[The Daily] Resnais, Varda, and More

A little over a month ago now, we posted Marvel mon amour, a video by Daniel Raim in which Stan Lee looked back on working with his good friend Alain Resnais (above with Olga Georges-Picot in Cannes in 1968) on The Monster Maker, a screenplay for a science-fiction project that sadly never saw the light of day. The video has brought back a few memories for filmmaker David Fakrikian (Iron Dream). “During my adolescence, I was blessed enough to have the chance to meet, and become friends, with the man Resnais himself, as he would stop when schedule permitted at the shop I worked in, Album Comics rue Dante in Paris, for his monthly dose of comics,” he writes. “We would debate about Howard Chaykin’s modern limited series reboot of The Shadow, John Byrne’s run on Fantastic Four and She-Hulk, the direction of Chris Claremont’s X-Men, and what we considered half-assed comic-book films adaptations like Tim Burton’s Batman (worry not, like Tim himself, we also preferred Batman Returns), or Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, while praising the merits of directors like James Cameron and John McTiernan, and the sound of widescreen laserdiscs like Die Hard and Terminator 2. Yes I know, crazy.” And there’s more.

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody notes that “when François Truffaut was planning to make his adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, he worried that French filmmakers didn’t do science fiction well.” Agnès Varda’s Les Créatures (1966) with Michel Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve, “which came out in France two weeks before Truffaut’s, proved his hesitations wrong exactly as his own film did. Above all, no less than Truffaut, Varda transformed science fiction into a subject in her own image . . . In effect, Varda turns the blend of fantasy and realism into a wild science-fiction-plus-neo-realist parody of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.”

“From 1968 to 1975 Claude Chabrol directed a dozen films—one of the most fertile and accomplished periods of his career,” writes Jonathan Kirshner for Bright Lights Film Journal. “In retrospect, two factors appear to account for his phoenix-like middle-aged resurrection. First, Chabrol, pushing forty, had matured considerably as a filmmaker . . . reaching beyond the foundations of his principal, formative influences, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang.” And second “was the arrival on the scene of André Génovès, who produced all twelve of these films,” which Kirshner then revisits, one by one.

Also in Bright Lights, Jeff Firmin on John Carpenter’s first fifteen years: “It is a popular cinema of opposition, an attempt to smoke out the horrors of the world and to bring the forces of repression into view, an attempt to present a human defense against those forces.”

“In 1969, the Year of the Pig, participants in what is known as (descriptively) youth culture or (smugly) hip culture or (incompletely) pop culture or (longingly) the cultural revolution are going through big changes.” The New York Review of Books has been dipping into its archives and has recently posted Ellen Willis’s piece for the January 1, 1970 issue on Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider and Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant.

“In our nightly dreams—our dark, beautiful, horrifying dreams—we are all David Lynch,” writes novelist Michael Chabon for the Paris Review.

Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express “is nearly twenty-five years old, and it remains as jittery and sparkling as it was in 1994,” writes David Bordwell in an entry that serves as a sort of supplement to the latest episode of Observations on Film Art on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck. “Chungking Express typifies everything that I love about Hong Kong and its people and its cinema.”

With In a Lonely Place (1950), Nicholas Ray “delivers a scathing critique of an ideology which defines the perfect male (the writer) as an adventurer taming a savage wilderness, and his ideal partner, the perfect female (the reader), as a home-maker belonging exclusively to the domestic sphere,” writes Brad Stevens in Sight & Sound.

Andy Rector’s posted an excerpt from Jean Narboni’s presentation of Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964) at the Cinémathèque française in January, transcribed and translated by Ariane Gaudeaux: “We're between utopia and nightmare. . . . The way I see it, this film could be well summed up by Rossellini’s phrase about Chaplin's A King in New York: ‘It is the film of a free man.’”

Adrian Martin’s posted his 1979 review of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), a short 2012 piece on John Cassavetes’s Too Late Blues (1961), a 2015 piece on Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), and: “Mike Flanagan is a talented and prolific new filmmaker, who has managed to make six features within six years, all within the horror-thriller genre ambit; his forthcoming projects are a TV series based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (2018), and Doctor Sleep, an adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining. Hush [2016] is the least usual project in Flanagan’s CV so far.” And “it’s beautifully calculated and controlled at all levels. (William Friedkin professes to be a fan of it, too, which doesn’t surprise me.)”

