Film Forum Podcasts

ONE LUCKY ELEPHANT: Where does an elephant go after a life in the circus? Sixteen years have passed since circus producer David Balding adopted Flora, the orphaned baby African elephant. As Flora approaches adulthood, he realizes that she is not happy performing. Ultimately, David must face the difficult truth that the circus is no place for Flora; she needs to be with other elephants. The road to Flora’s retirement, however, is a difficult and emotional journey which tests their bond in unexpected ways. Ten years in the making, ONE LUCKY ELEPHANT eschews easy sentimentality and doesn’t shy away from examining the problems and mysteries posed by keeping wild animals in captivity. This is the denouement of a love story between two individuals — one of them weighing 10,000 pounds — who share feelings of loyalty, sorrow, admiration and joy. Suitable for children, 10 and older. This podcast episode is a recording of the Q&A with ONE LUCKY ELEPHANT director Lisa Leeman and producer Cristina Colissimo, recorded June 8, 2011, at Film Forum, at a screening of the film.

IT'S A GIFT: (1934, Norman Z. McLeod) W.C. Fields’ Harold Bissonette silently suffers as blind man Mr. Muckle gets loose in the lightbulb bin; Baby LeRoy gets into the molasses; a noisy salesman interrupts his nap; and a crooked real estate deal quashes his California fantasy of gin and fresh-off-the-tree o.j. Selected for the 2011 National Film Registry -- an annual list of important cinema treasures compiled by the Library of Congress. Approx. 68 minutes. This podcast episode is a recording of the introduction to IT'S A GIFT by Dr. Harriet Fields and Ronald J. Fields, grandchildren of W.C. Fields, recorded April 21, 2011, at Film Forum, at a screening of the film during our W.C. FIELDS series.

TAXI DRIVER: (1976) “You talkin’ to me?” Robert De Niro’s insomniac cabbie Travis Bickle, amid his nocturnal 12-hour shifts, yearns in moody voice-over for a rain that’ll “wash all the scum off the streets”, while he ferries presidential candidate Leonard Harris (then Channel 2 entertainment critic) and Scorsese’s own hopped-up cuckold; tentatively tries for a date with campaign worker Cybill Shepherd; and silently spectates as pimp Harvey Keitel yanks 12-year-old hooker Jodie Foster out of his cab; as Bernard Herrmann’s brooding score — his last — presages the blow-ups to come. Shot during a sweltering NYC summer-cum-garbage strike, Scorsese’s contribution to the Bicentennial was inspired by the diaries of Arthur Bremer (would-be assassin of presidential candidate George Wallace), Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and screenwriter Paul Schrader’s own near-nervous breakdown. In one of his legendarily obsessive role preparations, De Niro drove his own shifts on a temporary cabbie's license, lost over 20 pounds, and listened to tapes of Bremer’s diaries, then ad-libbed his memorable soliloquy to a mirror. Today, still one of the screen’s greatest evocations of urban alienation — and a time capsule of a long-gone world of dial phones, Kris Kristofferson LPs, Checker cabs, and 42nd Street grindhouses — all stunningly shot in lurid color by Michael Chapman, though the blood-spattered finale had to be desaturated to get an R rating; Scorsese claims he now finds it more shocking that way. Palme d’Or at Cannes, and four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture; it lost to Rocky. A SONY PICTURES REPERTORY RELEASE. This podcast episode is a recording of the introduction to TAXI DRIVER by DAVID YASSKY, recorded March 22, 2011, at Film Forum before the screening of the film.

MADAME BOVARY: (1949, Vincente Minnelli) “Truth lives forever, men do not,” states James Mason’s Gustave Flaubert, on trial for writing his “indecent” novel, then proceeds to narrate his story: mid-1800s provincial Jennifer Jones, bored with doctor husband Van Heflin and dreaming of the romance she finds in books, meets Louis Jourdan and... Most successful adaptation of the classic, with Jones keeping Emma likable and understandable (as she must be) and a vintage Minnelli set piece: the waltz at the Marquis' ball, as the camera swirls ecstatically around the room. This podcast episode is a recording of the introduction to MADAME BOVARY by translator LYDIA DAVIS, recorded March 8, 2011, at Film Forum at the screening of the film.

PUBLIC SPEAKING: Wise, brilliant and funny, Fran Lebowitz hit the New York literary scene in the early ‘70s when Andy Warhol hired the unknown scribe to write a column for Interview magazine. Today, she’s an acclaimed author with legions of fans who adore her acerbic wit. Directed in the inimitable and energetic style of Scorsese’s early documentaries “Italian American” and “American Boy,” PUBLIC SPEAKING captures the author in conversation at New York’s Waverly Inn, in an onstage discussion with longtime friend and celebrated writer Toni Morrison and on the streets of New York City. Lebowitz offers insights on timely issues such as gender, race and gay rights, as well as her pet peeves, including celebrity culture, smoking bans, tourists and strollers. Of her beloved city, she says, “New York was not better [in the ‘70s] because there was more crime. It was better because it was cheaper.” Running time: 82 min This podcast episode is a recording of the Q & A with writer FRAN LEBOWITZ, star of PUBLIC SPEAKING, recorded March 2, 2011, at Film Forum after a screening of the film.

