Episode #122 - Marie-Louise Khondji (Birth)

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"Films deserve to be bought, but they also deserve to be seen.”

Nothing is more frustrating in our streaming era than turning on any specific app and suddenly staring hundreds of movie posters with only an algorithm trying to decide what you might like (especially if such product is actually made by the company to help its margins). But what if there was a streaming site that only offered a single movie a week, and maybe not even a feature but a short or medium-length feature? And what if it had circulated ultra-rare films by Claire Denis, Hong Sang-Soo, Matias Piñeiro, Jonas Mekas, and fascinating filmmakers you had never heard of? That's the promise Marie-Louise Khondji has brought to her site Le Cinéma Club. Marie sits down to talk about growing up with her father (the cinematographer Darius) and how she moved into management through distribution and production before starting a site to help filmmakers showcase work that needed an outlet and created to be accessible for all. Finally, the two talk about the wonderful Jonathan Glazer film Birth, and how it seems to capture a certain timeless stasis of its upper elite New York culture.

0:00–6:27 Opening
7:40-11:32 OVID.TV Sponsorship
12:17–45:51 Deep Focus — Marie-Louise Khondji
46:40–51:15 MUBI Sponsorship Section
52:31–1:03:47 Double Exposure — Birth (Jonathan Glazer)
1:04:12–1:06:42 Close 

Episode #82 - James Schamus (The Tall T)

 

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"When adapting, the fundamentals you are left with are the words and gestures and actions and interactions of characters."

How does one reconcile the ideas of artistry in cinema, the kind of magic of cinephilia that we see each time we look up at the screen, with the business practices that often painted as limiting it? James Schamus has somehow made a career of toeing this (likely constructed) dichotomy, helping produce some of the early independent films of the 1990s before becoming the co-founder of Focus Features, which made films like The Pianist, Atonement, Brokeback Mountain, and Moonrise Kingdom, as well as a collaborator of Ang Lee, writing the screenplays for The Ice Storm, Ride With The Devil, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. James discusses this work between the politics of making art for specialty audiences, as well as his interest in the very nature of art through his work as a theorist and professor at Columbia University. They then turn to his directorial debut, an adaptation of Philip Roth's Indignation, and what it means to modulate performance. Finally, the two discuss Budd Boetticher's 1957 hostage western The Tall T, and what a specialty art house producer can learn from watching Randolph Scott contemplate existence in this low budget western.

0:00-3:57 Opening
5:08-17:11 Establishing Shots — 4 Years of The Cinephiliacs

17:56-1:06:20 Deep Focus — James Schamus

1:07:21-1:11:32 Sponsorship Section

1:12:33-1:22:44 Double Exposure — The Tall T (Budd Boetticher)

1:22:50-1:27:00 Close // Outtake