tag:mubi.com,2005:/notebook/postsThe Daily Notebook2024-03-15T20:58:00Ztag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107582024-03-12T14:51:23Z2024-03-15T21:11:10ZRelated Images | "Who Is Sabato De Sarno?"<div><i><b><a href="https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/tag/Related-Images">Related Images</a></b> is a column in which filmmakers invite readers behind the scenes, into their sketchbooks, or otherwise through the looking glass to learn more about their creative processes.</i></div><div><i><b><a href="https://mubi.com/en/us/films/who-is-sabato-de-sarno-a-gucci-story">Who Is Sabato de Sarno? A Gucci Story</a> </b>is now showing exclusively on MUBI from March 15, 2024.</i></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38717/images-w1400.jpg?1710261579"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Who Is Sabato De Sarno? A Gucci Story </i>(Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2024).</span></div><div>Gucci called out of the blue, asking if we wanted to make a doc about their new creative director and his first fashion show. Sabato De Sarno (the new creative director) said he liked our film <i><a href="https://youtu.be/eU7V4GyEuXA?si=WF_m8d1DTy0Xmznu">A Brief History of John Baldessari</a></i> (2011) about the artist John Baldessari, and could it be something like that? He said the length was flexible, but they were imagining something between six and eight minutes. We didn't know much about Gucci, or Sabato, but we were curious, which for us is a great starting point for a documentary. A few days later we were on a plane to Milan. </div><div>“Something like <i>Baldessari</i>” is tough, because it’s extremely post-heavy—jam packed with multi-media imagery, music, and fast-paced montage. It requires months of editing, archival research, and rights clearances. Sabato and Gucci (and their legal department) had the right disposition for the process. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38718/images-w1400.jpg?1710261775"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption">An image from our deck going into the shoot. It turned out to be pretty accurate.</span></div><div>We spent five days backstage with Sabato and the Gucci creative team as they hustled their way from sketches on paper to luxurious clothes on models. In the same five days, we watched them set up a hugely complicated runway show outdoors… and then set up another simpler one indoors when the weather acted up. </div><div>The original plan was that the film would be finished four days after the show, but thankfully Gucci moved off of that idea. Back in New York, we struggled to jam all of this story into six minutes. The first cut we shared was 27 minutes long. The marketing team at Gucci wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. We tried in vain to create a version under ten minutes, until Sabato himself stepped in and said he loved the long version and we could forget about trying to make it shorter. It ended up being twenty minutes. It is a credit to Gucci, and to Sabato, that they were so creatively open. It was very European. They were like, “You guys are artists, do your thing. We trust you.” </div><div>So much happened that week in Milan, and even more in the four months we spent editing. Here’s some of it…</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38719/images-w1400.jpg?1710261823"></div><div>Sabato was really open and let us follow him almost everywhere. He has an infectious creative spirit and it’s always fun to be around him. That’s me in the background with the Blackmagic camera. I had just seen <i>Passages</i> (2023) and was inspired by the crazy mesh tank top Franz Rogowski wears to meet the parents. This one is mesh too. The fashion heads seemed to appreciate it.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38750/images-w1400.jpg?1710508555"></div><div>Sabato’s dog, Luce, is a big part of his life. We knew she had to be a big part of the film. For a while we thought the film might be told from Luce’s POV, with Paul Mescal doing her voice. So we secretly shot a lot of footage from “dog level.” After a few days in the edit, we scrapped the idea, and Sabato never knew. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38721/images-w1400.jpg?1710261869"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption">Photograph by Henry Joost.</span></div><div>This is Sabato backstage moments before the show. The combined nervous energy was awesome—like 200 friends putting on a Broadway show. The difference is a fashion show only lasts eighteen minutes and is only performed once—with “no second chance.” And they do this three or four times per year!</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38722/images-w1400.jpg?1710261900"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption">Photograph by Henry Joost.</span></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38751/images-w1400.jpg?1710508718"></div><div>There was so much going on backstage during the show, we shot four cameras. Our DP, Mike Simmonds, with a big Alexa, Henry with Super 8mm, and me with a Blackmagic and a Leica Q. The show itself was already being filmed by another production company with tons of cameras.