ZERO BRIDGE (1944): In the tradition of hard-hitting neo-realist filmaking comes ZERO BRIDGE, the debut feature of Tariq Tapa, a US-born filmmaker of Kashmiri/Jewish-American descent. Having spent his childhood summers in India-controlled Kashmir with his father’s family, he was committed to making a film of quotidian life, far from Bollywood fantasies and Western news reports of terrorism: Dilawar is a teenage pickpocket whose escape plans are complicated when he develops an uneasy alliance with a woman (herself fleeing an arranged marriage) whose passport he has stolen. ZERO BRIDGE is a story of two young people's struggle to retain their humanity, despite poverty, the traditional culture into which they’ve been born, and the fatalism, sexism and casual cruelty of their families. This podcast episode is a recording of the Q & A with filmmaker Tariq Tapa, moderated by Farooq Papa of the WKDA, recorded February 16, 2011, at Film Forum.

WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944): Professor Edward G. Robinson takes up Joan Bennett’s “come up and see my sketches” invitation, then, after blackmail by low-life boyfriend Dan Duryea and the ensuing murder, gets to watch D.A. Raymond Massey “use the law to nail a man. This podcast episode is a recording of the introduction to a screening of WOMAN IN THE WINDOW by Film Forum board member SHELLEY WANGER (daughter of actress Joan Bennett and producer Walter Wanger), recorded on January 30, 2011, at Film Forum.

IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE: Romania’s official entry into this year’s Oscar competition for Best Foreign Language Film and a prize-winner in Berlin, IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE, is a taut drama set in a prison for juveniles, where 18-year-old Silviu has only a few days left to his sentence. But when his beloved younger brother and their good-for-nothing mother arrive for a visit, their surprising news sets the stage for his psychic unraveling. IF I WANT TO WHISTLE… uses non-pro, juvenile offenders in many of the roles and features first-time actor George Pistereanu as a young thug whose angry persona is flecked with remarkably vulnerable and charismatic qualities, not unlike those James Dean brought to the screen. An auspicious debut feature by a director who counts Bresson and Almodovar, Bruno Dumont and Ken Loach among his influences. This podcast episode is a recording of the Q & A with filmmaker FLORIN SERBAN, recorded January 5, 2011, at Film Forum.

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF: (1980) Marguerite Duras is heard, but not seen; people hear split seconds of music no one else can hear; in public, women are slapped, men get their hair pulled; the most disparate activities are interrupted for vital phone calls; Jacques Dutronc’s Paul Godard (!) smokes big cigars, exchanges notes about parental abuse with his pre-pubescent daughter’s soccer coach, and battles with ex-lover Nathalie Baye; who constantly bicycles around town, edits videotapes, tries to unload the apartment she’d shared with Dutronc, and bonds with prostitute Isabelle Huppert; who herself had spent the night with Paul, counseled an aspirant to “being on the game,” and constantly thinks (in a voice-over quoting Charles Bukowski) on other things as she responds in a lackadaisical “why not?” manner to the absurdly bizarre demands of her clients, notably a four-person “rondelay that Rube Goldberg in his most lecherous mood could hardly have invented... an outrageous metaphor for the mating of sex and capitalism: and it’s funny as hell besides” (Richard Corliss, TIME). Godard’s return to mainstream (for him) filmaking, his self-described “second first film,” with technical innovation — freeze frames and slow-mo within continuing uncut shots — and the most startling and arbitrary of conclusions. This podcast episode is a recording of the introduction to EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF by RICHARD BRODY, recorded November 19, 2010, at Film Forum.

PSYCHO: “Mother’s not quite herself today.” After trysting with her married lover, Janet Leigh embezzles 40 grand and heads South of the Border, but stops for a rest at taxidermy buff Anthony Perkins’ Bates Motel, where guests check in, but... Hitchcock’s legendary, blackly comic shocker (author Robert Bloch’s first ambition was to be a comedian) was shot fast and cheap by the regular crew of his TV series, after original releasing studio Paramount — weary of this hot potato — graciously allowed him to finance it himself. In the wake of its path-breaking promotion (no one was allowed in the theater once the picture began and viewers were cautioned not to reveal the ending), Psycho packed theaters with white-faced patrons, vaulted its title into the non-Freudian mainstream, turned comfy shower stalls into places of terror, and sent Hitchcock chortling all the way to the bank. By virtually inventing the modern horror film — aided by Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking all-strings score — the Master more than fulfilled his stated 1947 ambition: “I aim to provide the public with beneficial shocks.” This podcast episode is a recording of the introduction of PSYCHO by DAVID THOMSON, recorded October 29, 2010.

