Journal
Essay
Pizza Party
BY Metrograph
In honor of Untitled Pizza Movie, we asked local filmmakers and other friends of Metrograph to share their pizza-related memories and favorite spots to grab a slice, past or present.
Essay
Reverse Shot on Djibril Diop Mambéty:
Things Unseen
BY Boukary Sawadogo
Laurence Gavron’s documentary Ninki Nanka, The Prince of Colobane closely observes the celebrated director during the making of his final feature, Hyenas.
Essay
Follow the Money
BY Yasmina Price
Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun combine a harsh critique of neocolonial structures with buoyant portraits of those surviving at their margins.
Essay
Reflections on My Cinema
BY Jackie Raynal
The filmmaker, actress, and film curator takes us on a verbal and visual tour through her career, from making her first feature Deux fois in the late ’60s to programming in mid-’70s New York City.
Essay
The Traveling Entertainer
BY Jackie Raynal
An appreciation of legendary film critic, and beloved friend, Serge Daney. This piece, written June 21, 1992—nine days after Daney’s death—was originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma; this is the first time it has appeared anywhere in English.
Essay
Land of Milk and Honey
BY Gabriel Jandali Appel
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow sets forth an unexpectedly gentle vision of nascent America.
Essay
Attention Must Be Paid
BY Rebecca Panovka
Today, Frederick Wiseman’s films play like reminders of all the mundane, uncinematic elements of daily life we’ve been missing throughout the pandemic.
Q&A, Video
A Conversation with
Kirsten Johnson & Michael Moore
BY Metrograph
The two filmmakers talk about Dick Johnson Is Dead following a special February 1 screening of Johnson’s moving love letter to her father.
Q&A
The Directors of Suture in Discussion
with Steven Soderbergh
BY Metrograph
In an in-theater chat from 2017, Soderbergh and directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee talk about what it took to make their brain-twisting debut feature.
Essay
The Two Faces of Suture
BY José Teodoro
Driven by a striking lead performance and a bold and unusual approach to race, the noirish first feature by filmmaking duo David Siegel and Scott McGehee recalls a time when sharp, inventive indie output wasn’t an exception to the rule.
Essay
Debt to Nature
BY Chloe Lizotte
Valentyn Vasyanovych’s meticulously crafted Atlantis fixes its gaze on postwar fallout in a bleak and lonely, yet not entirely hopeless, near-future Ukraine.
Interview
Claire Atherton
BY Yonca Talu
Chantal Akerman’s frequent editor of three-plus decades talks about the process, and honor, of working with the celebrated Belgian filmmaker on a trio of her later documentaries.
Essay
To Go on Living
BY Christine Smallwood
On Red Desert and Melancholia, two tales of female despair amid environmental foreboding made nearly 50 years apart.
Interview
Eliza Hittman
BY Austin Dale
The Never Rarely Sometimes Always director discusses her career, Planned Parenthood, and how she gamed the casting process.
Essay
Distant Traveler
BY Amy Taubin
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films of isolation perfectly suit the mood of today, but To the Ends of the Earth, in which a young woman feels lost in a faraway land, brings less doom to the usual reality-fantasy mix.
Essay
Lucky Together
BY Aliza Ma
Tsai Ming-liang’s poetic Goodbye, Dragon Inn charts the empty spaces found within—and created by—cinemas fading into obscurity.
Essay
Divorce Baumbach Style
BY Monica Castillo
The director of The Squid and the Whale continued his exploration of families dividing with Marriage Story.
Essay
Delinquents
BY Ackbar Abbas
In Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong, disaffected youngsters embody historical promises unkept.
Essay
An End and a Beginning
BY Ariel Esteban Cayer
Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong captures the realities of Hong Kong’s marginalized people with immediacy and urgency.
Interview
Gardener’s Question Time:
Derek Jarman
BY Metrograph
Prior to a run of Jarman’s little-seen masterpiece The Garden at Metrograph theater last year, we uncovered this rare interview with the director from 1990 in the movie’s original press materials.
