In his new book The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Adam Shatz writes that, “The American poet Amiri Baraka described James Baldwin, who was born a year before Fanon, as ‘God’s Black revolutionary mouth.’ What Baldwin was for America, Fanon was for the world, especially the insurgent Third World, those subjects of European empires who had been denied what Edward Said called the ‘permission to narrate.’” Shatz’s book explores, in lucid detail, the complex life and thought of the Martinican psychiatrist and anticolonial theorist,  whose life was tragically cut short in 1961.

Fanon’s epochal books Black Skin, White Mask and The Wretched of the Earth have long been a source of inspiration for politically minded filmmakers, including Med Hondo, Claire Denis, and many others. Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited Adam on the podcast to talk about Fanon’s interest in cinema, filmmakers who’ve engaged the theorist’s works, and what exactly makes a movie “Fanonian.” In addition to films by Hondo and Denis, we talked about Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Antonioni’s The Passenger, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl, and more.

Adam Shatz on Frantz Fanon in Cinema

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.

Tribute to Navroze Contractor, with Deepa Dhanraj

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

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

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

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.

For today’s episode, critics Kelli Weston and Jessica Kiang join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to unpack three of the most highly anticipated premieres of the festival: Francis Ford Coppola’s operatic fable Megalopolis, Andrea Arnold’s magical realist Bird, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre anthology film, Kinds of Kindness.

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

Cannes 2024 #3, with Jessica Kiang and Kelli Weston

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.

On today’s episode, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish sat down with Canadian filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson to discuss their new film Rumours, one of the true delights of the festival so far. It’s a horror comedy set during a G7 Summit, with a dynamic ensemble cast including Cate Blanchett as the German chancellor, Charles Dance as the American president with an explicable British accent, and Roy Dupuis as the Canadian prime minister sporting a man bun. These and other leaders of the world’s richest democracies gather in a gazebo in the German forest to draft a statement addressing an unnamed political crisis, but soon sinister noises and figures emerge from the shadows around them. Rumours is a satire that is as whip-smart and timely as it is unabashedly silly, featuring hijinks such as a giant brain and an AI bot that traps sex predators.

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

Cannes 2024 #4: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson on Rumours

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.

On today’s episode, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish is joined by Kevin B. Lee, Abby Sun, and Vadim Rizov to debate their differing reactions to Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s Rumours, Patricia Mazuy’s Visiting Hours, and Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language.

Subscribe today to the Film Comment Letter for a steady stream of Cannes coverage, providing everything you need to know about the 2024 edition.

Cannes 2024 #5, with Kevin B. Lee, Abby Sun, and Vadim Rizov

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.

Jeff Bridges Makes a Decision

Film Comment

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