Outskirts Film Podcast

Lusty wolves, sadistic squirrels, neurotic pigs… This week on the podcast, we're diving into the gleefully deranged universe of Tex Avery. If it was Disney who built the church of animation, it was Avery who spent his whole career slinging eggs at it. As a creative force, Tex Avery didn't care about character, didn't care about plot, didn't even really care about the rules of cinematic continuity. He cared about one thing and one thing only: landing the laff. 
We trace the evolution of this legendary cartoon-maker from his formative years at Warner Brothers to his golden years at MGM, cataloguing his career-long (mis)treatment of bodies and plot premises as disposable and fungible. With this episode, we try to map the contours of Tex Avery's rich and strange cinematic universe.

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As we kick off our second season, we're tackling the bizarre and beguiling career of the filmmaker who built one of hardcore cinema's most serious and ambitious bodies of work. A Navy veteran and Queens hairdresser turned director, Gerard Damiano is regrettably best remembered today for the adult film that became a controversial cultural touchstone of the 1970s, Deep Throat (1972).  
But across the so-called "porno chic" boom of that decade and into the '80s, Damiano produced a run of loungey, varied, formally daring films that we talk through in this episode: Devil in Miss Jones (1973), Memories Within Miss Aggie (1974), The Story of Joanna (1975), and Let My Puppets Come (1976), as well as his own... loose "adaptation" of Homer's The Odyssey... 1977's Odyssey: The Ultimate Trip. These films and others feature a recurring troupe of performers — Harry Reems, Georgina Spelvin, Jamie Gillis, Annie Sprinkle — and when seen together suggest the serious-minded aspirations of this remarkable X-rated artist.

In this first episode of the second season, we trace the throughlines of the man’s quixotic oeuvre, still sadly little explored, despite the best efforts of scholars and restorers, outside that one famous, challenging title.

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For our season one finale, we dive into the blazing world of Filipino master Lino Brocka, a filmmaker whose furious, hothouse melodramas and searing social issue films feel every bit as lively and vital today as ever. From his unlikely path through poverty, missionary work, and theatre to a fiercely prolific film career under the Marcos regime, Brocka forged a politically charged cinema of desire, exploitation, and resistance that still isn’t nearly as widely seen in the West as it should be. 
We also have a live segment of the podcast coming to you directly from Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, where a new restoration of Brocka's early masterpiece Weighed But Found Wanting is premiering in a dazzling new restoration.

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Wet lovers, sex hunters, tattooed flowers, feline nights… This week on the podcast, we're tackling Nikkatsu's Roman Porno line—the cinematic desire machine launched by one of Japan's oldest and most prestigious studios, which produced more than 800 softcore erotic films in the 1970s and 1980s. Operating under a set of rules that both constrained and contributed to artistic freedom, Roman Porno allowed many young and ambitious filmmakers, screenwriters, and cinematographers to develop their craft.

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On the podcast this week, we're talking about Jocelyne Saab, a pivotal figure in the history of Lebanese cinema, whose pioneering work shifted between television reportage, documentary, ripped-from-the headlines popular cinema, photography, and gallery work across a career shaped by Beirut and the Lebanese Civil War. Her early films captured this upheaval, the Palestinian liberation struggle, and other crucial regional political happenings of the time with rare immediacy, while her later work grappled, often imperfectly, with the question of how images can bear witness to and carry traces of living history.

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