The Cinematologists Podcast

Sometimes Always Never

Sometimes Always Never is the debut feature film from Liverpool filmmaker, musician and designer Carl Hunter. It marks the latest stage in a collaboration with screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce and stars Bill Nighy, Sam Riley, Alice Lowe, Jenny Agutter and Tim McInerny.
The film was released digitally in March, following a successful festival run over the past couple of years, and tells the story of Nighy searching for his long missing son, with Riley as the brother left behind. It’s a moving story, beautifully told and as lockdown got underway, Neil talked with Carl about the film, his filmmaking process and that slippery question ‘what is British cinema?’.
Prior to their chat, Carl sent Neil some images - his scrapbook of ideas and some polaroids - that informed the filmmaking process. He has kindly agreed for us to post a couple here, including the one that sold Bill Nighy on the project as discussed on this episode.
The conversation is framed by Neil and Dario’s discussion of the film and how it engages with ideas of Britishness and masculinity, the subtleties that mark the film out from other similarly themed films and the thrill of finding work to champion that sits on the fringes of the mainstream glut.
Sometimes Always Never can be rented on iTunes, Amazon, YouTube and pretty much anywhere you get your streaming rental fix.
Two of Carl and Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s previous collaborations, the brilliant Shakespeare inspired short A Winter’s Tale and the Beatles inspired short A Day In Life: Twenty Four Zero Hours can be found on YouTube here and here. They are superb shorts in their own right, but also provide a wonderful road map to their debut feature together.
You can also subscribe to The Cinematologists on:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-cinematologists-podcast/id981479854
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0RjNz8XDkLdbKZuj9Pktyh
Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/users/thecinematologists
We also produce an extensive monthly newsletter and bonus/entended content that is available on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists. You can become a member for only $2.50.
We also really appreciate any reviews you might write about the show (please send us what you have written and we'll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast so please do that if you enjoy the show.

The Uncertain Kingdom

The Uncertain Kingdom is “an anthology of twenty short films for our uncertain times”. The brainchild of producers Isabel Feeer, Georgia Goggin and John Jencks, the anthology is released digitally on June 1st with the hope that the films will “inspire, support and encourage new conversations about our interesting times’. 10 filmmakers were invited to make work for the project, with the other 10 shorts selected from an open submission call that saw over 1000 entries and work curated under narrative, documentary and experimental banners. The aim of the project was to create a snapshot of Britain in 2020, coming from an awareness on the behalf of the producing team that these post-Brexit vote times, were interesting across the political and social spectrum (and all this before a little something called Coronavirus).
For this episode, Neil talked to one of the project’s producers John Jencks as well as narrative filmmaker John Wingard (Pavement), documentary filmmakers Alison Hargreaves (Camelot) and Stroma Cairns (Sauna), and director Antonia Campbell-Hughes (Acre Fall Between). Apologies to Iggy LDN (Sucka Punch) and Sophie King (Swan) whose interviews were recorded but whose files were found to be corrupted at editing stage.
In the episode, Dario and Neil discuss the project, the films and the short film form more broadly. They also pay tribute to filmmaker Lynn Shelton and say happy birthday to the marvellous organisation Raising Films, who celebrated five years of activism on behalf of parents and carers in the film industry recently.
The website, with more information on all the films and filmmakers and where to watch them, can be found here.
This is a link to Neil’s Longform interview with Lynn Shelton for the journal Mai: Feminism and Visual Culture, from May 2019, shared here so listeners can enjoy spending time in the company of a great filmmaker sharing so much intimate wisdom about her career and craft. Her death is a real loss to our beloved art form.
You can also subscribe to The Cinematologists on:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-cinematologists-podcast/id981479854
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0RjNz8XDkLdbKZuj9Pktyh
Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/users/thecinematologists
We also produce an extensive monthly newsletter and bonus/entended content that is available on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists. You can become a member for only $2.50.
We also really appreciate any reviews you might write about the show (please send us what you have written and we'll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast so please do that if you enjoy the show.

