Cinéclub Podcast

Cinéclub Podcast number 23 is a conversation with Brighid Lowe and Henry K. Miller about Lorenza Mazzetti. Mazzetti was an Italian-born filmmaker who met her best-known films, K and Together in London in the 1950s whilst she was an art student at the Slade School of Fine Art. If you know her name it might, as it was for me, be from Ali Smith’s 2020 novel Summer , in which she wrote about Mazzetti’...

Cinéclub Podcast #22 is a conversation with Neil MacDonald and Dan Magee about skate videos. This is a topic that’s been on my wishlist of episodes for a long time. When I first started Cinéclub as a blog, I wrote a two-part piece entitled Video Days and Memory Screens: Skateboarding on video on film . The idea was certainly not to present myself as some sort of scholar of skate video history: I z...

Cinéclub Podcast number 21 is a conversation with Nico Bruinsma, usually known as Nico B., of the Blu-Ray label Cult Epics. Nico’s name has come up on the show before, because he released restored versions of Marleen Gorris’ first three films, which were discussed in episode 17 with Sue Thornham . On that podcast I said that I wanted to do more on Dutch cinema, and later it occurred to me that Nic...

The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series ran from 1971 to 1978, and there are just eight episodes. But there is also a whole constellation of other films that have a similar strange, unsettling atmosphere. This episode explores three such examples. My guest is Ray Newman, and our conversation was prompted by a blog post he wrote, listing a series of these A Ghost Story for Christmas -esque fil...

Cinéclub Podcast number 19 is a special episode because it’s a tie-in with the release of the second edition of the Cinéclub fanzine. This issue features an article on Conrad Rooks’ bizarre, star-studded countercultural artifact Chappaqua , with a focus on the long saga of its production, some shorter pieces on punk and film, and an essay linking Bertrand Tavernier’s 1974 film The Watchmaker of St...

Cinéclub Podcast #18 is a conversation with Will Sloan. You may know Will from his own podcasts: The Important Cinema Club which he co-hosts with Justin Decloux and Michael and Us , which he does with Luke Savage, which is a broader politics and culture podcast. In this episode, though, we’re focusing on Will’s new book, a study of the notorious Ed Wood, which is called Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood,...

Cinéclub Podcast #17 is a conversation with Sue Thornham on the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris. Gorris made her debut with A Question of Silence in 1982. A provocative feminist film which uses and subverts popular genre conventions, as you’ll hear, it stirred up controversy amongst critics, particularly here in the UK. It was the first in what she envisaged as a series of four films, and...

Cinéclub Podcast episode 16 is a conversation with the San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker Greta Snider. (In the podcast intro I say it’s episode 15 and I can’t find the time to go back and fix it!) Greta has been making films since the late 1980s, and around the same time, produced seven issues of a fanzine called Mudflap. For me, much of Greta’s work is characterised by a tactile, handmad...

Cinéclub podcast episode #15 is a conversation with Dan Erdman. As Dan mentions in the episode, his background is in archiving and preservation, and he works for the Chicago-based not-for-profit film and media archive Media Burn. You can find out more about them at their newly relaunched website, mediaburn.org. He also does a zine called Head Clog and, most importantly for this episode, he is the...

In March 1995, the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier stood on stage in the Odeon cinema in Paris, then holding a conference celebrating cinema’s first century, and read the Dogma 95 manifesto. Signed by von Trier and fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, the Manifesto makes many references to the perceived failure of the French nouvelle vague movement of the 50s and 60s, and calls for the use of...

When the French film historian George Sadoul coined the term ‘The Brighton School’ in 1945, he was primarily referring to two important filmmakers who began working in the late 1800s: James Williamson, and his friend George Albert Smith, though both lived and worked (to cite a well-worn local phrase) in “Hove, actually.” This podcast has covered G.A. Smith before , in the very first episode from J...

