The Film Comment Podcast

By: Film Comment Magazine
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • Founded in 1962, Film Comment has been the home of independent film journalism for over 50 years, publishing in-depth interviews, critical analysis, and feature coverage of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world. The Film Comment Podcast, hosted by editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, is a weekly space for critical conversation about film, with a look at topical issues, new releases, and the big picture. Film Comment is a nonprofit publication that relies on the support of readers. Support film culture. Support Film Comment.
    All rights reserved
    Show more Show less
Art
Show more Show less
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2
Episodes
  • The Films of Robert Kramer, with Erika Balsom and Benjamin Crais

    The Films of Robert Kramer, with Erika Balsom and Benjamin Crais
    Nov 5 2024
    The films of Robert Kramer blend fiction and documentary modes to engage with, and expand on, traditions of militant political cinema and subjective essay filmmaking. A founding member of the New Left activist film collective Newsreel in 1967, Kramer devoted himself to the group’s radical ethos, but he also began to make his own hermetic and probing fiction films—like The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969)—which turned the camera back onto the mostly white middle-class milieu of his comrades, posing thorny questions about the nature of political commitment. This process reached its peak with the sprawling, 3-hour plus Milestones (1975, co-directed with John Douglas), a vast mosaic featuring a cast of over 50 fellow travelers, union organizers, dropouts, Free Vermont commune dwellers, and more, all navigating the demands of their personal and political lives in the wake of the Vietnam War. At the end of ’70s, Kramer decamped to France, where his films had been championed by critics like Serge Daney, and proceeded to work in a wide variety of contexts across Europe and beyond, making films like Guns (1980), Our Nazi (1984), Doc’s Kingdom (1988), Route One/USA (1989), and Walk the Walk (1996). Over the past several years, the French DVD company Re:Voir has been beautifully restoring and re-releasing his films, and Kramer, who passed away suddenly in 1999, is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Viennale, running through the end of November. The retrospective is accompanied by a new book, Starting Places, published by the Austrian Film Museum, which reproduces a 1997 interview with Kramer by the French critic Bernard Eisenchitz alongside several essays written by Kramer himself. To mark the occasion, Film Comment’s Clinton Krute and Michael Blair invited Erika Balsom and Benjamin Crais, two noted critics who each proudly own original Milestones posters, to discuss Kramer’s life and work. A few short audio clips of Kramer talking about his films, sourced from the original 1997 interview tapes, are interspersed throughout the conversation, providing their own points of departure into this undersung filmmaker’s richly heterogenous, and endlessly fascinating, body of work. Special thanks to Volker Pantenburg. Show Notes: “The Traveller” by Benjamin Crais (Sidecar, 2023): https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-traveller “Milestones” by Erika Balsom (4Columns, 2020): https://4columns.org/balsom-erika/milestones Serge Daney on Milestones and Route One/USA (originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, 1975 and 1989): https://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-aquarium-milestones.html; https://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2014/05/murmur-of-world.html Robert Kramer: Notes de la forteresse (1967-1999) (edited by Cyril Béghin. Re:Voir, 2019):https://re-voir.com/shop/en/books/1101-robert-kramer-notes-de-la-forteresse-1967-1999.html
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 22 mins
  • NYFF62 Festival Report, with Bilge Ebiri and Lovia Gyarkye

    NYFF62 Festival Report, with Bilge Ebiri and Lovia Gyarkye
    Oct 16 2024
    As the 62nd New York Film Festival drew to a close last weekend, it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. This year, the end-of-fest ritual took place in collaboration with the New York Film Critics Circle, which will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2025. Devika and Clint were joined by NYFCC members Bilge Ebiri and Lovia Gyarkye for a spirited wrap-up analysis of the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF62 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discussed and debated RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Trương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam, and many more. The Questions: Favorite moment in an NYFF62 film? (4:25) Favorite performance? (19:30) Best film about a real person? (32:30) A film that you can’t shake, for good or bad? (50:17)
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 17 mins
  • Collective Protagonists, with Brett Story, Stephen Maing, John Hanson, and Rob Nilsson

    Collective Protagonists, with Brett Story, Stephen Maing, John Hanson, and Rob Nilsson
    Oct 9 2024
    Two films in this year’s New York Film Festival lineup grapple beautifully with the challenge of narrating stories of collective movements without giving in to the allure of the heroic individual protagonist. John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Revivals selection Northern Lights (1978) stages the founding of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota—formed in the mid-1910s by farmers from that state—parallel to a tale of young love, using a dramatized approach to explore the tensions between personal desires and collective commitments. Made more than four decades later, Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s documentary Union (2024)—featured in the festival’s Spotlight section—takes on another chapter in the history of the American labor struggle: the 2022 unionization drive of the Amazon plant on Staten Island, and the challenges facing an autonomous movement that requires leadership but is rooted in democracy. Last Saturday, the two directorial pairs—Hanson and Nilsson, and Story and Maing—joined Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a live panel discussion on their stylistically different but thematically connected works. In a thought-provoking conversation, they examined the practical, formal, and political considerations of making films about people power.
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 10 mins

What listeners say about The Film Comment Podcast

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews

Amazon reviews
No Reviews are Available