Taking a cue from the reception of two “buddy dramas” on HBO in 2013, True Detective and Doll and Em, Lili Loofbourow writes in the Virginia Quarterly: “To be clear, the show about boys got way too much credit, and the show about girls got way too little. This is how we approach male vs. female work. Let’s call it the ‘male glance,’ the narrative corollary to the male gaze. We all have it, and it’s ruining our ability to see good art.”

“Some people wait for the blow job scene in The Brown Bunny the way I waited to get to the lake when I was a child.” Another Man has posted an “unfiltered and unedited” piece by Vincent Gallo in which he cuts loose on feminism, tolerance, Trump, and several other individuals he calls out by name.

“Mati Diop is a master of the low-key shock-cut,” writes Michael Pattison. “In Atlantiques (2009), a nonfiction experimental short she made while attending Le Fresnoy, a single edit midway through the film simultaneously opens its world and closes it up around us. In Snow Canon (2011), her half-hour fiction follow-up, a night-to-morning jump-cut changes a two-shot of women in a bed into an image of adolescent confusion, longing, isolation—and much more besides.”

Pattison also writes about Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995): “Racism, misogyny, the power structures that embed and sustain both; tapping into these through the metaphoric lens of Y2K hysteria—a networked anarchy, a scorched-earth implosion that posits Hollywood as the center of a mostly terrible world (but don’t worry, we’ll always have the movies)—Bigelow’s film thematizes The Society of the Spectacle.”

Also in the Notebook:

• Douglas Sirk’s arrival at Universal-International was “fortuitous and a direct stimulus to his full flowering as an artist,” writes Blake Lucas.
• Jonathan Kiefer on Damien Manivel and Kohei Igarashi’s The Night I Swam, which thrives “on subtle awe at how a young person’s inner life can seem transparent and inscrutable almost simultaneously.”
• “Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) was the middle of three spooky house films made by Danish director Benjamin Christensen, who's best known for the satanic documentary Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages,” writes David Cairns. “Christensen came over at the same time as Garbo, and for a while looked to be making a go of it in Hollywood, directing successful films at MGM and Warner Bros. His very weird sensibility seems surreal now, but apparently fitted into the commercial cinema of the day.”
• Leonardo Goi: “Different in style and substance as they may be, I think this is where [Harmony] Korine’s Mister Lonely [2007] and Trash Humpers [2009] land on similar ground: in their mutual fight to reassert one’s individuality in the face of a homogenizing society ready to chastise any variations from its permitted norms.”
• “Since A Burning Hot Summer (2011), [Philippe] Garrel has been dialing his style back to its bare essentials, crafting a series of brisk masterworks characterized by an intense formal precision and clarity of expression,” writes James Slaymaker. “Running just over an hour, Lover for a Day [2017] is a work of radical compression.”
• Daniel Riccuito: “I’ve always wondered where the film canon resides—what are the visiting hours?”

Private Hell 36 (1954) was “the last, leanest, and in many ways best of three films in which [Ida Lupino] played nightclub singers—canaries very much at home in the coal mine of noir,” writes Imogen Sara Smith.

Also at the Chiseler: “In Lon Chaney movies, nasty tricks of fate come with such regularity that you begin to doubt if anything good has ever happened or ever will happen to anyone,” writes Dan Callahan. “He was a one-man rebuke to the Jazz Age, a tough medicine to counteract all that whoopee and bootleg gin.”

Writing for the TIFF Review, Andrew Tracy argues that “while [Gene] Kelly cultivated a blue-collar persona for his musical films, he was in truth only magnifying a crucial aspect of the [Fred] Astaire character.”

“‘When Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed,’ Kurosawa once said of the director who arguably did as much for Indian cinema during his, and Kurosawa’s, lifetime as Kurosawa did for Japanese cinema,” writes Marc Saint-Cyr. “‘But after seeing Kiarostami’s films, I thanked God for giving us just the right filmmaker to take his place.’ When Kiarostami passed away in 2016, many were likely similarly left wondering, in the midst of their grief, just who would fill the place left by the fallen master in the landscape of twenty—first century world cinema, now tragically deprived of one of its greatest artists far too soon. In my view, the filmmaker of the current cinematic climate who most closely follows in Kiarostami’s footsteps in terms of innovative spirit, earned stature, productivity, devotion to his home culture, and artistic accomplishment is Apichatpong Weerasethakul.”

