The Cinematologists Podcast

• PTA's latest, Redford reflections and some big podcast news

  We are back! Season 22 kicks off with a stellar, loose, multi-layered, melancholic, heated and nervy, shambling odyssey of an episode, which befits the central discussion, centred as it is around the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.The timing of the release of the new PTA is fortuitous as he is a filmmaker that we have circled around over the years, given my love for the filmmaker, as well as his place in contemporary American cinema. It’s also good timing as the film has found itself lodged at the centre of film discourse in so many ways since its release last Friday (September 26th).Before we get into it, looking in depth at the film and the conversations and reactions it has provoked, the episode starts with a bang, of an announcement about the future of the podcast (no spoilers here), followed by a short ode to one of the great screen actors of all-time, Robert Redford, and how we have marked his passing in terms of their viewing choices. Their chat covers what made Redford such a unique, enigmatic Hollywood star, his on and off-screen legacies, including a lovely anecdote from Dario about seeing his final film, David Lowery’s The Old Man & The Gun (2018) at the London Film Festival.The second-half of the episode is given over to One Battle After Another. We unpack my love of PTA and how that informs his viewing of his films when they are released and the film’s approach to form and how it relates to the original text that inspired it, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which feels like a stronger source text than some reporting suggests. We go on to explore how Pynchon and PTA share a sense of juxtaposing zaniness with bone deep sadness at the way America is and has been, as well as what makes the cinematic spectacle and theatrical experience of the film so magnetic and rewarding.Then there’s the conversation around the film, that flows from the above but is contextual. They talk about the ‘takes’ and responses to the film, where critique feels valid and where it feels misguided. Much of this centres around the ideas of what a Hollywood film can and should do in terms of being revolutionary, and indeed what any film created in a capitalist structure can do, but also we unpack how the film might be read as a comment on revolutionary Cinema, what happens to revolutions over time, the ongoing revolution of resistance to white American control, and the impact of white revolutionaries in fights that they have the privilege of being able to walk away from to a large degree. And also, why this film, despite its incredible dynamism and grotesque operatic performances, is so damn sad.And if that whets your appetite for this season, we have you covered, this is just the beginning. From here, it’s one podcast after another. Sorry. Couldn’t resist. (NF) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

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• The Cinematologists Present: Students on Screen

  This special episode of The Cinematologists is a contribution to the Students on Screen  project convened by Dr Kay Calver and Dr Bethan Michael-Fox, to coincide with a special issue of Open Screens they have edited, which explores screen representations of students across a plethora of Global screen media forms.On behalf of The Cinematologists, Neil contributed a paper - drawing from his decade-old doctoral work - on representations of film students in anglophone cinema, and put together this episode, which is both a dissemination of and critical artefact of, the special issue.For this episode Neil talks to Kay and Beth about the Students on Screen project, as conveners and issue editors, as well as three contributors to the special collection. The contributors are Dr Sharon Coleclough, Dr Devaleena Kundu and Dr Oli Belas. The critical focus of all the conversations includes critical regard for the spaces where representations of students in fiction and non-fiction screen spaces can improve, address, or further address gaps in lived experience.Elsewhere in the episode, Neil and Dario discuss representations of students on screen, Neil’s paper, and in an extended analysis, a film that Neil doesn’t cover in his piece, but is worthy of discussion, 2014’s The Rewrite, directed by Marc Lawrence and starring Hugh Grant and Marisa Tomei.For more information on the Students on Screen project, click the link above, and for more information, on the journal Open Screens, click here.———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists———You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (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.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

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• Terrence Malick (w/John Bleasdale)

  For the final [main] episode of this season, the 21st, we are delighted to welcome writer and podcaster John Bleasdale (Writers on Film) to the show, to discuss his excellent book on Terrence Malick, The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick.Neil talks to John about his approach to research and interview/archive given the glaring lack of a central subject's voice, Malick and John's own relationship to the big themes around philosophy and faith, the power of understanding Malick's later period work anew through the lens of [auto]biography, and the ways that Malick's early work truly shifted American film language.Elsewhere Neil and Dario discuss Malick's work in thematic/aesthetic periods, how Malick used formal experimentation to explore biographical trauma and regret in his most divisive work, approaching famous people, and how books and podcasts provide valuable routes into engagement with film and cinema, to understanding wider contexts, particularly for challenging and envelope-pushing work.———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists———You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (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.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing.   This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

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• Pavements (& Videoheaven w/Alex Ross Perry)

