Episode #121 - Jon Dieringer (Made in Hollywood)

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"I just hope there's always going to be a healthy alternative."

The podcast returns in our perilous times with a profile of the website all about what's playing in repertory and experimental cinemas across New York. And though the balconies remained closed and the popcorn machines without an ounce, there are plenty of reason to subscribe to Screen Slate and listen to this conversation with Jon Dieringer. Jon takes us to his early programming days and work on a few Hollywood movies before diving into the complex work preserving the history of experimental video at Electronic Arts Intermix. He then talks about the origins of Screen Slate (including its infamous and now defunct competitor) and how it continues to push the boundaries of what curious cinephiles can and should watch. Finally, the two dive into the absolute oddity that is Made in Hollywood, a proto-Lynch take on the industry from Bruce and Norman Yonemoto with Patricia Arquette that is both highly artificial and highly bizarre. 

0:00–6:18 Opening
7:27-10:43 OVID.TV Sponsorship
11:28–1:20:21 Deep Focus — Jon Dieringer
1:21:32–1:24:57 MUBI Sponsorship Section
1:25:37–1:40:32 Double Exposure — Made in Hollywood (Bruce and Norman Yonemoto)
1:40:36–1:42:33 Close // Outtake

2017 Favorites With Keith Uhlich (Part Two)

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On one hand, cinema has mutated. It is no longer contained to the theater and its methods no longer simply produce simply 3 act narrative features. But was it ever so limited? The first films were hand cranked into a box at a parlor on 34th street. The military in WWII made cinema portable in order to bring secrets across enemy lines. Films taught people their trades. Video tape launched a spiritual and later political revolution against the dominant mode. The medium was never the message, so let's just celebrate what was seen and experienced—the movement was not just in the image but in our bodies (the real movement...was love). All is this to say, Keith and Peter have good fun exploring their favorite works of 2017, debating the nature of reality in a series of works either attempting to pull it from other the rug or expose it through unsuspecting places. Is it future? Or is it past? Or is it simply the now in which me must live. And live we must.

0:00-2:27  Opening
2:28-47:16 Picks for #5
47:16-1:16:00 Picks for #4
1:16:01-1:34:31 Picks for #3
1:35:14-1:39:05  Sponsorship Section
1:40:07-2:09:39 Picks for #2
2:09:40-2:25:07 Pick for #1
2:25:08-2:27:14 Final Thoughts

2:27:31-2:29:57 Close

"But Who Is The Dreamer?" Twin Peaks: The Return

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In a summer where blockbusters felt stale and indie films became rote, cinephilia thrived every Sunday night as David Lynch put on an 18-hour spectacle on primetime television. Twin Peaks: The Return saw the filmmaker behind Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr. return to the soap opera that would in part define two decades of serialized television. He created not just a new spin on the story of Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer, but instead delved into a mystery that felt more aesthetically, narratively, and emotionally involved than any other visual story this year. As the boundaries between cinema, television, streaming, and other categories have become less defined, Twin Peaks: The Return lept past these debates to simply create an utterly singular work about the never ending battle between good and evil. To celebrate the show's culmination (and perhaps the capstone of Lynch's career), Peter invites a Roadhouse worthy group of  guests—Alison Herman of The Ringer, Scott Nye of Battleship Pretension and Criterion Cast, and Nate Fisher of Mubi Notebook—to dissect the show's use of nostalgic devices, moral dichotomies, and employment of experimental cinema techniques. Grab a coffee, watch out for the tulpas, and don't give anyone a light, we're all Twin Peaks this week on the podcast.

0:00-4:16 Opening
4:16-46:35 Discussing Twin Peaks: The Return
47:05-49:44 Sponsorship Section
50:36-1:3019 More on The Return

1:31:14-1:34:19 Close / Outtake

Episode #93 - Girish Shambu (Gold)

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"I think there's a place for the skills that we learn as cinephiles in the world at large."

If the cinephilia of lining up on small streets of Paris and New York for obscure rare prints of art films and the auteurs of Hollywood to appreciate the wind in the trees has died with Susan Sontag, what has replaced it? This is one of many questions asked by blogger Girish Shambu in his book The New Cinephilia. In this final report from SCMS, Girish discusses his childhood in India and how he became interested in not just film but the kind of critical discourses it creates, and how he sees himself functioning within that world. The two talk about the opportunities and challenges that cinephilia faces in our current moment, both in terms of the expanding definition of media and its relation to politics. Finally, they turn their eyes toward the ever nebulous group of coy German filmmakers known as the Berlin School, and in particular, Thomas Arslan's Klondike-trekking western Gold with Phoenix star Nina Hoss.

0:00-3:03 Opening 

3:57-12:15 Establishing  Shots — A Tale of Twin Peaks
13:07-52:22 Deep Focus — Girish Shambu

53:14-56:13 Sponsorship Section
57:17-1:16:58 Double Exposure — Gold (Thomas Arslan)
1:17:03-1:18:42 Close

Episode #75 - Blake Williams (INLAND EMPIRE)

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"When I'm making work it's very important that me that I'm unsure where it's going"

What does it mean to view a stereoscopic image, to see films in a way that's at once closer to our daily life perception while also expanding it beyond anything we could ever see? Blake Williams is one of many filmmakers working in the avant-garde who has been exploring this question—through filmmaking, criticism, and historical research. Williams joins the podcast to trace his lineage as both a critic and a filmmaker, and the very nature of 3D images that has made this such an exploratory visual medium to work in, using it to explore heady concepts in both literal and theoretical terms. Peter and Blake then turn to a narrative filmmaker who created his own long experimental: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE. The two debate the use of narrative in the film while also examining the nature of its low-grade digital imagery, which can be sublime or absolutely terrifying.

0:00-3:02 Opening

3:40-11:14 Establishing Shots — The Mermaid and Mountains May Depart

11:59-1:10:24 Deep Focus — Blake Williams
1:11:26-1:15:24 Sponsorship Section
1:16:39-1:39:33 Double Exposure — INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch)

1:39:36-1:41:14 Close 

Visit Blake's film-viewing blog and his filmmaking website.
Watch the films of Blake Williams, including No Signal, A Cold Compress, Coorow-Latham Road, Depart, Many A Swan, Baby Blue, and Red Capriccio.

Read Blake on Cinema Scope and Ion Cinema.