Open has posted a lecture recently delivered by filmmaker Gurvinder Singh: “Having been taught in film school that film thrived on privileged instants, on the Eisensteinian model of movements or developments extracted from moments of crisis, on collision of ideas and thematic reasoning; enduring or attending to information, however rarefied or saturated and unfolding in time, was perhaps what had escaped all of us. It changed my way of looking at cinema, of looking through the camera. From an obsession with space and information, I started seeking out duration, time and attention. The film turned from a visual art into a delightful temporal form.”

Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mychal Denzel Smith argues that the “greatest contribution” of Allen and Albert Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993) “is that it unburdens itself from struggling against the racist lies of cinematic history.”

In The Young Karl Marx, Raoul Peck “freezes the story in a moment of maximum idealism and hope,” writes Bruce Robbins, also in the LARB. “In that sense, this film could be described as post-ironic.” Speaking of which, Annie Julia Wyman for the Nation: “The Young Karl Marx’s earnestness is perhaps produced by the thorough identification of a director with his subject: Peck, like Marx, knew proletarian life (as a taxi driver in New York City), wrote and reported as a journalist (in Berlin, where he went to film school), and eventually served as a prominent political voice (as minister of culture in his native Haiti, decades after his family fled from Duvalier’s dictatorship). Marx, like Peck, was a man without a country, an exile and a polyglot. No surprise, either, that Peck brings both the documentarian’s factuality and the fiction filmmaker’s joie to his task.”

Stuart Klawans writes about The Young Karl Marx in the Nation, too, but also:

History advances by sympathetic magic, as well as by slapstick and unrequited love—which is fine in a movie so long as it’s a good one, like The Death of Stalin.

Honesty compels me, though, to mention that the great film about the death of Stalin is the 1998 Khrustalyov, My Car! With its multitude of characters ironically sideswiped by the cruelties of history and crazily shuffled by the raging, satirical writer-director Aleksey German, it’s a movie so exhaustingly dense and outlandish in every scene—so disconcerting, disorienting, eyeball-blasting, and heart-confounding—that my colleague John Powers once suggested that the New York Film Festival ought to sell tickets for ten-minute excerpts, since that was enough to give you the idea, and more than most people could absorb.

Last week was Women Writers Week at RogerEbert.com, and Chaz Ebert’s posted a table of contents.

“Cult movies used to be scruffy, desperately original, and intermittently brilliant works of transgressive art that left audiences energized, and sometimes radicalized,” writes Judy Berman for the Baffler. “The Room—which is bad art, but art nonetheless—does the opposite. The mirror it holds up is the underside of a dirty metal spoon; the reflection you see in it is blurry but genuine. So what’s sadder: that it set the prototype for the twenty-first-century American cult film or that it might wind up being our last enduring cult hit?”

Revived interest in the BBC’s 1984 docudrama Threads, depicting the effects of a nuclear attack on Sheffield, and the 1986 animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows is not difficult to explain, grants Jude Rogers. For the New Statesman, he delves into the origins of these films and the ways in which they’ve been received over the past three decades.

Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon “isn’t particularly interesting or provocative as a pleading for tolerance and understanding,” writes Michael Koresky in his latest “Queer & Now & Then” column for Film Comment. “What makes Love, Simon useful—and where its queerness has real meaning—is how it addresses issues around acceptance for a very particular audience: not its imagined audience, its real one.”

Lou Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) writes about “Falling Asleep at the Movies” for the Talkhouse: “Perhaps what makes the films that we treasure so lasting and powerful is not so much their ability to transport us to different worlds (or galaxies, or character’s lives) but their ability to carry us into the realm of our own unconscious minds, where images and events speak on a level deeper than literal meaning and resonate in ways not so easily described by words.”

“I used to think of cinema as a form of secular worship, but these days I believe that there’s a danger in this sort of thinking.” Dan Schoenbrun explains at Filmmaker.

“Ben Davis’s Repertory Movie Theaters of New York City: Havens for Revivals, Indies and the Avant-Garde, 1960-1994 delivers exactly what the title promises,” writes Stephen Akey at the Smart Set. “If you were ever dying to know what sort of programming choices distinguished the Carnegie Hall Cinema from the Bleecker Street Cinema in the 1970s, this is the book for you. But it might also be the book for you if you ever fell in love with movies and had a favorite theater or two, whether in New York or any small city or college town, to nourish that love.”

