https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/07/15/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-daniel-bird-on-sergei-parajanov/
We ask who is Parajanov and why Parajanov? We touch in the centrality of his work to the national and cultural identities of so many countries: Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Russia; its aesthetic beauty and its continuing power. Certain filmmakers continuously crop up in relation to Parajanov's work -- Eisenstein, Jarman, Greenaway, Pasolini, Kenneth Anger, Powell and Pressburger. The conversation is bounded by the war in Ukraine; post-colonial relations; the excitement of cinema poetry, the need to archive, preserve, restore and circulate; questions of anarchy in totalitarian context; and a fluid line of different degrees of queerness that runs across Parajanov's oeuvre. Beautifully restored versions of SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS and THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES will be screened at Cinema Rediscovered, Watershed, Bristol on July 28th.

Daniel Bird on Sergei Parajanov

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/07/17/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-sheldon-hall-on-armchair-cinema-feature-films-on-british-television-1929-1981/
Sheldon Hall’s ARMCHAIR CINEMA: A HISTORY OF FEATURE FILMS ON BRITISH TELEVISION is a beautifully produced object, lavishly illustrated and lovely to hold. More importantly, it is a pleasure to read , full of new and fascinating information and is sure to become a landmark and reference point in the study of films on television for decades to come. In the podcast we discuss how the book came to be and how it developed, how the policy around films in television developed over the years, how research lead to a heretofore unaccounted for Hitchcock film, Leslie Halliwell’s influence as film buyer, the role of television programming in creating particular types of cinephilia, how the editing of films for television changed over the years, what Sheldon learned as a result of writing the book, what I learned as a result of reading it, and much mor

José Arroyo in Conversation with Sheldon Hall on ARMCHAIR CINEMA

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/07/20/cinema-rediscovered-2024-preview/
Richard and I preview the 2024 Cinema Rediscovered Programme taking place in Bristol, July 24-28. We’ve already podcast on the Parajanov films and the Ninon Sevilla ‘cabaretera’ films so we here highlight some of the other strands such as the 70s cycle of ‘New” American films of the 70s titled OUT OF THEIR DEPTH: CORRUPTION, SCANDAL AND LIES IN THE NEW HOLLYWOOD and QUEER CINEMA FROM THE EASTER BLOC. We also highlight restorations of films from Charles Burnett, Bela Tarr, Edward Yang and many others, as well as the rare opportunity to see films by the likes of Lynda Miles, Stephanie Rothman, not to mention beautiful restorations of classics such as GILDA and THE LONG KISS GOODBYE. Cinema Rediscovered offers not only a superb programme but a model of engagement, community based, inclusive, social, cinephile, generative. It includes films but also history walks, workshops on criticism and projection and much else. Aat the centre of it all are films, usually in beautiful prints with great attention to projection, all instigating a conversation on cinema.

Cinema Rediscovered 2024 - Preview

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/07/31/cinema-rediscovered-2024-wrap-up/
We have nothing but praise for this year's edition of Cinema Rediscovered. In the podcast, we discuss the pleasures of seeing Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) and Le Samurai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) in beautiful prints on the opening night; the pleasure in seeing restorations with an audience where every time someone responds differently it raises a question one might not have thought of before; thus, a pleasure that begins in the realm of the aesthetic and moves on and combines with the the real of dreams and thoughts.

We talk about the two Edward Yang films screened,  A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Mahjong (1996) and praise Ian Wang for doing such a terrific job of introducing the films: interesting, entertaining, succinct and opening up ways of entering the film, a challenge in the age of Wikipedia.