VISION: The 12th-century Benedictine nun, Hildegard von Bingen — today a cult figure — is luminously portrayed by Barbara Sukowa in her 5th collaboration with director Margarethe von Trotta. Hildegard, a polymath by any century’s definition, was a composer of Gregorian chants, a playwright, poet, and scientific pioneer in the fields of healing, herbal medicine and botany. As an iconoclastic religious figure who insisted on separate and independent abbies for nuns, she ran up against the church’s authoritarian and patriarchal hierarchy; as a mystic and visionary, she insisted on her right to preach and interpret the Gospels. Sukowa infuses Hildegard with the will of a modern feminist, but one tethered to a medieval universe. Von Trotta makes that world believable and lush, and at times as scary and alluring as a 900-year-old fairy tale. This podcast episode is a recording of the Q & A with VISION star BARBARA SUKOWA, recorded October 28, 2010, at Film Forum during a screening of the film.

VISION: The 12th-century Benedictine nun, Hildegard von Bingen — today a cult figure — is luminously portrayed by Barbara Sukowa in her 5th collaboration with director Margarethe von Trotta. Hildegard, a polymath by any century’s definition, was a composer of Gregorian chants, a playwright, poet, and scientific pioneer in the fields of healing, herbal medicine and botany. As an iconoclastic religious figure who insisted on separate and independent abbies for nuns, she ran up against the church’s authoritarian and patriarchal hierarchy; as a mystic and visionary, she insisted on her right to preach and interpret the Gospels. Sukowa infuses Hildegard with the will of a modern feminist, but one tethered to a medieval universe. Von Trotta makes that world believable and lush, and at times as scary and alluring as a 900-year-old fairy tale. This podcast episode is a recording of the Q & A with filmmaker MARGARETHE VON TROTTA, recorded October 15, 2010, at Film Forum during a screening of the film.

BLUE COLLAR: Fed up with management and their own reps, Detroit auto workers Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto knock over union headquarters, netting a crummy 600 bucks and a ledger detailing mob linkups that gets them in steadily deeper waters. Color; Approx. 114 minutes. This podcast episode is a recording of the Introduction to BLUE COLLAR by screenwriter PAUL SCHRADER, recorded October 6, 2010, at Film Forum during a screening of the film.

NAZI DOCTORS: Robert Jay Lifton: renowned psychiatrist, author, founding member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, expert on Nazi doctors. Lifton’s 1986 groundbreaking book, “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide,” is at the heart of this visit with one of the world’s leading thinkers on medical ethics. Lifton describes the process by which he researched and interviewed dozens of doctors who served in Auschwitz (“doctors were at the heart of it”), the circumstances under which they were currently living (financially affluent, some still practicing), and their attitude toward him (nervous, “unctuous”). With measured words and carefully calibrated analysis, he leads us through the “acculturation to killing” that the camps fostered, the process of “splitting” or “doubling” which allowed doctors to strike a Faustian bargain, and his belief that “any one of us might find ourselves in service to evil.” This is a fascinating, compelling, profoundly disturbing movie that miraculously leaves one agreeing with Lifton that “there is room for hope.” This podcast episode is a recording of the Q & A with NAZI DOCTORS co-producer/director WOLFGANG RICHTER & subject DR. ROBERT JAY LIFTON, recorded October 6, 2010, at Film Forum during a screening of the film.

PATHS OF GLORY: “There are few things more fundamentally stimulating than watching another man die.” France, 1915. Amid the muddy trenches of World War I’s Western Front, Kirk Douglas’s French Colonel Dax gets the dreaded order: have his poilus take the seemingly impregnable “Anthill.” While behind the lines, icily smiling generals George Macready and Adolphe Menjou, ensconced in their chateau headquarters, play the General Staff office politics twostep, the one to get that promotion, the other to get some nice ink in the papers. But, with the troops trapped in the trenches amid the ensuing bloodbath, Macready vows that heads — but not his — will roll. And ultimately, three men — Joe Turkel, Ralph Meeker (Kiss Me Deadly’s Mike Hammer) and Timothy Carey (the wacko assassin of The Killing and “a precursor of the hipster druggies of the 60s” – Pauline Kael) — become the scapegoats in a game of judicial murder. But as Menjou suavely explains, “One way to maintain discipline is to shoot a man now and then.” Shot in Germany after French authorities nixed the project as defamatory (the film was banned in France until 1975), Paths is one of the most ruthlessly anti-war films ever, with Kubrick’s telephoto-lensed, side-tracking shooting of the assault perhaps the screen’s most authentic treatment of trench warfare. A crew of 60 worked around the clock for weeks to re-create the intricate trench systems and ravaged terrain of a WWI battleground (although the trenches were built two feet wider than the claustrophobic originals to accomodate the riveting backtracking shots of Douglas’s pre-zero hour procession); the set for HQ was a building actually damaged by WWII bombs; and the special effects techies discharged over a ton of explosives in the first week of filming alone. With a screenplay by Kubrick, Calder Willingham and cult pulp novelist Jim Thompson, Paths was named to the National Film Registry in 1992. This podcast episode is a recording of the introduction to PATHS OF GLORY by writer/producer DAVID SIMON, recorded September 20, 2010, at Film Forum during a screening of the film.