The Long-Lost Autobiography of Georges Méliès

Julia Marchese’s Out of Print, a documentary recounting the history of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, “has gone from a celebration of a family legacy to a sad remembrance,” writes Dennis Cozzalio at Trailers from Hell.

“In a wave of films offering cynical alternatives to the mighty samurai archetype favored by wartime nationalists, few presented a more ruthless rebuttal of the old myths of loyalty and honor than Kaneto Shindo’s exquisite 1968 ghost story Kuroneko,” writes David Pountain for Vague Visages.

Also at Vague Visages, Brian Brems writes about John Ford’s The Fugitive (1947) and Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016): “Two Catholic filmmakers, in two different parts of the world, in two dramatically different eras of mainstream filmmaking, tell the same story about the power of faith in the face of persecution, most evidently through each film’s focus on small, physical tokens of its characters abstract faith.”

And contributors to Vague Visages look back on the “films that influenced their formative years.”

For the BFI, Adam Scovall’s sought out the original locations of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), while Oliver Lunn’s looked to Paris to spot locations for films by Eric Rohmer. Also, fifty years after the release of John Cassavetes’s Faces, Lunn considers the ways “it laid the foundations for a new kind of movie.”

DVD/BLU-RAY

Last month’s release of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc on DVD and Blu-ray has naturally occasioned a few pieces. Colin Fleming for the Daily Beast: “It’s a silent film, and yet it all but screams at the modern-day viewer.” Jonathan Mahon-Heap for AnOther: “Dreyer asked us to consider divinity from our most familiar canvas—the human face.” Eric Henderson at Slant: “Not for nothing did Jean-Luc Godard, maybe an even finer scholar of cinema than he was a practitioner, stage one of his most memorable sequences (from 1962’s Vivre sa vie) by seating his muse, Anna Karina, at a movie theater for a screening of Dreyer's film.”

And most unusually, Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker, who opens her piece with last month’s March for Our Lives and Emma González’s speech: “In its restraint, its symbolism, and its palpable emotion, González’s silence was a remarkable piece of political expression. Her appearance also offered an uncanny echo of one of the most indelible performances in the history of cinema: that of Renée Maria Falconetti.”

Writing for Artforum, Melissa Anderson argues that, in Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), “heterosexuality is revealed to be the most unnatural form of coupling.”

“A supremely cool-headed treatment of a highly combustible subject, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama is a tour de force of paradox,” writes Dennis Lim for Grasshopper Film. It’s “a film that seems in some ways ripped from the headlines and in others stubbornly detached from the contemporary moment.”

Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) “looks now like the most resonant exploitation movie of its era,” writes Adam Nayman at the Ringer. “Released on the eve of the Kennedy assassination, Shock Corridor traced a link between the uncompromising quest for knowledge and the onset of madness—the truth is out there, but it’s also inside, and either way you might not be able to handle it.”

G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930) “depicted World War I with a remarkable lack of sentimentality and a visceral clamor of shouts and explosions,” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times.

The Age of Innocence (1993) is Martin Scorsese’s “American answer” to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), suggests Sean Axmaker.

INTERVIEWS

For the March 1976 issue, American Cinematographer editor Herb Lightman spoke with John Alcott about working with Stanley Kubrick, first on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and then on A Clockwork Orange (1971). But the real focus of the interview is Barry Lyndon (1975), and they really get into the nitty gritty here. Later, in 1980, Alcott would also shoot The Shining.

For the New Yorker, Alexis Okeowo profiles Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, “the best-known documentary filmmaker in Pakistan. Her films, which have won two Oscars and three Emmys, range from reportage on xenophobia in South Africa to an inquiry into the ethics of honor killings in Pakistan. ‘Anger is necessary for people to go beyond not liking what they see,’ she said. ‘I need enough people who watch my stuff to be moved, and to be angry, and to do something about it.’”

In Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, Joaquin Phoenix “plays a hammer-wielding veteran who is paid to save kidnapped children and who brings all his rage and regret and self-loathing and desire for oblivion to the job,” writes Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “The actor is so convincing in the role that at first I was somewhat scared to talk to him. But the result was a fascinatingly open-ended discussion about acting, Ramsay’s brilliant film, as well as his turn as Jesus in the upcoming Mary Magdalene.”

For Little White Lies, Simon Bland gets Jason Schwartzman looking back twenty years to his first role, Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore: “I could relate to many aspects of the character. When I was fifteen, I had written and directed a play. I also wasn’t great at school but I was enthusiastic for it and falling for someone much older than me. I felt like I was somehow in a love triangle—I don’t know if the other two people even realized they were a part of it—but I related to the character on those levels.”