We discuss the Ninon Sevilla cabaretera films, possibly the hit of the festival. There was a fantastic programme of 'New' Hollywood films -- Out of Their Depth: Corruption Scandal and Lies in the New Hollywood -- and we discuss the only two films in the programme that we did manage to see:  Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) and The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973). We hope to catch up with the rest when it tours. The festival offers a great balance tween the more esoteric strands and those appealing to a larger audience. It was wonderful to see The Wizard of Oz (1939) with an audience full of children, some of them dressed up as Dorothy. We also touch on the eff Barnaby and  Bill Douglas cycles as well as  the Sergei Parajanov restorations and other strands of the festival. We will be doing a separate podcast on the Queer Cinema from the Eastern Bloc programme.

There were several revelations in this festival that we discuss in the podcast: The Student Nurses (Stephanie Rothman, 1970) the only woman to direct a film in Hollywood between Ida Lupino and Elaine May; Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish (1999); Ehsahn Khoshbakht’s beautiful and very personal Cellulloid Underground; and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi's Il Mare (1962), which David Melville Wingrove in his introduction argued had been a formative influence on Jarman as well as Bill Douglas and, we later learned on Tony Richardson as well as Pedro Almodóvar. Quite a queer package.

Lastly, we praise how the festival makes use of the city, the different venues, It’s part of a concerted effort to bring the city into the festival and the festival into the city. The festival seems an incubator for curators, some curating a single film, some a strand. A very entertaining event, and no one used their phones during the screening. Big Gold Star. The community feel, the social engagement, the educational component of talks and workshops, a teaching people how to do things, all meshed together to form a very impressive festival. Many congratulations to all. Some of the strands will be touring.

Cinema Rediscovered 2024 Wrap-Up

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/08/01/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-siavash-minoukadeh/
At Cinema Rediscovered I attended a panel on film programming and film curating chaired by Maddy Probst and found the collaborations between the festival and the young programmers impressive and inspiring. The strand I attended most assiduously was Siavash Minoukadeh’s Queer Cinema From the Eastern Bloc, co-curated with Fedor Tot. In the accompanying podcast I talk to Siavash about how he came to be a curator, how this particular programme came to be, what his collaborations with Fedor Tot and the Festival were like, what risks were involved, and what the feedback on the program has been like thus far. Is film programming putting bums on seats? Developing new audiences? Bringing hard to see material into view? Creating contexts for different ways of viewing and understanding? Making cultural interventions? All of the above?

José Arroyo in Conversation With Siavash Minoukadeh

After a long time off, we return with M. Night Shyalaman's new thriller, Trap, in which Josh Hartnett's doting dad, Cooper, takes his daughter to see her favourite pop star at a massive arena gig, but finds himself surrounded and hunted by the FBI.

We discuss the ways in which Shyamalan gives Cooper opportunities for escape but closes them off; the unusually disappointing lack of imagination and expression in some of the visual design and shot selection (something we're used to finding so interesting from Shyamalan); the attempt to sell a psychological background to Cooper, which is somehow neither intelligent nor daft enough; the production of the music and Saleka Night Shyamalan's performance as Lady Raven; Mike's fickleness in choosing whom to root for; and José's joy at seeing Hayley Mills. But despite picking at flaw after flaw, as we always do, we had a great time in Trap, and recommend it.

Recorded on 9th August 2024.

424 - Trap

Deadpool 2 put us in such a foul mood when it came out in 2018 that we threw away our podcast on it. It was too toxic to publish. Fortunately, Deadpool & Wolverine, the third in the series, didn't have such an effect on us - even José found some things to compliment about it.

Perhaps it's the relative diminishment of Marvel since its peak in 2018, when it was reaching the climax of the story it had been building for a decade, that makes Deadpool & Wolverine work as it otherwise might not - its jokes about the X-Men joining the MCU at a low point really landed, for example. It's far from perfect - Ryan Reynolds' schtick remains smug, and the film tries to have it both ways, delivering snarky commentary on the sorts of things films like this do, then discarding the snark when it wants to do them itself. But it's pacey, energetic, full of intense action with a delightfully cartoony attitude, filled with so many attempts to make you laugh that some of them are bound to work, and featuring a pair of enjoyable, charismatic villains: Matthew Macfadyen's Mr. Paradox is a marvellously hammy presence, while Emma Corrin's Cassandra Nova's slight physique and genteel demeanour make her telepathic abilities all the more threatening.