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38723/images-w1400.jpg?1710262001"></div><div>Throughout the five-day shoot we had a permanent interview setup in one of the Gucci outbuildings. We would grab people whenever they were available. We were so taken with the elegant way Mark Ronson draped himself over that stool and held the position for an hour. He also gave us great sound bites.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38724/images-w1400.jpg?1710262035"></div><div>We needed somebody to hold objects for the camera. This handsome gentleman, Andrea Savio, was our key grip and has an amazing face. Here he is holding Sabato’s manifesto. Andrea mentioned later that we were not the first directors to put him in a movie, which he is happy to do as long as he doesn’t have dialogue. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38725/images-w1400.jpg?1710262059"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption">Photograph by Henry Joost.</span></div><div>We knew we needed an Italian producer, who spoke not just Italian, but also the language of fashion. Fortunately, I had just met Emanuela Matranga on the set of <i>Queer</i>, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Turns out her father had worked with Henry’s father in Egypt in the 1980s!</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38726/images-w1400.jpg?1710262096"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption">Photograph by Fadia Ghaab.</span></div><div>Most of the models were walking in their first runway show. Now they’re on billboards all over the world. Taking photos <i>of</i> them makes you feel like a great photographer; taking photos <i>with</i> them is not great for self-confidence.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38752/images-w1400.jpg?1710508779"></div><div>This is us with our cinematographer, Mike Simmonds. We’ve shot two features and so many shorts and commercials together.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38728/images-w1400.jpg?1710262172"></div><div>It may come as no surprise that people who work for Gucci are incredibly well dressed, far cooler than those on a typical film set. Remo, in particular, was really inspiring. Maybe because his style seems so attainable, until you ask him where exactly he got everything (a vintage store in Japan?). As soon as we returned to New York, I gave Henry a pair of shoes pretty similar to Remo’s for his birthday. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38729/images-w1400.jpg?1710262196"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption">Photograph by Henry Joost.</span></div><div>Here’s Mike with the Big Camera, an Alexa Whatever. A big way this film differs from our Baldessari film is that it incorporates vérité footage. Baldessari is just one interview about the past. This film tells a story happening in real time. We made a creative decision before the shoot started to split the style of the photography into two components: vérité and fixed. All of the vérité footage was shot with 16mm zoom lenses and a reduced sensor for inherent grain, the “fixed” interviews were shot on 35mm prime lenses on a full-frame sensor. Our colorist, Tom Poole, thought we were cool for doing this. </div><div>Speaking of post-production…</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38753/images-w1400.jpg?1710508812"></div><div>For most of our docs, we like to ask the subject who they want to narrate. John Baldessari instantly said Tom Waits. Sabato said, without hesitation, Paul Mescal. Both excellent choices. We recorded with Paul the day before he went to Malta to finish shooting <i>Gladiator 2</i>. That was a great motivating deadline for us (and writer Gabriel Nussbaum) to finish the script.</div><div>Side note: Paul was a good sport about Henry’s temp voice-over, which he did in a thick Irish accent (think: Lucky Charms).</div><div>Since we didn’t have a script going into the shoot, most of the story was shaped in post, through archival footage and motion graphics. We went back and forth with our editor, Matt Posey, and his team at PS260 for months and 50 versions of the film, tweaking hundreds of moments, big and small. We are insane about this stuff and would keep tweaking forever if we could. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38731/images-w1400.jpg?1710262261"></div><div>Every film about a journey needs a map. We wanted to find a different way to do the <i>Indiana Jones</i> map. This image of baby Sabato on his tiny Vespa felt right. I’m surprised how long it took us to realize.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38732/images-w1400.jpg?1710262279"></div><div><i>Sabato</i> means <i>Saturday</i>. We tried to come up with as many ways as possible of visually saying <i>Sabato</i>. Turns out some vintage day-and-date watches were made in Italian. </div><div>We didn't notice in the moment, but when we looked at the backstage footage we saw Ryan Gosling blow a kiss to Sabato’s mom in the smoothest, most “Hey Girl” meme kind of way. Remember those? </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38733/images-w1400.jpg?1710262360"></div><div>It started out as a freeze-frame joke on text message, and we ended up adding our own version of this meme to the film.