The Films of Christopher Harris

On December 12, 2024, as part our annual winter list extravaganza, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish led a panel of special guests—Molly Haskell (critic, author), and Michael Koresky (critic, founding editor of Reverse Shot)—for a live real-time countdown of the films topping our year-end critics’ poll. The evening featured a lively discussion (and some hearty debate) about the films as they were unveiled—and now it’s here in Podcast form, for your home-listening pleasure. Consider it a holiday gift from us to you, our loyal listeners. Read the full list, plus Best Undistributed Films, individual ballots, and more, at filmcomment.com/best-films-of-2024

Sleepily emerging from the turkey-induced haze of Thanksgiving break and looking ahead to the barrage of Best of 2024 lists, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited critics Robert Daniels and Beatrice Loayza to discuss some of the most highly-anticipated Hollywood blockbusters (and would-be blockbusters) of this year’s holiday season. The group convened to offer their thoughts on Steve McQueen’s Blitz (3:25), Edward Berger’s Conclave (17:00), Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II (31:56), Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (43:55), and Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 (55:53).

During the 2024 New York Film Festival, Film Comment’s Devika Girish had the chance to chat with Julianne Moore, one of the great American actresses of the last three decades and more. She was at the festival for the premiere of The Room Next Door, the first English-language feature film by Pedro Almodóvar, which stars Moore as a writer in New York who reconnects with an old friend, now in the late stages of cancer, played by Tilda Swinton. The friend makes a strange request of Moore’s character: to give her company in a house in upstate New York where she plans to take her own life using a euthanasia pill. Almodóvar’s film unfolds like a chamber drama, honing in on the awkward but tender companionship of two women in an absurd and dark situation, as they try to figure out how to enjoy the day-to-day of their togetherness while anticipating death. The Room Next Door hinges on its lead performances, and Moore and Swinton rise to the task with luminous turns that imbue the beautifully designed, fantasy world of Almodovar’s film with a rough-edged, piercing emotional realism. Devika’s conversation with Moore delves into the challenge of inhabiting the unreal worlds of Almodóvar with realism, as well as Moore’s relationship with Swinton, how she acts with her voice, and whether it’s difficult to play a good person in the movies.

When Payal Kapadia won a historic Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her second feature, All We Imagine as Light (the first Indian film to play in competition at Cannes in 30 years), she paid homage to another Cannes prizewinner whose work has deeply influenced her: Miguel Gomes, whose Grand Tour won the award for Best Director. The resonances between their latest films go beyond Cannes laurels and directorial inspiration. All We Imagine as Light, which opens in American theaters this Friday, traces the stories of three women in present-day Mumbai, while Grand Tour follows a British colonial officer and his fiancée as they traipse across various East Asian cities in 1918—but both films are city symphonies that center love stories within broader political contexts and are driven by the pulsings of female desire. Last month at the New York Film Festival, Film Comment editor Devika Girish moderated a conversation with Kapadia and Gomes—both practitioners of artful docufiction—which touched on their influences, aspirations, and methods.

The films of Robert Kramer blend fiction and documentary modes to engage with, and expand on, traditions of militant political cinema and subjective essay filmmaking. A founding member of the New Left activist film collective Newsreel in 1967, Kramer devoted himself to the group’s radical ethos, but he also began to make his own hermetic and probing fiction films—like The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969)—which turned the camera back onto the mostly white middle-class milieu of his comrades, posing thorny questions about the nature of political commitment. This process reached its peak with the sprawling, 3-hour plus Milestones (1975, co-directed with John Douglas), a vast mosaic featuring a cast of over 50 fellow travelers, union organizers, dropouts, Free Vermont commune dwellers, and more, all navigating the demands of their personal and political lives in the wake of the Vietnam War. At the end of ’70s, Kramer decamped to France, where his films had been championed by critics like Serge Daney, and proceeded to work in a wide variety of contexts across Europe and beyond, making films like Guns (1980), Our Nazi (1984), Doc’s Kingdom (1988), Route One/USA (1989), and Walk the Walk (1996).  Over the past several years, the French DVD company Re:Voir has been beautifully restoring and re-releasing his films, and Kramer, who passed away suddenly in 1999, is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Viennale, running through the end of November. The retrospective is accompanied by a new book, Starting Places, published by the Austrian Film Museum, which reproduces a 1997 interview with Kramer by the French critic Bernard Eisenchitz alongside several essays written by Kramer himself. To mark the occasion, Film Comment’s Clinton Krute and Michael Blair invited Erika Balsom and Benjamin Crais, two noted critics who each proudly own original Milestones posters, to discuss Kramer’s life and work. A few short audio clips of Kramer talking about his films, sourced from the original 1997 interview tapes, are interspersed throughout the conversation, providing their own points of departure into this undersung filmmaker’s richly heterogenous, and endlessly fascinating, body of work.   Special thanks to Volker Pantenburg. Show Notes: “The Traveller” by Benjamin Crais (Sidecar, 2023): https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-traveller “Milestones” by Erika Balsom (4Columns, 2020): https://4columns.org/balsom-erika/milestones Serge Daney on Milestones and Route One/USA (originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, 1975 and 1989): https://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-aquarium-milestones.html; https://sergedaney.blogspot.com/2014/05/murmur-of-world.html  Robert Kramer: Notes de la forteresse (1967-1999) (edited by Cyril Béghin. Re:Voir, 2019):https://re-voir.com/shop/en/books/1101-robert-kramer-notes-de-la-forteresse-1967-1999.html