  Welcome friends.Thanks for stopping by and welcome to the many new free subscribers that have signed up in the last few weeks. A very special thanks to Helen, Bluetrue, R.J. MacReady, & sukhveer kang for becoming paid subscribers. I really do appreciate your support. Postcards should be coming your way anytime (if you haven’t yet DM’d me your address, please do that if you want a little physical media token of my gratitude).Subscribe nowI’m working on a couple of longer written pieces, to be published next week. These are articles that have been on my mind for a little while and I wanted to take a bit of extra time in crafting the argument and furnishing the research.They both speak quite zeitgiesty. One reflects a prevalent cinematic trend, in which form and theme, as I see it, emerges from the “absurdities” of the contemporary socio-political experience. In the other piece, I’m working on putting one element of the emergence of FilmStack in a larger historical context.Yes, I’m being a little enigmatic, but that’s my prerogative. Hopefully, some of you might be suitably intrigued. In the meantime, I wanted to share a recent episode of The Cinematologists Podcast featuring my co-host Neil’s [Indistinct Chatter] in-depth conversation with American indie Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry.Hi latest work - Pavements - is a self-reflexive, tonally playful, and structurally audacious film that might loosely be called a “music documentary,” though such a categorisation feels entirely insufficient.Joe Keery & Stephen MalkmusIt is as much a study of fandom and memory as it is a biographical account of the influential '90s indie band Pavement. Through a collage of archival materials, faux-biopic fragments, split-screen juxtapositions, and full-blown musical theatre sequences the film constructs a mythopoetic portrait of a band whose identity was always wrapped in contradictions: sincerity and irony, virtuosity and nonchalance, lo-fi chaos and lyrical precision.What unfolds in our conversation is a deep dive into:The editorial complexity of telling four parallel stories simultaneously: the band’s rise, their reunion, a fictional musical, and a staged film-within-a-film.Perry’s desire to create a film whose form reflects the band’s sensibility — fractured, contradictory, but ultimately cohesive.The challenge of navigating tone when the project itself subverts traditional modes of storytelling, even as it draws from them.The role of humour, performance, and self-awareness in both Pavement’s legacy and the filmmaking process.Why sincerity can only function when set against the backdrop of knowing absurdity.In an era where the “music doc” has become as formulaic as the legacy biopic, Pavements is a fascinating outlier: elegiac essay film, audiovisual slash fiction, unreliable cultural history and hyper-self-conscious indie experiment. It’s a film that doesn’t so much document a band as contribute a mythological re-staging. In their conversation, Neil and Alex dig into some fascinating terrain: the legacies of Gen X fandom and its oscillation between slacker irony and obsessive authenticity; the cultural fatigue that breeds dislocations between cynicism and sincerity; and the strange condition of loving something while also deconstructing it in real time. What emerges is a compelling meditation on aesthetic form as a kind of fandom in itself, a way of expressing reverence not through hagiography but through playful reconstruction. Pavements ultimately asks: What does it mean to remember a band that never fully wanted to be remembered? And how do you make a film that honours ambivalence without resolving it?There’s also discussion of Perry’s other new release, Videoheaven, a formally rigorous, found-footage love letter to the ephemeral space of the video store - tracing its representation in over 180 films from the mid-80s to the present. The conversation explores how both films, in their different registers, offer meditations on media archaeology, nostalgia, and the ways in which personal and collective cultural memory are shaped through images, sound, and spaces.In our post-interview conversation, Neil and I attempt to deconstruct the meta-textual layers at play, beginning with a reflection on the interview process itself: that is, the inherently performative and constructed nature of podcast discourse, especially when it’s in dialogue with a film already so self-consciously aware of its own artifice. From there, we try to unpack the slipperiness of articulating what makes a film like Pavements “good.” That category, “goodness”, often operates at the level of instinct or affect, shaped by personal taste, mood, cultural memory; it resists codification and certainly defies objective criteria. And this is especially true when the film’s formal strategies seem designed to destabilise conventional modes of storytelling and undercut sincerity at every turn. Yet paradoxically, that very tension, between irony and emotional investment, between knowingness and vulnerability, is what makes Pavements work. It mirrors the band’s own history, their aesthetic ethos, and the contradictions they never resolved and never needed to.Pavements is now available to view on MUBI.Videoheaven, which is available to screen direct from Cinema Conservancy.Neil and I first discussed Pavements on our second 2024 London Film Festival episode, the festival where the film had its UK premiere. As always, thanks for coming back or clicking for the first time on Contrawise. If you like what you have read/watched/listened to, I’d really appreciate it if you can restack/share to your networks.A gesture of human curatorial practice is more valuable than any algorithm recommendation.ShareWe really appreciate any reviews you might write (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. If you’re not already a subscriber, please consider doing so by hitting the button below. Become part of the network of curious, fascinating people!Subscribe nowThere’s always an unease in asking for financial support, especially when one is competing in today’s oversaturated digital marking. So any support is genuinely appreciated and will allow me to continue to build a resource for those interested in cinema, media and the human experience.A subscription is £5 per month (£50 for the year). You get access to the full articles, podcasts, and film resources I produce. I’ll also send you and physical postcard, wherever you may reside:Become a paid SubscriberOr, if you don’t want to subscribe but think to yourself: “yeah, I’d shout that guy a coffee if we ever met IRL”, you can do that here:Buy me a coffeeMusic Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

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• The Learned and The Learner