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38736/images-w1400.jpg?1710262418"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption">Photograph by Michael Simmonds.</span></div><div>Henry & Rel. Happily working together for eighteen years. </div><div>This film is one of the highlights. It reignited our love for documentaries and inspired us to dress a little better on set. </div>Henry Joost/en/notebook/posts/author/896Ariel Schulman/en/notebook/posts/author/897tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107562024-03-11T20:56:43Z2024-03-14T14:38:28ZRelated Images | "In the wake of emotions"<div><a href="https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/tag/Related-Images"><b><i>Related Images</i></b></a><i> is a column in which filmmakers invite readers behind the scenes, into their sketchbooks, or otherwise through the looking glass to learn more about their creative processes.</i></div><div><i>Flóra Anna Buda’s <b><a href="https://mubi.com/films/27-2023">27</a> </b>is now showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries.</i></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38697/images-w1400.jpg?1710190703"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption">All images from Flóra Anna Buda's "In the wake of emotions," 2020–ongoing.</span></div><div>I started drawing the series “In the wake of emotions” during the early production of my short film <i>27</i>. It was COVID times, and I was seeing a therapist who was helping me understand my different emotions. This led to a morning routine that made me start my day by drawing an imaginary portrait of my actual mood. </div><div>It was important to me, first of all, on a personal level since I had a hard time detecting my own emotions, understanding them, and allowing myself to feel them. On the other hand, it was the time when I was drawing the layouts of <i>27</i> with all the important acting positions and closeups of facial gestures, so I needed to become aware of how these different nuances and reactions work on my character’s face. </div><div>I chose crayon because this is the media I used most of the time as a child and it is sort of comforting. Since these drawings were made during the first lockdown in 2020 and later at the second one in 2021, comfort was very important to me. By using crayon I could enter a mind-space that was safe, and also I could connect to that level of free imagination that every child has. I felt very inspired, and it was a lot of fun coming up with these colorful, bizarre faces. It is slowly turning into—hopefully—a little book project focusing on all these emotions and gestures.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38698/images-w1400.jpg?1710190839"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38699/images-w1400.jpg?1710190918"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38700/images-w1400.jpg?1710190929"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38701/images-w1400.jpg?1710190938"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38702/images-w1400.jpg?1710190949"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38703/images-w1400.jpg?1710190959"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38704/images-w1400.jpg?1710190970"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38705/images-w1400.jpg?1710190986"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38706/images-w1400.jpg?1710190995"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38707/images-w1400.jpg?1710191004"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38708/images-w1400.jpg?1710191014"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38709/images-w1400.jpg?1710191025"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38710/images-w1400.jpg?1710191036"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38711/images-w1400.jpg?1710191047"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38712/images-w1400.jpg?1710191058" alt="In the wake of emotions"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38713/images-w1400.jpg?1710191171"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38714/images-w1400.jpg?1710191191"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38715/images-w1400.jpg?1710191211"></div>Flóra Anna Buda/en/notebook/posts/author/895tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107552024-03-11T17:22:00Z2024-03-14T13:31:51ZLosing the Way Home: The Irrepressible Uncanny in Hayao Miyazaki<div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38696/images-w1400.jpg?1710189946"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Howl's Moving Castle </i>(Hayao Miyazaki, 2004).