Listening, Viewing: Haskell, Bava, and More


On the new episode of the Supporting Characters podcast (123’49”), Bill Ackerman talks with author and film critic Molly Haskell, author of From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies and, most recently, Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films. Among the topics covered here are feminism, “Andrew Sarris, Leo McCarey, Diabolique [1955; image above], the Sarasota French Film Festival, Twitter, Pauline Kael, women’s films of the 1970s, film theory, Agnes Varda, the origins of the National Society of Film Critics and New York film culture in the 1960s.”

The latest Film Comment Podcast (54’18”) is a continuation of Nick Davis, Girish Shambu, Michael Koresky, and Violet Lucca’s conversation about “the directors they found later in life, especially ones who might have redefined their preconceived notions about the medium. Héctor Babenco, Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, and Abbas Kiarostami all crop up in this half.”

Talk Easy host Sam Fragoso chats with Lois Smith, who this year alone has appeared in Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (64’32”). They also discuss “her LIFE magazine cover in 1955, her mindset when it comes to promoting films, and some wisdom from her character in Minority Report.

TIFF Long Take hosts Rob Kraszewski and Geoff Macnaughton meet Gaylene Gould, Head of Cinemas and Events at BFI Southbank, to discuss “the fine line between programming challenging films and meeting financial expectations, the questions she asks herself when selecting films, and how she tests her audience's unconscious bias.” (28’27”).

Viewing

Tim Lucas, author of Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, points us to FilmStruck’s introduction to the director’s work (14’11”) featuring commentary by himself and filmmaker and Kino Classics producer Bret Wood.

Grasshopper Film is making Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s En rachâchant (1982) freely viewable through Friday (7’52”). “Marguerite Duras’s 1971 story ‘Ah! Ernesto!’ is the basis for Straub-Huillet’s short, which was originally released as a prelude to Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach [1983].”

The National Film Preservation Foundation, in cooperation with EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, has added six films to the EYE Project screening room. “These freshly preserved American silent films, unseen since their original release more than ninety years ago, are accompanied by new music from composers Michael Mortilla, Ben Model, and Stephen Horne, and by program notes from scholars and silent film experts.”

Liquid Television was an animation showcase that ran on MTV from mid-1991 through mid-1994, launching such shows as Beavis and Butt-head and Æon Flux. And now the full series is available at the Internet Archive. Via Beth Elderkin at io9.

Alive from Off Center, renamed Alive TV in 1992, was an American arts anthology television series aired by PBS between 1984 and 1996.” John Coulthart points us to the eleven episodes at UbuWeb featuring work by Laurie Anderson, Zbigniew Rybczynski, Spalding Gray, and Julien Temple, among many, many others.

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