On today’s episode, FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish sits down with Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen, whose new documentary Occupied City was one of the early standouts at the festival. It’s a more than four-hour opus that combines a voiceover drawn from a book written by Bianca Stigter, McQueen’s collaborator and spouse, about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, with footage of the city shot by McQueen in the last three years. The result is a haunting superimposition of the past and the present that makes us think about the ways in which the spaces we occupy today are resonant with history. Devika talked to McQueen about the genesis of the film, the experience of making it during the pandemic, and why it feels so crucial to revisit history right now.

Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter today for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2023 edition: www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Cannes 2023 #3: Steve McQueen on Occupied City

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.

TV & Film

Cannes 2024 has arrived—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors is high-tailing it from screening to screening, ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts.

For this episode, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish is joined by Cannes veterans and all-star FC critics Bilge Ebiri and Jonathan Romney, whose dispatch on the festival’s early days will be in Friday’s Film Comment Letter. The three discuss and debate some of the most buzzy titles that have screened to date, including George Miller’s would-be blockbuster Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Magnus van Horn's The Girl With the Needle, Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail, Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Roberto Minervini’s The Damned, and Rúnar Rúnarsson’s When the Light Breaks.

Subscribe today to the Film Comment Letter for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2024 edition: https://www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Cannes 2024 #2, with Bilge Ebiri and Jonathan Romney

Cannes 2024 has arrived—and our intrepid on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors is high-tailing it from screening to screening, ready to cut through the noise with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts.

To kick things off, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish sat down with our contributor Beatrice Loayza (stay tuned for her dispatch next week) and Sight and Sound’s Isabel Stevens. The three critics debated their differing reactions to the festival’s opening night selection, Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act, as well as Sophie Fillières’ This Life of Mine, Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond, and Abel Gance’s newly-restored silent epic Napoléon (1927), before looking ahead to the films they’re most excited to see as the festival continues.

Subscribe today to the Film Comment Letter for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2024 edition: https://www.filmcomment.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Cannes 2024 #1, with Beatrice Loayza and Isabel Stevens

Avant-garde cinema emerged in direct conversation with the film criticism that contextualized, championed, and critiqued it. Writing about work that is premised on defying formulaic intelligibility, and which invites us to reach beyond language to other modes of interpretation, can be both challenging and thrilling—requiring the critic to draw on a deep historical knowledge and a finely-tuned sensory awareness. And reading such criticism can be at once an eye-opening entryway into better appreciating experimental cinema, and its own creative encounter with connections across image and thought.

On May 9, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with Amy Taubin, Genevieve Yue, and Ayanna Dozier, some of the best critics of the avant-garde working today, to discuss the history of the craft, the nitty-gritty of this niche beat, what good writing on avant-garde cinema looks and sounds like, and what to even call the genre—avant-garde? Experimental? The other cinema? The talk took place at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in Downtown Manhattan as part of this year’s edition of Prismatic Ground, an exemplary and boundary-pushing festival dedicated to experimental documentary. Throughout the inspired conversation, the group referred to a few exemplary passages written by the esteemed panelists. Go to Film Comment's website to read:  https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-writing-about-avant-garde-cinema

Writing About Avant-Garde Cinema, with Ayanna Dozier, Amy Taubin, and Genevieve Yue

Every year, Film at Lincoln Center honors a luminary of the film industry with the Chaplin Award. This year’s honoree is a beloved screen icon: the Dude, the Starman, the legend—Jeff Bridges. In advance of the 49th Chaplin Award Gala, taking place on April 29, Devika sat down with Bridges for a look back at the actor’s long career. Taking inspiration from a painting Bridges made many years ago, titled Jeff Makes a Decision, which depicts him as a stick figure navigating a river full of whirlpools, their conversation touched upon several of Bridges’s iconic roles—The Last Picture Show, Tron, Crazy Heart, and more—and how the actor ended up in those movies, often in spite of himself. Bridges also discussed the lasting influence his parents, both actors, have had on him; some of the crazy on-set stories behind his most memorable performances; and the television shows he is currently enjoying.

Jeff Bridges Makes a Decision

From the early ’70s onwards, Indian cinematographer Navroze Contractor—who passed away last year at age 80—blazed a trail of radical image-making. Trained in fine arts, photography, and cinematography, Contractor wielded the camera as a weapon and a paintbrush, capturing both the thrills and the throes of popular uprisings in films that defined political documentary in India, and giving stunning form to the bold adventures in fiction undertaken by India’s Parallel Cinema filmmakers. 

Last Monday, Film Comment presented a double-feature program of two films shot by the cinematographer—Mani Kaul’s rapturous Duvidha (1973), and Sanjiv Shah’s unique musical satire Love in the Time of Malaria (1992)—along with an extended conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, Contractor’s partner in life and work, with whom he founded the feminist Yugantar Film Collective in the 1980s. 

The talk, available today on the podcast, delves into the challenging and low-budget conditions that Duvidha was shot under, the influence of Indian miniature painting and still photography on its look, and Contractor’s extraordinary visual felicity with both documentary and fiction.

Cannes 2023 #3: Steve McQueen on Occupied City

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