</span></div><div>I returned to the films of Hayao Miyazaki last year because the kids I nanny in Brooklyn—A, eight, and J, six—happened upon Studio Ghibli Fest while they were away over the summer in Upstate New York, visiting their grandparents in a town where they had spent the early pandemic. Of the two, J’s infatuation with Miyazki is least<b> </b>surprising: his interests include black holes, rare crystals, and mushrooms, especially the poisonous varieties. Through his eyes, I rediscovered Miyazaki, rewatching once-familiar films with a new attunement to their strangeness. In the process I was reminded of first meeting J, when he was four years old and still reeling from his family’s relocation from a house Upstate to their apartment in Brooklyn. He was particularly incensed about having to wear shoes, which I imagine crystallized the totality of the transformation: in that passage from grass to concrete, from an unstructured existence to the 9 to 3 at Pre-K, he had irreversibly moved from one world into another. </div><div>Now I wonder if J sees himself in Miyazaki’s protagonists, who experience similar dislocations: consider the titular witch in <i>Kiki’s Delivery Service </i>(1989), who leaves her pastoral home for a faraway city, or the goldfish princess in <i>Ponyo </i>(2008), who flees her ocean kingdom to live on land. <i>Spirited Away</i> (2001) is one of J’s favorites, in part, I speculate, because it dramatizes these transitions as both physically and psychically disruptive. In the film, ten-year-old Chihiro becomes stranded in a spirit realm in the course of her family relocating to a new residential development. Gazing across a river at the human world from which she came, Chihiro turns translucent and almost disappears altogether: as if by losing one’s sense of place, one also loses any sense of self.</div><div>For the eleven-year-old Mahito of Miyazaki’s latest, <i>The Boy and the Heron </i>(2023), that upheaval follows the death of his mother, whose Tokyo hospital was firebombed three years into World War II. One year later, Mahito evacuates to the countryside with his father<b>,</b> Shoichi, whose new wife, Natsuko, is the sister and spitting image of Mahito’s late mother. While Chihiro’s strange surroundings in <i>Spirited Away</i> facilitate her spontaneous disappearance, Mahito is driven by this new reality to bring about his own disappearance: walking home from school one day, he smashes a rock into his head.</div><div>The injury confines him to the estate, which is overwhelmingly green and almost hermetic in its silence: a pastoral idyll that in the aftermath of Mahito’s self-inflicted violence—as well as curious visitations by a heron—channels the eerie, unsettling ambience that is singularly Miyazaki’s. Though his style is often described as imaginative and sometimes dark, it might be understood in terms of Freud’s theory of the <i>unheimlich</i>, or the uncanny. The concept describes the kind of dread evoked by something familiar to us. The literal translation of <i>das unheimlich</i> approximates “the unhomey,” which lends the term a paradoxical texture: when the familiar registers as terrifying, we realize that we no longer feel at home. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38693/images-w1400.jpg?1710189332"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Boy and the Heron </i>(Hayao Miyazaki, 2023).</span></div><div>Miyazaki’s imagery isn’t just visually striking but uncannily so, often estranging us from the familiar in a series of escalating disturbances. In his new film, the heron opens its bill to speak to Mahito and—through a row of unnervingly humanoid teeth—claims that his mother isn’t dead, only trapped in the ruined<b> </b>tower that was built on the estate by his granduncle. Despite his initial resistance, Mahito eventually follows the heron underground through the tower in search of Natsuko, who goes missing one day. In that subterranean spirit world—where he is almost devoured by a swarm of pelicans—Mahito encounters more unsettling echoes of the world above, including a sailor who resembles a maid from his father’s estate. Yet the most alarming similarity is the one obscured by its mundanity: as in Mahito’s world, everyone here is just trying to eat. When a fish is carved up, hordes of roly-poly creatures called Warawara toddle closer, hoisting plates above their heads. Newly fortified, they drift into the sky to be reborn above as human souls—only to be snapped up by the pelicans. The carnage is stalled, but the brief sense of triumph is undercut when a pelican, scorched half to death, discloses to Mahito that its kind have been forced to feed on Warawara since the fish population disappeared. “We didn’t choose this life,” the pelican insists, coughing up blood. “The sea here, it is cursed.”</div><div>If the uncanny is irrepressible in Miyazaki’s grisliest, most fantastical scenes, it also courses through his depictions of everyday life. His films often follow a protagonist reckoning with the sense of the <i>unheimlich </i>that sets in after leaving home for the first time. The titular witch of <i>Kiki’s Delivery Service</i>, for example—whom Miyazaki modeled after the young women who moved to Tokyo in the 1980s with dreams of becoming manga artists—travels with her feline companion, Jiji, to pursue an apprenticeship in the city of Koriko. The bustling European-style seaport reflects how an asset price bubble from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s exposed a historically insular Japan to internationalization. Its clock tower, adorned with a painted sun, imposes organized hours upon solar time, alluding to the commercial rhythms that will dictate Kiki’s newfound independence.