The King of Cinema

“I always go back to Ozu and Bresson, both of whom I admire a great deal. I like the way Bresson frames midriff: a person going across the room but you’re just seeing the half, the midriff of the body. The scene in Pickpocket at the racetrack. And Hitchcock, any of the inserts: the scene in The Wrong Man where Fonda is booked and Hitchcock shows you the detail, each step of the process. It has such a sense of isolation and helplessness, because these objects, these inserts, they speak to you. They tell you how to look at them. They direct the viewer,” Martin Scorsese said to Nick Pinkerton in the cover feature of our January/February issue. This special live episode of the Film Comment podcast deep-dives into perhaps the most appropriate Scorsese film for a live media event, The King of Comedy, shown in the Museum of the Moving Image’s Martin Scorsese retrospective. Following its screening of the film, the Museum hosted The Film Comment Podcast, featuring Pinkerton; Eric Hynes, MoMI curator and FC columnist; Nicolas Rapold, Editor; and Violet Lucca, Digital Editor. The lively conversation covers the film's unsettling mix of humor and discomfort, its open-ended slippage between fantasy and reality, its place in the careers of Scorsese and De Niro, and the myriad ways in which Rupert Pupkin's name gets hopelessly botched. Listen and enjoy, whether or not your office happens to be a Pupkin-esque setup in a Times Square phone booth. And as a special treat, the discussion is followed by a guided audio tour of the museum's exhibition of Scorsese artifacts with Lucca and MoMI Chief Curator David Schwartz.