Women Make Film (Mark Cousins)

For the first episode of a new century (of Cinematologists episodes) we are proud to present a conversation with esteemed filmmaker and cineaste Mark Cousins to celebrate the release of his mammoth, 14hr, poetic documentary project, and cinephile treasure trove, Women Make Film.
Recorded during lockdown in 2020, the conversation features Neil and Dario talking to Mark about his process and approach as well as the discoveries and rediscoveries contained within this love letter to cinema and foregrounding of forgotten, undervalued and sidelined directorial voices.
The film is released on Blu-ray by the BFI on Monday 18th May, with the BFI Player also streaming the film in 5 parts over the coming 5 weeks from the same date.
Thanks to Jill Reading at the BFI for helping set up the conversation with Mark. Also, for sending us the review copy of Ozu’s Flavour Of Green Tea and Rice, which gets discussed on this episode alongside two releases from Eureka/Masters of Cinema - The Specialists (Sergio Corbucci) and Throw Down (Johnnie To). Thanks to Steve Hills at Eureka for furnishing review copies of the latter titles.
You can also subscribe to The Cinematologists on:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-cinematologists-podcast/id981479854
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0RjNz8XDkLdbKZuj9Pktyh
Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/users/thecinematologists
We also produce an extensive monthly newsletter and bonus/entended content that is available on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists. You can become a member for only $2.50.
We also really appreciate any reviews you might write about the show (please send us what you have written and we'll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast so please do that if you enjoy the show.

5 Years & 100 Episodes

In this special episode, marking 100 episodes and five years of The Cinematologists podcast, Neil and Dario take a breath. With the help of friends and supporters of the podcast they discuss the history and evolution of the show, their formative experiences of cinemas, meaningful film viewing experiences, critics and academics that helped shaped their understanding of talking about cinema on the page and elsewhere, and what they think and hope the future of cinema(s) and the podcast might look like.
This episode, like the previous 99 and the show in general, would not be possible without the engagement of the listeners and the willingness of participants to give up their time and knowledge to help make the podcast what it is.
Thank you to everyone who has listened, come to a taping, recorded an interview, provided feedback, bought a t-shirt or just said ‘nice one’.
For episode 100 Neil and Dario especially want to thank Ellen Cheshire, Ryan Gilbey, Gwenno, Mark Jenkin, James Maitre, Marbelle, Kingsley Marshall, Andrew Peirce, Lottie Smith, Tessa and Ren Zelen for their contributions.
A wonderful time was had thinking about the comments and questions that were supplied and talking them through on the recording. Here’s hoping you the listener feel the same.
Thanks for listening.
The music for episode 100 is ‘Open Again Eventually’ by Leah Kardos, which can be heard in full here. In title and tone it felt like the right music for now, for this episode. Thanks Leah for letting us use it. To buy Leah’s latest EP ‘Bird Rib’, where this song is taken from, go to her Bandcamp page. Leah is a doctor of philosophy and senior lecturer in music at Kingston University where she co-founded the Visconti Studio with legendary music producer Tony Visconti.
You can also subscribe to The Cinematologists on:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-cinematologists-podcast/id981479854
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0RjNz8XDkLdbKZuj9Pktyh
Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/users/thecinematologists
We also produce an extensive monthly newsletter and bonus/entended content that is available on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists. You can become a member for only $2.50.
We also really appreciate any reviews you might write about the show (please send us what you have written and we'll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast so please do that if you enjoy the show.
 
 
 
 

Blake Howard (One Heat Minute Productions)

Perhaps the most in-depth analysis possible is focused on an entire film minute by minute. This week's guest Blake Howard has patented that very idea in the format of his highly popular podcast One Heat Minute. Interviewing a guest every week and assigning them a minute from the film, this deep-dive podcast represents a synergy between obsessional fandom, close textual analysis, and explorations of what film means to those who see the form as part of their very identity. The first film that was the subject of this was Heat, and it was a testament to the success of the show that the director, Michael Mann was the final guest of that series. Since then Blake has done series: The Last (12 minutes) of the Mohican's, All the President's Minutes (his current podcast on which Dario recently appeared) and two spin-off shows which he produces: Increment Vice and the upcoming Josie and the Podcats. He has also recently start con-TEN-gen, the film critic's response to the impact of the coronavirus on his colleagues and friends.
In this episode, Dario and Blake realise they have a parallel history in their film education and their taste in films. They discuss Blake's history as a film journalist at the beginnings of the digital age, the challenges and rewards of the 'one-minute' format, film podcasts as a genre, and the possibility of a cinematic experience without images.
In this episode, Neil also reviews three reissues from Eureka/Masters of Cinema: Syncopation (William Dieterle, 1942) Buster Keaton's MGM Boxset, Long Day's Journey into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962).
Links
Blake Howard is on Twitter as @OneBlakeMinute
Link here for One Heat Minute Productions
Contributor to www.flicks.com.au/ & Dark Horizons
Blake's Article for Vague Visages - Why Criticism: Not Quite the Apocalypse
 

