The Cinematologists Podcast

Our second summer episode is our London debut where we took the podcast to the Curzon Bloomsbury to screen Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces. Perhaps not his most highly lauded film Broken Embraces does however, offer an opportunity to discuss Almodovar's relationship to cinema itself through the film's meta-cinematic structure and constant allusions to how we see the world cinematically.

This episode also features an interview with Jose Arroyo from the University of Warwick who has written about and interviewed Almodovar.  

Dario's blog on Broken Embraces

Apologies for some poor quality sound on this episode.

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In this summer interlude Dario and Neil cover a large range of subjects including the state of cinema, Bret Easton Ellis' film podcast, fandom and online culture, the Cary Grant Festival in Bristol, the joys and ills of academic conferences, and various films they have seen. 

Show notes:

Bret Easton Ellis podcast

Death Foretold is not Death - Neil's article in Director's Notes

Creators, fans and death threats: Talking to Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman and more on the Age of Entitlement - LA Times article by Todd Martens

Cinematologists screening of Broken Embraces: 

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Dario is joined by Neil at the Electric Palace in Hastings once again to screen Kelly Reichardt's poetic road movie Old Joy. A rainy afternoon in a fern-carpeted forest. Two old friends, Mark and Kurt (Will Oldham), drive up into the mountains near Portland, and get lost trying to find the hot springs. Resounding with sustained images and sounds given the time to reverberate, unarticulated tensions course through the film like a hidden creek. Finally at the turn-off to the springs, we see the sky reflected in their windshield and the whole world turns on this moment.

The episode also feature's Neil's fascinating interview with all round cinematic mensch Mark Cousins about his new film I Am Belfast.

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In our penultimate episode of the season Dario is joined by film Scholar, writer and podcaster Alex Fitch to present a classic of the American new wave: The Last Detail (1973) directed by the under appreciated Hal Ashby and starring Jack Nicholson. Two hard-boiled petty officers, Buddusky and Mulhall, are detailed to take a young sailor, Meadows, to a Naval Prison to serve an eight-year sentence for a trivial offense, and they decide to show him a good time on the way. They narrowly escape a bar fight, tangle with some Marines, and visit a brothel for Meadows’ first sexual experience. After reluctantly turning him in, Buddusky and Mulhall realize they are as much prisoners of their own world as Meadows now is of his.

ario also interviews freelance film critic and journalist Christina Newland. They discuss studying film at university, writing process, feminist politics, and boxing movies along with this weeks overarching theme: the American new wave.

Christina Newland's article on Creed and the Legacy of the boxing film.

Molly Haskell (1987) From Reference to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

Cinephilia and Beyond: ‘The Last Detail: Hal Ashby and Robert Town's Slice of the 70s America'

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Dario returns to the School of Film and Television at Falmouth University to host a screening of Alex Garland's Sci-Fi drama Ex_Machina. He is joined on-stage by Dr Verena Von Eicken who selected the film and they discuss its potential to be read as a metaphorical critique of gendered power relations and the male gaze. Neil and Dario also discuss issues around the narrative structure of film, Alex Garland as a writer director and other recent examples of hard Sci-Fi such as Her (2013) and Under the Skin (2013).

Show Notes: 

Link to Laura Mulvey's seminal 1975 essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema

Link to Donna Haraway's 1983 essay The Cyborg Manifesto

 

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Dario returns to the School of Film and Television at Falmouth University to host a screening of Alex Garland's Sci-Fi drama Ex_Machina. He is joined on-stage by Dr Verena Von Eicken who selected the film and they discuss its potential to be read as a metaphorical critique of gendered power relations and the male gaze. Neil and Dario also discuss issues around the narrative structure of film, Alex Garland as a writer director and other recent examples of hard Sci-Fi such as Her (2013) and Under the Skin (2013).

Neil and Dario meet up in Falmouth to discuss the Nick Cave music 'documentary' 20000 Days on Earth directed by Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth. Neil also interview British film director Kieran Evans about the fundamental relationship between music and film.

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Dario is joined on-stage at the Electric Palace by two final year Digital Film students studying at the University of Brighton - Kathryn Bessant and James Calver - to discuss George Miller's 1979 Ozploitation action fest Mad Max. Mel Gibson takes the title role as Max Rockatanski, the fearless cop waging war with kill-crazy bikers who target his family. It is a road-scorching, neo-punk, take-no-prisoners combat set in the lawless Australian outback.

Neil and Dario expand on themes from the film and engage in a wider discussion covering topics including the future of the arts in higher education, neoliberal ideology, dystopian cinema, Sean Parker's Screening Room proposal and Louis CK's Horace and Pete.

Show Notes:

Times Higher article on graduate earnings

Requiem for the American Dream - Documentary on Noam Chomsky

Sean Parker's The Screening Room - Daily Beast article

Horace and Pete - Louis CK

WTF with Marc Maron - Interview with Louis CK

The Teacher's Soul and the Terrors of Performativity by Stephen J. Ball

London Review of Books article about H.G. Adler's The Wall

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Cinematologists contributor Kingsley Marshall picks Blue Steel to discuss his research on the work of director Kathryn Bigelow and Neil interviews British film director Kim Longinotto about her work. Dario and Neil also discuss whether films can have real social or political impact.

Kim Longinotto's Dreamcatcher, official site.

Kim Longinotto talks to fellow Cinematologists interviewee Jeanie Finlay for The Talkhouse. 

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Le Quai Des Brumes is a seminal of French director Marcel Carné. Starring the enigmatic Jean Gabin it epitomises Carné’s poetic realism, often seen as influential to Hollywood film noir, evocating the intense beauty and tragedy of wartime Europe. Capturing the romantic fatalism of the protagonists the film is often defined as critique of the moral and social state of the French nation during World War II.

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