LISTS

“No country took so decisively to the new widescreen formats that revolutionized cinema in the 1950s as Japan,” writes Jasper Sharp at the top of an annotated and amply illustrated list of five great examples for the BFI.

Craig Keller, who’s been revisiting the work of Seijun Suzuki lately, has posted his 2017 top ten.

“What is the best Japanese film of the 21st century?” asks David Ehrich at the top of a recent IndieWire Critics Survey.

At Vulture, Samantha Ladwig has written up a list of twenty-five great Hollywood musicals from the 1930s, ‘40s, and ’50s.

The Toronto Film Review has posted Seth Feldman’s list of “100 Best Canadian Films.”

IN OTHER NEWS

“Martin Scorsese and his nonprofit organization The Film Foundation have announced their brand-new film curriculum, Portraits of America: Democracy on Film,” reports Zack Sharf for IndieWire. “The curriculum is the latest addition to the group’s ongoing film course The Story of Movies, which aims to teach students how to read the language of film and place motion pictures in the context of history, art, and society.” The course, a series of eight lessons (Sharf has the full outline), is “completely free for schools and universities.”

Catherine Grant trumpets the news that the entire archive of Film-Philosophy, dating back to 1997, is now an open access resource.

James Benning’s L. Cohen (2017) has won the Cinéma du réel Grand Prix.

Winners of the top awards at the Hong Kong International Film Festival are all women, reports Vivienne Chow for Variety: Yang Mingming (Girls Always Happy), Laura Bispuri (Daughter of Mine), and Toda Hikaru (Of Love & Law).

“The twelfth edition of the Asian Film Awards saw Chen Kaige’s The Legend of the Demon Cat emerge as the numerical winner. But it missed out on the best film prize, which went to Youth, directed by fellow mainland Chinese director Feng Xiaogang.” Patrick Frater has the full list of winners at Variety.

Roger Corman, now ninety-one, has sold his New Horizons Pictures library, “a collection that includes 270 films and a sci-fi TV series,” to Shout! Factory and China-based Ace Film, reports Katie Rife at the A.V. Club. “The deal gives Shout! Factory the rights to the New Horizons library in North America, Europe, Australia and Russia, with Ace covering the rest of the world.”

GOINGS ON

New York. As Brent Lang reports for Variety, the exhibition Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs will open at the Museum of the City of New York on May 3 and run through October 28.

Louis Garrel’s 2011 short La Règle de trois will precede Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Un château en Italie (2013) tonight as part of the French Institute Alliance Française series Louis Garrel: Love Songs & Heartbreak.

At Screen Slate, Cosmo Bjorkenheim argues that Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (1955), screening Thursday and Friday at the Metrograph, is, along with Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963), “one of the most serious treatments of Cold War nuclear-annihilation anxiety, more serious than 1964’s flippant Dr. Strangelove or ponderous Fail-Safe.”

Los Angeles. For the Hollywood Reporter, Jordan Cronk writes about the highlights coming up in April.

A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood is a program of three films by Zoe Beloff screening at the Velaslavasay Panorama on Friday.

IN THE WORKS

“To the Ends of the Earth will surely be unlike any film I’ve made thus far,” says Kiyoshi Kurosawa. As Gavin J. Blair notes in the Hollywood Reporter, the screenplay, written by Kurosawa, “centers on the host of a Japanese travel variety TV show who ventures with her crew to shoot a segment in Uzbekistan. Her experiences there change the usually cautious, introspective host.” Shooting begins in Uzbekistan next month.

In a terrific piece on his influences for frieze, Mark Cousins mentions in passing that he’s “completing a film about the drawings and paintings of Orson Welles.”

Neil Gaiman and Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) are teaming up to adapt Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels for television, reports Deadline’s Peter White.

“After years in development on both the big and small screens, a feature adaptation of Josh Bazell’s debut novel Beat the Reaper is finally coming together, as Sebastian Stan has signed on to star, while Gore Verbinski has signed on to direct,” reports Jeff Sneider at the Tracking Board. The story “follows a young ER doctor whose life is upended when a patient recognizes him from his past life as a mafia hitman. He’s forced to fight to stay alive as old enemies come out of the woodwork to destroy him.”