  This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dariollinares.substack.comWelcome friends. Thanks for lending me some of your valued attention.This wasn’t the post I intended for today. I’m working on a longer exploration of current debates unfolding on Film Stack—particularly around questions of what Film Stack actually is—and the recent flurry of posts that allude, explicitly and implicitly, to a shared agenda or set of aims, i.e. a manifesto. Film and art manifestos have always fascinated me. Their parameters, their intentionality, and their fallibilities offer a snapshot of an individual or group sensibility at a given moment, bridging an interior state of mind with a reaction to a specific set of social, cultural, or political circumstances. I’m really interested in how the growth of a named community of thought on this platform - concerned with the future of cinema in its many interpretations - could be framed in the context of the history of film manifestos.That piece is to come (hopefully) next week.For this post I wanted to share some of the recent Cinematologists Podcast audio and writing that myself and co-host Neil have produced. Our last main episode is a brilliant episode that Neil ( [Indistinct Chatter] ) produced featuring an interview with film critic Ryan Gilbey about his new book It Used to be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema. It’s a wonderfully personal conversation of trust, empathy and curiosity, very much in keeping with the tenor of the book. Ryan’s personal reflections on how cinema shaped his identity will register with so many of us. This is allied to the depth of knowledge and critical passion for Queer cinema, the uses and contradictions of that term. Indeed, one of the most fascinating directions in which the conversation goes is the idea that film watching is a queer act in and of itself.The conversation covers many films as you would expect, but a key personal example for Ryan, and one the Neil and I discuss in out conversation, is Lucio Casto’s elegant romance The End of Century. At the risk of being reductive it reminded me of Linklater’s Before Trilogy, but with subtle time shifting mechanism that demand the most satisfying kind of critical labour. Call Me By Your Name would be another obviously touchpoint, but I also found something of the relational character empathy of Celine Sciamma - I’m thinking Petit Maman.The episode is underpinned by a greater level of poignancy which, I won’t go into here, but if you listen to the episode, you’ll get a sense of how myself and Neil needed to reframe the interview somewhat. You can download/stream the episode for free wherever you get your podcasts - below is the link to Spotify:For paid subscribers: I've added above the bonus podcast episode Neil and I recorded as an accompaniment to the main show. He was up in London from his home in Cornwall for these tapings. As we don’t often get the chance to record IRL, it’s always a pleasure to shoot the breeze, so to speak, in a more relaxed way—and without the barrier of internet lag.In this free-flowing conversation, Neil and I reflect on recent projects, shifts in our pedagogical and creative identities, and the deeper personal processes that underlie our podcasting practice. From there, we touch on the role of physical space and routine in our writing lives, particularly Neil’s decision to work from a local café in Cornwall as a way to disrupt solitude and cultivate a new creative rhythm. This spirals into a discussion about the psychological conditions that enable productive work, and how these are often at odds with the institutional structures we’ve historically worked within.A key thread that emerges is our shared ambivalence about our academic identities. We unpack what it means to move beyond the institution—not with disdain, but with a desire for more open-ended, hybrid forms of public engagement. This includes a reflection on Substack as a space for exploratory, essayistic writing that doesn’t require the defensive armature of traditional scholarship.Film wise Neil talks about S/He Is Still Her/E – The Official Genesis P-Orridge Doc, and I, in stark contrast, make a few “considered” remarks about enjoying the Star Wars/Disney series Andor.Also below, for paid subscribers, is the July newsletter article I recently wrote, entitled The Learned and the Learner.It’s one of those pieces that reflects on the serendipitous collision of ideas that have emerged through recent conversations, reading, and life events. I try to explore the fluidity between teaching and learning—how these “concepts” are something I’m continuously negotiating across different creative and intellectual contexts.I reflect on how our culture too often enshrines rigid binaries—teacher/student, expert/amateur, art/commerce—and how cinema, at its best, can offer a more dynamic and relational model of engagement. Drawing from the conversations above, along with my recent discussion with Adrian Martin and the piece I wrote on Cinemas and Film Education, I also bring in Zen concepts like “beginner’s mind” and the writings of Alan Watts and Shunryū Suzuki, positioning these ideas alongside my preparation for a new teaching role at the National Film and Television School.As always, thanks for reading, watching, or listening.If you enjoyed this post and think to yourself yeah, I’d by this guy a coffee if he was in my local café please consider doing that virtually. It really does help sustain my work:Also, if anything here strikes you as interesting, useful, or even mildly amusing, feel free to share it in the Substack app or on any of those other platforms we like to decry - but also can’t live without. Sharing and commenting (not just liking) is a gesture of curatorial practice and a small act of resistance against complicity with the algorithmic overlords.Lastly, if you value the work please consider becoming a paying subscriber. I know this is a lot to ask, so it’s incredibly appreciated. A subscription is only £5 (or £50 for an entire year). You’ll receive access to the paid portion of my work, which includes podcasts, extended interviews, and bonus writing. Every paid subscriber also receives an IRL postcard from me through the post.Peace and Love.The Learned and the LearnerIn the last few weeks, I’ve been grappling with an idea that I’ve intuitively known - perhaps for as long as I’ve been teaching - but which feels increasingly acute: that the processes of teaching and learning are not linear progressions from ignorance to knowledge, nor one-way transmissions from authority to acolyte, but rather an endless loop. A mutually constitutive relationship that defines how we engage with the world. Teaching is not the culmination of learning; it is its continuation. And learning is not the inverse of teaching; it is its condition.

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