Recorded on 9th August 2024.

425 - Deadpool & Wolverine

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/08/16/jose-arroyo-in-converssation-with-alastair-phillips-on-tokyo-story-yasujiro-ozu-1953/
I’ve been wanting to talk to Alastair Phillips about his ‘BFI Classic’ monograph on TOKYO STORY (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) since it was first published late last year. I found reading the book after watching the film truly illuminating, deepening and enriching the experience: a real achievement with a film already so familiar. It draws on Japanese sources not yet available in English, offering new information on the film’s production and reception and combines this with Alastair’s characteristically precise and informative textual analysis. It’s no surprise that the book is already on its second printing.
 
In the podcast we discuss the significance of TOKYO STORY being Ozu’s first film after the American occupation; Shochiku Studios, genre, and the star system of the period; the film’s reception in Japan and the lag between that and broader international release; Ozu’s characteristic aesthetic, including what Nöel Burch characterised as the ‘pillow shot’ ; the relation of space to place in the film; how the film is about the flow of time in its varied temporalities; the female-centric aspect of the film and what it has to say about ‘blood’ families; why and how it’s so moving; it’s relationship to MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (Leo McCarey, 1937); how Ozu is not just one of the great directors of the Twentieth Centuries but, considering his work as a potter, designer, painter, photographer, calligrapher etc, might just be one of its greatest artists; why it keeps getting ranked at the top of the critics’ polls decade after decade;  why isn’t it called THE ONOMICHI STORY …. And much more. A conversation that will hopefully incite listeners to read the book.

In Converssation with Alastair Phillips on Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

One of cinema's most infamous disasters, Caligula was conceived by producer Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse magazine, as an explicit, expensively-made adult film, about the rise and fall of the titular Roman emperor. In pursuing this, Guccione removed director Tinto Brass during post-production, so that he could have hardcore pornography shot and inserted into the film. On its release in 1979, Caligula was critically savaged on both moral and cinematic grounds, confiscated by police in some countries, banned in others, and the cause of lines that stretched around the block. It has remained an artifact of cult interest ever since, and the subject of occasional attempts to reconstruct it in a form that reflects something approaching its creators' original visions - to whatever extent their visions agreed with each other.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is the most thorough of these reconstructions by far, benefitting from the rediscovery of 96 hours of original material, which had been rushed out of Italy and hidden during the film's release. Opening intertitles claim that every frame of art historian Thomas Negovan's cut is previously unseen. It's long been wondered whether there's a great film within Caligula; although we don't think The Ultimate Cut demonstrates that there is, it's entertaining and striking, and offers an idea of what might have been.

Recorded on 18th August 2024.

426 - Caligula: The Ultimate Cut

A welcome new instalment in the Alien franchise, which has moved between genres and directors, remained popular for over four decades, and offered fascinating expansions of its internal mythos, Alien: Romulus moves with the times to give Generation Z the opportunity to die in space. It goes like the clappers, orchestrates loads of entertaining, tactile action, and is unbelievably good-looking. It's also underwritten, arguably overstuffed with reference to previous films in the series, and features one of those entirely uncontroversial and ethically pure reanimations of a deceased actor through CGI and other technologies. Perhaps after seeing the muted responses to the ideas on offer in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the series has decided to seek refuge in the cloying bosom of nostalgia - but we differ on how excessive it is, while enthusiastically agreeing that Romulus is great fun, and easy to recommend.

Recorded on 19th August 2024.

427 - Alien: Romulus

"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what I hope to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation." - José Arroyo.

"I just like the sound of my own voice." - Michael Glass.

425 - Deadpool & Wolverine

Eavesdropping at the Movies

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