Kate McKinnon is “in negotiations” to join Lily James and Himesh Patel in an untitled comedy to be written by Richard Curtis and directed by Danny Boyle, reports Variety’s Justin Kroll. “Most plot details are being kept under wraps, but it will be music-themed and set in the 1960s or ’70s.”

Eric Lavallée has launched a new feature at Ioncinema, the “Top 50 TV Binge List,” focusing on “series in the works,” including in this first round Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young and Michael Haneke’s Kelvin’s Book.

OBITS

Television writer and producer Steven Bochco, “who died Sunday morning of leukemia at seventy-four, was the mastermind behind a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, L.A. Law, and Doogie Howser, M.D.,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture. “He won multiple Emmys and Peabody awards, the Humanitas Prize, and countless other honors, and incidentally ran a series of on-air finishing schools for writer-producers (including Deadwood’s David Milch and Law and Order’s Dick Wolf) who absorbed his sensibility and went on to be almost as important has he was. . . . It’s impossible to imagine modern television existing without him.”

“Delores Taylor, whose empathy for Native Americans informed the 1971 surprise action-film hit Billy Jack, which she wrote and starred in with her husband, Tom Laughlin, died on Friday,” reports Richard Sandomir for the New York Times. She was eighty-five.

LISTENING

Cinephiliacs host Peter Labuza talks with Antonella Bonfanti, director of Canyon Cinema, “the famed distribution company for experimental cinema.” (82’43”). And she discusses “how Canyon continues to operate and its bright future in finding audiences in the digital age” before the conversation turns to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972).

“Satire’s Funny Like That” is the theme of a recent Film Comment Podcast (33’33”) focussing on Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin. Violet Lucca talks with Lauren Kaminsky “about the Russian humor this film exerts within the context of Anglo-American satire of today’s political events.”

The latest Film Comment Podcast (57’14”) features Lucca, Ashley Clark, and Michael Koresky discussing “over-the-top performers who produce a certain joy that a subtler actor can’t. From cops pontificating about posteriors in Heat to Maine put-down artists in Dolores Claiborne, this gammon-fueled chat is one for the ages.”

Switchblade Sisters host April Wolfe talks with Liz Hannah, who’s written the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s The Post, about The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The conversation covers “Anthony Hopkins’s performance (he only blinks once in the movie), the amazing craftsmanship of director Jonathan Demme, and the groundbreaking character of Clarice Starling played by Jodie Foster.”

The new Senses of Cinema podcast (72’20”) features Mark Freeman, Eloise Ross, and Craig Martin discussing Alex Garland’s Annihilation and Netflix. Plus, an interview with Soda_Jerk about their film Terror Nullius.

On the Film Stage Show (102’40”), Bill Graham, Brian Roan, Michael Snydel, and Scout Tafoya discuss Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki bouki (1973).

The second A24 Podcast (48’08”) features Jerrod Carmichael and Bo Burnham discussing the latter’s Sundance hit Eighth Grade, “the Internet, and staying sane in a culture where everything ages like milk.”

On the new Poster Boys podcast (141’21”), Brandon Schaefer and Sam Smith discuss the movie posters for Ingmar Bergman’s films, which “saw creative and visionary poster designs in Germany, Poland, Japan, Italy, the Czech Republic, and the U.S., providing a veritable international poster tour for listeners and cinephiles this month.” The link takes you to their tumblr, where you can page through the collection they’ve put together.

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum is “launching a new series of podcasts with experts from the University of Exeter and beyond talking about artefacts in the museum. An item in the collection forms a springboard for a discussion on wider aspects of moving image history.”

VIEWING

Indigenous Cinema is a new channel from the National Film Board of Canada featuring over 200 films streaming for free.

That tip comes by way of Girish Shambu, as does this one: Docalogue posts two essays a month, side by side, on a single documentary and then encourages its community to watch the film and live tweet responses together. Allyson Nadia Field and Nzingha Kendall have written about Yance Ford’s Strong Island and the appointment for the communal viewing is April 15, 9pm ET (6pm PT).

SCROLLING

“One of the best and most inventive movie poster designers currently at work” is “the L.A.-based artist known as Midnight Marauder,” writes Adrian Curry, who’s asked “MM a.k.a. Emmanuel” to select and comment on his ten favorite posters ever.

The Kodak Samples Collection at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England “is an invaluable resource on the history of color film technology from the late nineteenth century until the 1980s.” Noemi Daugaard writes about being a part of the team that’s documented these samples.

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