As the 62nd New York Film Festival drew to a close last weekend, it was once again time for Film Comment’s Festival Report, our annual live overview of the NYFF that was. This year, the end-of-fest ritual took place in collaboration with the New York Film Critics Circle, which will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2025. Devika and Clint were joined by NYFCC members Bilge Ebiri and Lovia Gyarkye for a spirited wrap-up analysis of the highlights and lowlights from the NYFF62 lineup. In front of a lively audience, the panel discussed and debated RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Trương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam, and many more. The Questions: Favorite moment in an NYFF62 film? (4:25) Favorite performance? (19:30) Best film about a real person? (32:30) A film that you can’t shake, for good or bad? (50:17)

Two films in this year’s New York Film Festival lineup grapple beautifully with the challenge of narrating stories of collective movements without giving in to the allure of the heroic individual protagonist. John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Revivals selection Northern Lights (1978) stages the founding of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota—formed in the mid-1910s by farmers from that state—parallel to a tale of young love, using a dramatized approach to explore the tensions between personal desires and collective commitments. Made more than four decades later, Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s documentary Union (2024)—featured in the festival’s Spotlight section—takes on another chapter in the history of the American labor struggle: the 2022 unionization drive of the Amazon plant on Staten Island, and the challenges facing an autonomous movement that requires leadership but is rooted in democracy. Last Saturday, the two directorial pairs—Hanson and Nilsson, and Story and Maing—joined Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a live panel discussion on their stylistically different but thematically connected works. In a thought-provoking conversation, they examined the practical, formal, and political considerations of making films about people power.

The films of Christopher Harris are haunting and cerebral in equal measure—blending the sensorial power of analog avant-garde cinema with a thoroughly researched and deeply felt engagement with African-American history. Starting in 2001 with the 16mm feature still/here, which was also his MFA thesis at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Harris has created a rich and versatile body of work that draws on the legacy of the slave trade, the present-day realities of racism and capitalism, and the construction and destruction of urban space. Last week in New York City, Harris celebrated a major career milestone—his latest shorts, Speaking in Tongues: Take One and b/w, screened as part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and a weeklong retrospective of his work kicked off at Anthology Film Archives. In the midst of these screenings and speaking engagements, Harris joined Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute to talk about the origins of his filmmaking in his youthful ambition to be musician, his interest in stillness and silence as structuring concepts, and why his work is always as fun as it is challenging and erudite.

This week, Film Comment is on the ground at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, which began on September 5 and runs through September 15. This year, as ever, the festival’s lineup is full of buzzy titles, including new films from directors like Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodóvar, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Brady Corbet, Dea Kulumbegashvili, and more. For our fourth and final Podcast from the shores of Lake Ontario, critics David Schwartz, Saffron Maeve, and Robert Daniels join Film Comment editor Devika Girish to discuss shorts from the boundary-pushing Wavelengths programs (3:05), as well as Muhammed Hamdy’s Perfumed with Mint (21:40), the final two installments of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy (27:57), and Luca Guadagnino’s Queer (35:16). Catch up with all of our coverage of TIFF 2024 at filmcomment.com

This week, Film Comment is on the ground at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, which began on September 5 and runs through September 15. This year, as ever, the festival’s lineup is full of buzzy titles, including premieres of new films from directors like Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodóvar, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Brady Corbet, Dea Kulumbegashvili, and more. For our third Podcast from the home of David Cronenberg, Drake, and the great Tim Hortons, Film Comment editor Devika Girish welcomes critics Adam Nayman and Beatrice Loayza to discuss some of the most anticipated films of this year’s festival. Kicking things off, Adam, the noted Torontonian, gives a rundown on the Toronto-based movies at this year’s edition (2:59) before the three critics move on to discuss Nicolás Pereda’s Lázaro at Night (6:05), Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue (12:32), Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest (22:09), Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End (32:09), and Joseph Kahn’s Ick (39:33). Catch up with all of our coverage of TIFF 2024 at filmcomment.com