Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 31 October

La Maison de la Radio (Philibert, 2012)

Today’s offer­ing is a little more obscure than some of the more recent ones but I know that there are a few sub­scribers here who work – or have worked, or will work again – in pub­lic broad­cast­ing so I hope you are as inter­ested in what goes on at one of the giant out­fits as I am.

I was reminded of this film as I was listen­ing to the great Kim Hill inter­view­ing the dir­ect­or, Nicholas Philibert, about his latest film, Sur l’Adamant. (Yes, I know that aired back in July, I have a big Kim backlog…)

Back in 2013 I wrote this about La Maison de la Radio (The House of Radio):

I’m a radio-head from my child­hood. I love radio, listen­ing to it, appear­ing on it, mak­ing it. I love look­ing at stu­di­os, per­ving at micro­phones, the red lights that go on when the mics are live, the silently tick­ing clocks. Watching Nicolas Philibert’s The House of Radio, I was a pig in shit. I don’t think I’ve been as blissed out as this watch­ing a film for ages. It’s one day in the life of Radio France, where seem­ingly dozens of sta­tions share a giant Parisian cathed­ral ded­ic­ated to the wire­less. News, talk, cul­ture, music – clas­sic­al, jazz and hip-hop. Philibert’s polite cam­era peers into their stu­di­os and their offices, even the Tour de France cor­res­pond­ent report­ing live from the back of a motorbike.

While the con­ceit is that it fol­lows a single day, I under­stand it took six months to actu­ally shoot. Documentary always equals truth, eh?

There are some lovely scenes: ser­i­ous radio drama, a live quiz show with a stu­dio audi­ence where the host has a xylo­phone to sound the count­down to each answer, the clas­sic­al music host sur­roun­ded by towers of CDs that threaten to topple over and squash him forever.

Tomorrow I get to indulge my love of radio once more as I fill in for Simon Morris on RNZ’s At the Movies. On air 7.30m on RNZ National (and again on Sunday at 1.30pm and Monday at 12.30am.

Where to find La Maison de la Radio

In Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on DocPlay

In the UK and US: Digital rent­al from the usu­al sources

Further reading

I dropped anoth­er entry in my Quixotic quest to watch every film in the Sight & Sound Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time at RNZ: Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

And, just in time for Halloween, I pre­viewed some of the titles avail­able on the horror-focused stream­ing ser­vice Shudder.