The Cinematic Voice

The voice in cinema is a phenomenon that is in many ways taken for granted. Since the advent of the talkies, the speaking voice synchronised to the human body on-screen is the ingrained process for narrative exposition and character development. However, this accepted synchronisation is one of sound cinema’s fundamental illusions.
This major production for The Cinematologists features the analysis from leading film scholars and critics, each focusing on uses and interpretations of cinematic voice, using a plethora of filmic examples. Many aspects of the cinematic voice are explored including star voices, script and performance, sonic aesthetics of the voice, voice-overs, the singing voice, voices in animation, the disembodied voice, and politics of who has a voice and who listens. We draw upon many of the key thinkers on film sound including the seminal work of Michel Chion. Chion developed concepts like Audio-Vision, to explore how sound shapes how the screened image can be understood, and acousmetré, meaning the cinema’s use of disembodied off-screen voice. Using these ideas he forwards the argument that sound is not a secondary addendum to image in the cinematic experience, but fundamentally structures how we see and understand film.
Unlike our usual conversational format, this episode is an audio-essay; recorded interviews cut together with indicative clips in a sonic collage which is hopefully an immersive experience transversing the boundaries between creativity and criticism. We recommend that you listen to this episode on headphones to get the full effect. As always Dario and Neil discuss the themes of the podcast but also engage with the production and formal approach in the context of film podcasts more broadly.
Contributors to this episode are (in order of appearance are):
Dario Llinares - Website - Twitter
Clive Frayne (11:03-19:18)  - Website - Twitter
Neil Fox - (19:56-29:30) Website - Twitter
Laura Tunbridge - (32:08-37:08) Website - Twitter
Catherine Wheatley - (41:46-47:33) Website - Twitter
Ian Garwood  (48:56-55:00) - Website - Twitter
Farshid Kazemi (55:51-1:01:50) - Website
Jennifer O’Meara - (1:06:14-1:14:24) Website - Twitter
Mark Kermode (1:15:40-1:23:22) - Website - Twitter
William Brown (1:23:56-1:36:14) - Website - Twitter
My profound thanks for their time, labour and critical insight which has made this episode possible.
A full transcript of this episode is available at www.cinematologists.com
Film clips (in broadcast order)
The Jazz Singer (1927, Alan Crosland)
Blackmail (1929, Alfred Hitchcock)
Dead of Night [The Ventriloquist’s Dummy (1945, Alberto Cavalcanti)
To Have and Have Not (1944, Howard Hawks)
The Trial (1962, Orson Welles)
Dirty Harry (1972 Don Siegel)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
In the Heat of the Night (1967, Norman Jewison)
Inherent Vice (2014, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Dick Tracy (1990, Warren Beatty)
The Shawshank Redemption (1995, Frank Darabont)
Only Lovers Left Alive (2014, Jim Jarmusch)
White Men Can’t Jump (1992, Ron Shelton)
Daughters of the Dust (1991, Julie Dash)
Félicité (2017, Alain Gomis)
Mary Poppins (1964, Robert Stevenson)
Magnolia (1999) Paul Thomas Anderson
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami)
All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula)
Her (2014, Spike Jonze)
Toy Story (1995, John Lassiter)
Puss in Boots [Antonio Banderas Voice Session]
Frozen (2013, Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck)
Anomalisa (2016, Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson)
Star Wars (1977, George Lucas)
The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)
The Exorcist Original Voice Recordings
The Exorcist documentary
Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979, Terry Jones)
The Dark Knight Rises (2012, Christopher Nolan)
The Great Dictator (1940, Charlie Chaplin)
Valkyrie (2008, Bryan Singer)
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Flemming)
Some Like it Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)
References (in order of mention):
Altman, Rick. 1980. Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism. Yale French Studies, 60 Cinema/Sound: pp. 67-79 - https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2930005.pdf?seq=1
Chion, Michel. 1999. The Voice in Cinema. Columbia University Press.
 Barthes, Roland. 1978. The Grain of the Voice. In Image, Music, Text. New York: Wang and Hill. pp.179-189.
Whittaker, Tom and Wright, Sarah. 2017. Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Perspectives. Oxford University Press.
Kozlov, Sarah. 1992. Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. University of California Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 1994. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Harvard University Press.
Clements, Catherine. 1989. Opera, Or The Undoing Of Women. Virago.
Cavarero, Adrianna. 2005. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford University Press.
Kiarostami, Abbas. 2015. Lessons with Kiarostami. Sticking Place Books.
Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Sobchak, Vivien. 2005. When the Ear Dreams: Dolby Digital and the Imagination of Sound. Film Quarterly, 58(4), pp. 2-15.
Adorno, Theodor., & Horkheimer, Max. 1944. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.
Chow, Rey. 2017 ‘The Writing Voice in Cinema’. In Whittaker, Tom and Wright, Sarah. Eds. Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Perspectives. Oxford University Press.
Please consider sharing the show on your social networks and reviewing on your app of choice. If you would like to support us with our running cost please consider subscribing to our membership on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists)
You can subscribe to the show on:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Podbean
PlayerFM
Or wherever you get your podcasts.

