Lisa Cortés on Little Richard: I Am Everything

11/15/23 • 37 min

Midway through the new documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything, actor and singer Billy Porter says something that distills one of the film’s major themes: “In the face of insurmountable challenges, sometimes simply existing is a revolutionary act.” The film, directed by the multi-hyphenate filmmaker Lisa Cortés, tells the story of one of the great American artists, a global celebrity whose simple existence as a Queer Black man was a direct challenge to the status quo. A studied deep dive into the archive, filled with incendiary performances and biographical detail, I Am Everything is also a challenge to pop music history, and an effort to finally afford Little Richard his place as both the progenitor of rock ’n’ roll and a groundbreaking cultural force unto himself. Film Comment’s Clinton Krute spoke with Cortés about the contradictory nature of a man who swung between libertine impulses and religious conviction his entire life, how she reads his work and life as a utopian and cosmic project, and her own remarkable and varied career in the entertainment industry.

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Halloween Hangover 2023, with Clyde Folley and Nicholas Russell

It’s once again that time of year when ghosts, ghouls, and goblins are on the prowl. That’s right: it’s Halloween. And as much as we are scared to admit it, that means it’s also time for another Halloween Hangover episode of the Film Comment Podcast, where co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute confront one of their greatest fears—horror movies—with the help of some masters of the macabre. For this year’s festivities, they invited two horror experts to inflict some fear—FC contributor Nicholas Russell, and Clyde Folley, curator of the ’90s Horror series currently haunting the Criterion Channel. The two selected a pair of freaky favorites: Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers, an early-’90s remake of the classic sci-fi chiller, and Michael Powell’s 1960 serial killer masterpiece, Peeping Tom. Where Powell’s film lived up to its reputation as an endlessly fascinating text, rich with commentary on the inherent violence of visual culture, Ferrara’s streamlined variation on an oft-told tale opened up surprising questions about identity, family, and conformity. Listen to the end for some bonus, bone-chilling picks!

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Mumbai Film Festival, with Inney Prakash

After a three-year hiatus induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival returned this year with a new curatorial team and a robust lineup of independent and art-house work from all over South Asia and beyond. One of the major international film festivals in the region, MAMI (as it is colloquially known) is a unique combination of corporate glitz and die-hard indie cinephilia. Sponsored in large part by Reliance Industries, the company owned and run by the richest family in India, and boasting major Bollywood figures on its board, the festival is nevertheless an oasis for formally and politically bold filmmaking in a cultural landscape dominated by commercial blockbusters and constrained by censorship policies. Devika attended the festival for the first time this year, as did curator and Film Comment contributor Inney Prakash. On today’s episode, they discuss their experience in Mumbai and some of the highlights of the South Asia selection, including The World Is Family by Anand Patwardhan, Against the Tide by Sarvnik Kaur, Which Colour? by Shahrukhkhan Chavada, a program of short films by Amit Dutta, and more.