Happy new year, and welcome to Cinéclub podcast number 12. For this episode I was very lucky to talk with John Smith, a London-based experimental filmmaker who has been working since the early 1970s. John’s films include The Girl Chewing Gum from 1976, The Black Tower from 1985, Slow Glass , made between 1988 and 1981, and the Hotel Diaries series which ran from 2001 until 2007. His latest, Being...

Cinéclub Podcast #11 is the second edition of the podcast designed to tie in with the release of the Cinéclub fanzine , which came out last month. The zine features a big piece on cinematic treatments of the German urban guerilla group The Red Army Faction and one key film there is The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum from 1976, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margharethe von Trotta and based on t...

This is a very special edition of the podcast because it’s a celebration of the first Cineclub Fanzine which is now available. It’s 52 pages and covers cinematic representations of the German urban guerilla group The Red Army Faction from the 1960s to the late 2000s, Claude Chabrol’s 1962 film ‘The Third Lover’, and some pieces inspired by the excellent book Destroy All Movies on punks in cinema....

Cinéclub episode #9 is a conversation with Toby Amies. Toby is a documentary filmmaker, director of the features The Man Whose Mind Exploded from 2012, and In The Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 from 2022. We spoke online earlier in the year and discussed Toby’s previous life as a presenter on MTV, how he met Drako, the star of The Man Whose Mind Exploded , documentary ethics, workin...

Cinéclub Podcast #8 is a conversation with Daniel van der Velden, who works alongside Vinca Kruk under the name Metahaven. They are based in the Netherlands and produce all kinds of interesting work including graphic design work, films, and writing, including their essay Digital Tarkovsky which was published in book form in 2018. A recent bio is below: The work of Metahaven encompasses filmmaking,...

Cinéclub Podcast #7 is a conversation with John Higgs, author of books such as William Blake vs The World , I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary and Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century . For today’s episode, we focused mostly on his most recent book, Love and Let Die: Bond, The Beatles and the British Psyche , with a short diversion into the film wor...

In 2024, things might look bleak for communal film culture. Cinema attendance has been stubborn to return to pre-pandemic levels, and the abundance of choice on streaming services or, for the concerted cinephile, boutique Blu-ray labels, can’t be helping. But despite all this, over the last few years a healthy number of film clubs, societies and small programming strands have sprung up, mostly run...

Content warning: Beijing Swings contains some difficult, disturbing imagery that’s not for everyone. Some of the links on this page should be approached with caution, and this episode of the podcast contains discussion of some of the film’s challenging content. At 11:20pm on Thursday 2nd January 2003, 3.4 million people in the UK tuned in to watch Beverly Hills Cop II on BBC One.  Another 900,000,...

Cinéclub Podcast #4 is a conversation with Juliet Jacques. I wanted to talk to Juliet for a couple of reasons. Firstly she has written extensively and broadly about film, including work published by Sight and Sound, Criterion Current, Frieze, The Guardian, Novara Media and many more. Secondly I’m a big fan of her book Trans: A Memoir , published in 2015. The book started life as a series of blogs...

Cinéclub Podcast #3 is a conversation with Ray Newman. Ray is a writer of fiction, including the novel The Gravedigger’s Boy (2019) and short story collection Municipal Gothic (2022). He also writes about film on his website, with an interest in British film of the 60s and 70s. In this episode we discuss Ray’s work, including ghost stories in council houses, haunted films, sex and sickness in Brit...

Cine Blatz, Meatdaze, Kino Stacatto, Pulverised Cinema. These are just a few of the mysterious titles from the sprawling filmography of Jeff Keen, the Brighton-based experimental filmmaker and artist, whose career spanned from the late 1950s to his death in 2012. In Jeff’s films friends and family adopt star personas yanked from Hollywood B-movies, creation and destruction intermingle and, typical...

The 4th of January 2024 marks the 160th birthday of the Hove filmmaker George Albert Smith. To celebrate, this podcast takes a deep dive into Smith’s life and career including his involvement in spooky ‘thought transferrances’ experiments; the nature of his collaboration with his wife, the actress Laura Bailey; the films in which he expanded film grammar to include close-ups and sophisticated edit...