Essay
Merry Christmas, Mr. Woodcock
BY Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
On the holiday spirit of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread.
Essay
Chasing the Film Spirit
BY Tsai Ming-liang
The director of Goodbye, Dragon Inn recalls his relationship to cinema, on screen and off, in a piece that first appeared in Metrograph theater’s inaugural printed program in 2016.
Essay
Beyond Bronxspoitation
BY Kazembe Balagun
A look at Decade of Fire, a documentary that provides an essential community-driven narrative to the Bronx arson crisis of the 1970s.
Interview
Spike Lee
BY Jake Perlin
Spike Lee joined Metrograph in person during the 2016 presidential election to present two of his favorite films: Ace in the Hole and A Face in the Crowd.
Excerpt
An Excerpt from
Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks
BY Adam Nayman
In his new book, the critic examines Phantom Thread ’s luxurious, intricate weave of contradictions as part of a critical study of its subject’s overall body of work.
Interview
Oliver Laxe
BY Yonca Talu
The director talks about his powerfully meditative third feature, Fire Will Come, for which he returned to his roots to make.
Essay
Robert Kramer: Cinema/Politics/Community
BY David Fresko
With fellow travelers or on his own, the maverick filmmaker traversed national and formal boundaries to bring his radical politics to the screen.
Essay
Movie Prom Highs and Lows
BY Laura Kern
Docs like Midnight in Paris present joyful takes on the high-school tradition, while fiction films more often reveal another side.
Essay
Woof!: Making The Werewolf of Washington
BY Milton Moses Ginsberg
The long, bumpy road from crazy idea to the release of a definitive version nearly 50 years later, as told by the film’s writer/director.
Interview
Milton Moses Ginsberg
BY Steven Mears
The director of the satirical Watergate-era chiller The Werewolf of Washington considers the nexus of horror and politics, and recalls his attempt to exorcise personal and national demons
with his camera.
Essay
The Collective Creation of Christopher’s Movie Matinee
BY José Teodoro
How a director turned the reins of a documentary made at the height of the late ’60s counterculture movement over to a group of Toronto youth eager to tell their own story.
Essay
Roberta Cantow’s Intimate NYC Portraits
BY Nellie Killian
On the award-winning director’s short works Clotheslines and If This Ain’t Heaven, whose subjects of isolation and domestic chores feel extra prescient these lonely, housebound days.
Interview
Marie Rivière
BY Yonca Talu
The actress who worked closely with Éric Rohmer, and made her own film in tribute to him, reminisces about the unforgettable roles he provided her with—specifically in The Aviator’s Wife, Le Rayon Vert, and Autumn Tale—and the joys of their collaboration.
Interview
Mary Stephen
BY Aliza Ma
A life-spanning conversation with the Hong Kong-born filmmaker and long-time Éric Rohmer editor, co-composer—and friend, who, off the set, was welcomed into the Rohmer circle, engaging in discussions on life and film, much music, and even more tea-drinking.
Interview
Charlie Kaufman
BY David Ehrlich
The Oscar winner responsible for some of modern cinema’s most inventive and uncomfortable screenplays talks about the art of adaptation and getting a movie made, upon the release of his fourth feature as a writer/director, I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
Essay
ULRIKE OTTINGER IN SIX CONTRADICTIONS
BY Sam Bodrojan
On the vivacious films of New German Cinema’s most prominent female director, the subject of a recent retrospective at Metrograph theater, which is now carrying on digitally.
Essay
Oumou Sy: The Grande Dame of Senegalese Fashion
BY Alexandra Marshall
A look at the career of the fashion and costume designer whose contributions to Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas served to heighten the film’s exquisite beauty.
Interview
Moussa Sene Absa
BY Austin Dale
The Dakar-based filmmaker and visual artist, who was a close friend of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s, talks about coming on as the assistant director during the troubled production of Hyenas.