Berlinale 2020 Part 2

Part Two of our Berlinale 2020 special is here. You’d think that after 5 years doing this podcast I’d get a little thing like the audio right, but alas, a couple of my solo recordings here are of a very poor quality - lots of peaking and distortion, which I have tried hard to reduce. Apologies.
The content is still pretty good though methinks. Lots of chat with Dario about films including the award-winning The Woman Who Ran [Hong Sangsoo] and Never Rarely Sometimes Always [Eliza Hittman], Siberia [Abel Ferrara], Entre Perro Y Lobo - plus an interview with that film’s director Irene Gutierrez - Rizi (Days) [Tsai Ming-Liang], Nightshift (Police) [Anne Fontaine], Maggie’s Farm [James Benning], White Riot [Rubika Shah] and from the retrospective, King Vidor’s The Sky Pilot. Plus nestled in amongst my ruminations is a chat with friend of the podcast Neil Young and a few choice clips from some of the films mentioned. In the spirit of the master Tsai Ming-Liang they are intentionally un-subtitled. Enjoy. NF.
You can also listen to The Cinematologists here:
www.cinematologists.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0RjNz8XDkLdbKZuj9Pktyh
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-cinematologists-podcast/id981479854?mt=2
PlayerFM: https://player.fm/series/series-2416725
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists

Berlinale 2020 Part 1

It's Berlinale time. Our annual sojourn to our favorite European Film Festival is one of the highlights of the year and the programme looks intriguing with a host of big names in art-house cinema showing their latest work. This is the first of a two-part episode in which we bring our thoughts to bear on the big competition entries and fiction and documentary films from other sections of Berlin's extensive programme. We also interview various critics also in the city no only on their festival picks but on any emergent themes of this year's event. Wild mushroom picking, toxic masculinity and signature central sequences were just some of the obvious motifs. 
Dario and Neil see a film together (Hang Songsoo's wonderful The Woman Who Ran) at the festival for the first time and they ruminate, as usual, on all aspects of the experience. Please enjoy.
Thanks so much to the following critics for giving up their time. Please check out their writing and share/support it on your networks:
Joseph Owen - https://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2020/02/24/berlin-film-festival-2020-first-cow-review/
Savina Petkova - https://savinapetkova.contently.com/
Alex Billington - https://www.firstshowing.net/
Serena Scateni - https://vaguevisages.com/2020/02/25/berlinale-2020-review-hong-sang-soos-the-woman-who-ran/
The films discussed in this episode are:
First Cow - Kelly Reichardt
The Salt of Tears - Philippe Garrel
Undine Christian - Petzold
Never Really Sometimes Always - Eliza Hittman
Pinocchio - Matteo Garrone
Little Girl - Sébastien Lifshitz
Malkkrog - Cristi Puiu
Shirley - Josephine Decker
The Assistant - Kitty Green
Mogul Mowgli - Bassam Tariq
The Woman Who Ran - Hong SangSoo
You can also listen to The Cinematologists here:
www.cinematologists.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0RjNz8XDkLdbKZuj9Pktyh
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-cinematologists-podcast/id981479854?mt=2
PlayerFM: https://player.fm/series/series-2416725
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists