Cinéclub Podcast

Cinéclub Podcast #22 is a conversation with Neil MacDonald and Dan Magee about skate videos. This is a topic that’s been on my wishlist of episodes for a long time. When I first started Cinéclub as a blog, I wrote a two-part piece entitled Video Days and Memory Screens: Skateboarding on video on film. The idea was certainly not to present myself as some sort of scholar of skate video history: I zoned in on videos that seemed significant or were personal favourites, but omitted many more, either because the piece was already getting very long, or because of my own ignorance. More broadly I was interested in exploring the distinctive grammar of skate videos and the central role video plays in skate culture, but in that piece, I only considered American videos. When it came to shaping my own understanding of skateboarding, videos produced closer to home were far more influential.
So, when I saw that Neil Macdonald was releasing a book on the history of UK skateboarding, I thought he’d be a perfect person to invite to revisit this topic and shift the focus onto UK skate culture. Happily we were also joined by Dan Magee who, as you’ll hear, contributed so much to that story, but also made some of those influential UK videos, including Waiting for the World in 2000, First Broadcast in 2001, and Cover Version in 2019.
We discuss why video is so important in skate culture, the importance of music in skate videos, the footage in these videos that isn’t skateboarding, how skate videos and skate culture more broadly have been affected by platforms like YouTube and Instagram, and much more.
You can also find this episode on…
* Apple Podcasts
* Pocket Casts
* I will no longer be uploading podcasts to Spotify and have removed all previous episodes of the podcast from that platform. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, because Spotify is a transparently evil company that delights in ripping off musicians, promoting AI slop, and enabling genocide in Palestine.
Show notes
* Info on Neil’s book, Elsewhere: The Story of UK Skateboarding, 1987-2002
* Some suggested skate shops to buy the book from
* Native
* Focus
* Slam City Skates
* UK skate video archive at Neil’s website, Scienceversuslife
* Dan Magee’s videos
* Waiting for the World (2000)
* First Broadcast (w/ Adam Mondon, 2001)
* Lost and Found (2005)
* Make Friends with the Colour Blue (2010)
* Cover Version (w/ Kevin Parrott, 2019)
* Info on the Skate 50 exhibition at the South Bank Centre
* Other videos mentioned in the podcast, in the order they are mentioned
* Questionable (Plan B, 1992)
* Zoo York Mixtape (1998)
* Eastern Exposure (1993)
* Mind Field (Alien Workshop, 2009)
* Public Domain (Powell Peralta, 1988)
* Footage (Gordon & Smith [G&S, 1990])
* Unapromo (Unabomber, 1998)
* Headcleaner (Unabomber, 2001)
* Ban This (Powell Peralta, 1989)
* Art Bars: Subtitles and Seagulls (Foundation, 2001)
* Memory Screen (Alien Workshop, 1991)
* Mosaic (Habitat, 2003)
* Photosynthesis (Alien Workshop, 2000)
* GX1000
* Endless Beauty (Sci-fi Fantasy, 2025)
* Cherry (Supreme, 2014)
* Blessed (Supreme, 2018)
* The Sixth Sense (Transworld Skateboarding, 1998)
* BOBCBC (Quasi, 2025)
* Atlantic Drift Episode 11: Tom Knox (2021)
* Untitled (2022)
* My two-part article on skate videos, Video Days and Memory Screens: Skateboarding on video and film
* Part 1
* Part 2
* Buy issue 2 of the Cinéclub fanzine
* 44 pages w/ articles on Conrad Rooks’ bizarre, star-studded countercultural artifact Chappaqua, some shorter pieces on punk and film, and an essay linking Bertrand Tavernier’s 1974 film The Watchmaker of St. Paul (also known as The Clockmaker of St. Paul) to Paul Vecchiali’s La Machine from 1977. DIY and sold on a not-for-profit basis at a cost that just covers the cost of printing: £2.50 plus postage. Shipping internationally.
* Issue 1 is also still available, and you can buy both as a bundle.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cineclub.substack.com

Cinéclub Podcast number 21 is a conversation with Nico Bruinsma, usually known as Nico B., of the Blu-Ray label Cult Epics. Nico’s name has come up on the show before, because he released restored versions of Marleen Gorris’ first three films, which were discussed in episode 17 with Sue Thornham. On that podcast I said that I wanted to do more on Dutch cinema, and later it occurred to me that Nico would be the ideal person to ask, since he has put out so many great Dutch films on Cult Epics. We decided to focus on Scorpio films, the production company formed by directors Wim Verstappen and Pim de la Parra in 1965, and discuss a number of titles from across their output.
Verstappen and de la Parra were both students at the Nederlandse Filmacademie which opened in 1958, and were on the editorial board of the film magazine Skoop, published from 1963. Scorpio’s first feature, Verstappen’s De minder gelukkige terugkeer van Joszef Katus narr het land van Rembrant (1966), was made for a tiny budget of 10,000 guilders. The success of 1969’s Obsessions was eclipsed two years later by Blue Movie, which tapped into a newly sexually enlightened audience. Over 2 million people saw it, and it energised the moribund film industry in the Netherlands. Paul Verhoeven, whose Wat zien ik? was released the same year, said that 1971 was “the year that Dutch cinema was reborn.”
The frank sexuality of Blue Movie and other Scorpio releases doesn’t tell the whole story, however. Wim Verstappen followed Blue Movie with VD in 1972, a pitch-black satire that provocatively frustrates the anticipated sex sequences with abrupt cuts to graphic slaughterhouse footage. Pim and Wim also made more personal films: Verstappen’s Dakota (1974), a story about an obsessive longer pilot, was filmed on the island of Curacao where the director grew up. Similarly, Pim de la Parra made Wan Pipel (1976), the first film to be made in his home country of Suriname after the country won independence from the Dutch.
Both of these films went over budget, and both tanked at the box office. Scorpio never recovered, and declared bankruptcy in 1978.
Nico and I discussed Dutch cinema before Scorpio, Blue Movie’s blend of arthouse cinema and sex, the gear change of VD, the financial failure and artistic success of Dakota and Wan Pipel, the legacy of Pim and Wim in the Netherlands, and much more.
You can also find this episode on…
* Apple Podcasts
* Pocket Casts
* I will no longer be uploading podcasts to Spotify and have removed all previous episodes of the podcast from that platform. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, because Spotify is a transparently evil company that delights in ripping off musicians, promoting AI slop, and enabling genocide in Palestine.
Show notes
* Cult Epics website
* Articles on Pim and Wim at the Eye Film Institute website
* Pim and Wim: Scorpio Films
* Skoop and Skrien: A New Wind
* Dutch Film Academy
* Article on the troubled production of Dakota at Nostalgia Kinky
* Stream Pim de la Parra’s Rubia’s Jungle (1970) for free at Eye Film Player
* Buy issue 2 of the Cinéclub fanzine
* 44 pages w/ articles on Conrad Rooks’ bizarre, star-studded countercultural artifact Chappaqua, some shorter pieces on punk and film, and an essay linking Bertrand Tavernier’s 1974 film The Watchmaker of St. Paul (also known as The Clockmaker of St. Paul) to Paul Vecchiali’s La Machine from 1977. DIY and sold on a not-for-profit basis at a cost that just covers the cost of printing: £2.50 plus postage. Shipping internationally.
* Issue 1 is also still available, and you can buy both as a bundle.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cineclub.substack.com

The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series ran from 1971 to 1978, and there are just eight episodes. But there is also a whole constellation of other films that have a similar strange, unsettling atmosphere. This episode explores three such examples.
My guest is Ray Newman, and our conversation was prompted by a blog post he wrote, listing a series of these A Ghost Story for Christmas-esque films. From this post we chose three films: 1979’s Casting the Runes, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, the main man behind the BBC series; Baby, an episode of Nigel Kneale’s 1976 series Beasts; and The Woman in Black from 1989, also written by Kneale and directed by Herbert Wise.
Ray really knows his ghost stories, and recently published a second collection of his own, Intervals of Darkness, which we discuss at the end of the episode. Links to book, along with Ray’s original blog post and more can be found in the shownotes below.
You can also find this podcast on…
* Apple Podcasts
* Pocket Casts
* I will no longer be uploading podcasts to Spotify and have removed all previous episodes of the podcast from that platform. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, because Spotify is a transparently evil company that delights in ripping off musicians, promoting AI slop, and enabling genocide in Palestine.
Shownotes
* Buy issue 2 of the Cinéclub fanzine
* 44 pages w/ articles on Conrad Rooks’ bizarre, star-studded countercultural artifact Chappaqua, some shorter pieces on punk and film, and an essay linking Bertrand Tavernier’s 1974 film The Watchmaker of St. Paul (also known as The Clockmaker of St. Paul) to Paul Vecchiali’s La Machine from 1977. DIY and sold on a not-for-profit basis at a cost that just covers the cost of printing: £2.50 plus postage. Shipping internationally.
* Ray’s website
* The infinite supply of BBC ghost stories for Christmas (also here as a list on Letterboxd)
* Info on Intervals of Darkness
* Ray’s previous appearance on the Cinéclub podcast in 2024, discussing Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter and the relationship between film and his writing.
* Derek Johnson’s book chapter The British Ghost Story at Christmas from his book Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween - the source I used for background reading on the association between ghost stories and Christmas


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cineclub.substack.com

Cinéclub Podcast number 19 is a special episode because it’s a tie-in with the release of the second edition of the Cinéclub fanzine. This issue features an article on Conrad Rooks’ bizarre, star-studded countercultural artifact Chappaqua, with a focus on the long saga of its production, some shorter pieces on punk and film, and an essay linking Bertrand Tavernier’s 1974 film The Watchmaker of St. Paul (also known as The Clockmaker of St. Paul) to Paul Vecchiali’s La Machine from 1977. It’s £2.50 plus postage, shipping internationally, and you can buy a copy here.
It’s the latter film we’ll be focusing on in today’s episode, and to do so I was joined by Nick Newman. Nick is Managing Editor at The Film Stage, a freelance programmer, and most recently he launched a podcast, Emulsion, which I heartily recommend. As Nick mentioned in our conversation, I knew he was a fan of La Machine because he Tweeted about it around the time of Paul Vecchiali’s death in 2023. His Tweet stuck with me because this film is so often overlooked, even amongst the filmography of a still neglected director like Vecchiali. In the past few years, a few of Vecchiali’s films have been restored and re-released: in this episode we mention L’Etrangleur from 1970 and Rosa la rose, fille publique from 1986, recently reissued in the UK on Blu-ray by Radiance Films, but La Machine remains difficult to see. If you would like to see it, see the show notes below.
Nick and I start by discussing Vecchiali’s background and his production company, Diagonale. We then get into the film, exploring its approach to genre, its representation of mass media, what it has to say about the death penalty, the reasons why the film still resonates today, and much more. I started by asking Nick about the broader post-New Wave cinema landscape in France and how this generation of filmmakers differed from the nouvelle vague that preceded them.
Chapters
00:02:39 - post-New Wave / post-1968 French cinema
00:11:18 - Paul Vecchiali
00:23:04 - Diagonale
00:27:43 - La Machine and the crime genre
00:37:55 - La Machine as commentary on the death penalty
00:46:48 - the courtroom sequence
00:51:14 - why La Machine still resonates today
You can also find this podcast on…
* Apple Podcasts
* Pocket Casts
* I will no longer be uploading podcasts to Spotify and have removed all previous episodes of the podcast from that platform. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, because Spotify is a transparently evil company that delights in ripping off musicians, promoting AI slop, and enabling genocide in Palestine.
Shownotes
* Buy issue 2 of the Cinéclub fanzine
* 44 pages w/ articles on Conrad Rooks’ bizarre, star-studded countercultural artifact Chappaqua, some shorter pieces on punk and film, and an essay linking Bertrand Tavernier’s 1974 film The Watchmaker of St. Paul (also known as The Clockmaker of St. Paul) to Paul Vecchiali’s La Machine from 1977. DIY and sold on a not-for-profit basis at a cost that just covers the cost of printing: £2.50 plus postage. Shipping internationally.
* Watch La Machine (I am sharing these links as, to the best of my knowledge, the film is not currently commercially available)
* On YouTube (no English subtitles)
* Via Google Drive
* Nick’s writing, and episodes of his Emulsion podcast, at The Film Stage
* Some useful articles on Paul Vecchiali
* Essay on Rosa la rose, fille publique by Steve Macfarlane for Metrograph
* Notebook Primer: Diagonale and Co. by Patrick Preziosi for Mubi Notebook
* Diagonale and Us by Axelle Ropert for Screen Slate
* Paul Vecchiali, a Cinematic Franc-Tireur by Daniel Fairfax for Senses of Cinema


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cineclub.substack.com

Cinéclub Podcast #18 is a conversation with Will Sloan. You may know Will from his own podcasts: The Important Cinema Club which he co-hosts with Justin Decloux and Michael and Us, which he does with Luke Savage, which is a broader politics and culture podcast.
In this episode, though, we’re focusing on Will’s new book, a study of the notorious Ed Wood, which is called Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood, USA. If you’re not familiar at all with Ed Wood, it’s probably best to first acknowledge that he is mostly famous for being a bad director and known particular for Plan 9 from Outer Space which is a common contender for worst film ever made. However he also has a cult following of admirers and even his own Hollywood biopic, directed by Tim Burton in 1994.
Will’s book makes the case for Wood as an auteur, a filmmaker with a strong and distinctive creative voice despite, or in some cases maybe because of, the limited resources with which he worked and his limited ability to follow the accepted conventions of Hollywood film. Will writes the following to summarise a typical Ed Wood film: it is “ a pastiche of narrative/stylistic elements from other films; attempts to tell a story at a scale far beyond what its production value can accoomondate; features a case comprised of noth veteran former stars and unknown, awkward newcomers; and attempts natrualisim, but misses the mark, achieving instead an uncanny or dreamlike ambience.”
Will and I discussed the personal nature of Wood’s debut, Glen or Glenda; the otherworldly, dreamlike quality of Jail Bait, his attempt at a film noir; the distinctive authorial voice in The Beauty and the Beast, every bit an Ed Wood film despite being directed by somebody else; the uncanny, atmospheric nature of Plan 9 from Outer Space, the self-awareness of The Sinister Urge, the invented happy ending of Tim Burton’s affectionate biopic, and the unexpectedly fun and upbeat feel of his late-period sexploitation film Take It Out in Trade, and much more.
Chapters
* Glen or Glenda (1953) - 00:07:46
* Jail Bait (1954) - 00:15:07
* The Bride and the Beast (Adrian Weiss, 1958) - 00:19:33
* Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957) - 00:24:10
* The Sinister Urge (1970) - 00:27:26
* Later career: sexploitation, pornography, novels - 00:31:39
* Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994) - 00:35:12
* Take It Out in Trade (1970) - 00:40:20
You can also find this episode on…
* Apple Podcasts
* Pocket Casts
* I will no longer be uploading podcasts to Spotify and have removed all previous episodes of the podcast from that platform. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, because Spotify is a transparently evil company that delights in ripping off musicians, promoting AI slop, and enabling genocide in Palestine.
Shownotes
* Will Sloan’s book, Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood, USA at OR Books
* Will’s excellent Substack
* The Important Cinema Club podcast
* Michael and Us podcast
* I’m linking to Pocket Casts, but of course, the podcasts are available on all the platforms you’d expect
* The Ed Wood episode of Jonathan Ross’ The Incredibly Strange Film Show (1989)
* Andrew Sarris’ Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962
* Embarassingly I say this essay is from 1960 in the podcast. The correct year of writing is in the very title of the essay…
* Buy the Cinéclub fanzine
* 52 pages w/ articles on cinematic representations of the German urban guerilla group The Red Army Faction, Claude Chabrol’s 1962 film The Third Lover’ and some pieces on punks in cinema. DIY and sold on a not-for-profit basis at a cost that just covers the cost of printing: £3.50 plus postage.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cineclub.substack.com