Interview
Judy Irving
BY Yonca Talu
Dark Circle co-director Irving recounts the long journey of making a film on the history and aftereffects of nuclear energy and how her documentary subjects have grown more heartening since.
Interview
James Gray
BY Austin Dale
The director of Two Lovers spoke to Metrograph just prior to making an appearance at a Members-Only screening of his latest film Ad Astra this past September.
Interview
Michael Roemer
BY Melissa Lyde
The director, co-writer, and co-producer of Nothing But a Man talks about the inception of his groundbreaking 1964 debut feature, which is still finding the audience it deserves.
Video
About Stations of the Elevated
BY Manfred Kirchheimer
A 20-minute illustrated history of the production of the film, with director Manfred Kirchheimer, recorded for Oscilloscope Laboratories’ limited-edition DVD release.
Essay
St. Clair Bourne and Paul Robeson United
BY Violet Lucca
The cinematic intersection of two African-American pioneers yielded a pair of Robeson explorations, made by Bourne 30 years apart, and a doc that feels as if driven by Robeson’s guiding principles.
Video
“Stations” Locations
BY Manfred Kirchheimer
The NYC settings of Stations of the Elevated revisited by the film’s director. This video originally appeared as a bonus feature on Oscilloscope Laboratories’ DVD.
Introduction
Claire Denis Introduces L’Intrus
BY Claire Denis
Last April, Denis joined Metrograph theater to present two of her finest works. These are the words she shared prior to her 2004 film L’Intrus, which screened alongside No Fear, No Die.
Essay
Blood Work: A Reevaluation of Trouble Every Day
BY Melissa Anderson
Claire Denis’s often misunderstood Trouble Every Day only gets better with age, and, like all of Denis’s work, stays inside you long after viewing.
Essay
Improvisational Jamming: The Process and Production of Personal Problems
BY Nicholas Forster
A detailed look at the long, fascinating history of Bill Gunn‘s groundbreaking soap opera.
Interview
Alain Resnais
BY Philippe Labro
Resnais on the making of and motivations behind Je t’aime Je t’aime, which he insists is not science fiction, in an interview from 1968.
Essay
An Introduction to Duet for Cannibals, the Screenplay
BY Susan Sontag
Written New York in 1969, this intro appeared in the Noonday Original Screenplay edition, published in 1970 and now long out of print.
Essay
Jackson Heights on Screen
BY Laura Kern
A cinematic journey through the Queens neighborhood explored in Frederick Wiseman’s 2015 documentary, In Jackson Heights.
Interview
Frederick Wiseman
BY Eric Hynes
Frederick Wiseman talks about the evolution of his 50-plus-year career.
Interview
The Hyena’s Last Laugh: A Conversation with
Djibril Diop Mambéty
BY N. Frank Ukadike
The Senegalese master talks about making Hyenas and his plans for the future in a 1999 Transition 78 piece.
Essay
On Downtown 81
BY Amy Taubin
Edo Bertoglio’s vital and amazing document of the New York New Wave features Jean-Michel Basquiat and assorted cameos from important figures in the music world.
Interview, Video
Sontag/Varda: Lions and Cannibals
BY Jack Kroll
In 1969, Susan Sontag and Agnès Varda sat down together while promoting their films Duet for Cannibals and Lions Love.
Essay
Escaping Isolation with Éric Rohmer’s Summer Lovers
BY Austin Dale
The ultimate pleasure of Éric Rohmer’s movies in recent months? Little breaths of fresh country air.
Interview
Fruit Chan
BY Susanna T.
Chan talks about part one of his ”Handover Trilogy,“ Made in Hong Kong, in this talk that first appeared in Hong Kong Panorama 97-98.
Essay
I Remember the Fabled Rat Man (Apologies to Joe Brainard)
BY Luc Sante
The Belgian-born writer who was raised in NJ reminisces about his most memorable, life-shaping movie-going experiences.