</div><div>There is more opportunity for economic mobility in Kiki’s new life, but also new occasions for jealousy, kindled by the inequality that industrialism made possible. Walking to the grocery store one day past a group of teenage girls—one in bubblegum-pink capris, another in an orange miniskirt—Kiki is stricken by the ugliness of her black, formless dress. Contemplating her dwindling savings, she stops to covet a pair of vermillion pumps in a window display: a literally elevated version of her own red flats that, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, promise head-to-toe transformation.</div><div>Despite these pressures, Kiki soon establishes her delivery business, transporting goods from a bakery whose owner, Osono, provides her lodging above the shop. With this gesture, another film might have painted a rosy picture of the modernizing world. But <i>Kiki</i> was committed instead to depicting the alienation of urban life, even among well-meaning strangers. When Kiki heads downstairs to the bathroom one morning, for example, she almost falls over to avoid being seen by Osono’s husband in her nightgown. Though the film is structured around her business, these menial vignettes—airing out the attic, scrubbing the floorboards, shopping for household supplies—are just as essential to its vision of survival in an industrializing society. It takes all kinds of work, suggests Miyazaki, to feel at home amid the strangeness, and strangers, of contemporary life.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38691/images-w1400.jpg?1710189145"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Kiki's Delivery Service </i>(Hayao Miyazaki, 1989).</span></div><div>In an essay for the<i> New York Review of Books</i>, Lucy Jakub details how Miyazaki’s films “have all turned on a Marxist view that the human spirit is expressed in work.” But their depictions of domestic labor, in particular, reflect the effort it takes to feel settled or literally at home in the world when pitted against a persistent sense of <i>unheimlich</i>. In <i>Howl’s Moving Castle </i>(2004), Sophie is driven to the mountains by a mysterious curse, leaving the home where she worked as an unpaid apprentice in her family’s hat shop. Desperate for shelter, she poses as a cleaning lady to take cover at Howl’s castle. By keeping house—and taking charge of it—she creates a home from what was once a dilapidated bachelor pad. But that domestic bliss quickly unravels when Howl expresses his gratitude to Sophie: he transforms the castle into a family home, and in doing so reconstructs the bedroom where she was exploited by her own family. He clearly assumed that a familiar setting would help Sophie feel settled; instead the space feels uncanny, terrifying precisely because it “leads back to something long known to us,” as Freud writes. In Sophie’s case, this room leads her back to a life defined solely by her productive value, as a free laborer and a woman of childbearing age. </div><div>In <i>My Neighbor Totoro </i>(1988), domestic labor similarly provides a temporary balm to ten-year-old Satsuki and four-year-old Mei, who move from Tokyo to a weathered bungalow in the countryside. Helping their father maintain the property, the sisters find in their new chores a welcome distraction from the fact that their mother is recovering from tuberculosis in a nearby hospital. But they can never entirely erase all traces of their anxiety: while they wipe the floors and stamp the dirt out from laundry, soot sprites swirl among the rafters and stain the soles of their feet with grime, preventing them from feeling completely at ease. That sense of apprehension also resurfaces by the end of <i>Kiki</i>, whose optimism feels tentative rather than absolute. Though she gets what she wants in the end—not the pumps, but the social and material security they represented—Kiki also loses her ability to communicate with Jiji. This might be a sign of her maturation, a transformation only made possible by leaving the comforts of home. But Miyazaki is ambivalent about the disruptive aspects of the passage into adulthood. By folding this loss into the film’s otherwise sunny ending, Miyazaki expresses his anxiety about the sacrifices made in the name of progress: namely, the stability that came from being rooted in community and nature, for which material gains are empty substitutes.</div><div><span style="">The same</span> unease is expressed in <i>Spirited Away</i> through the arc of Chihiro’s companion, Haku, an anthropomorphic spirit who forgets his real name after losing his way home. Eventually Chihiro recognizes that he is the spirit of the Kohaku River that she once visited, recalling that it has since been filled in with apartment buildings—like the one that her family is about to move into. This detail, overshadowed by the joy of Haku recovering his true identity, explains why he lost his sense of home in the first place: not because of his choice to leave it behind, but because it was physically destroyed by government-sponsored development, intended to invigorate the post-bubble economy. The unsettled state of <i>unheimlich</i>, Miyazaki suggests, is not just a phase of life, or an indicator of maturity: it is an inescapable, existential condition of the modern industrial world.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38692/images-w1400.jpg?1710189299"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Spirited Away </i>(Hayao Miyazaki, 2001).</span></div><div>Miyazaki has spent decades pondering a question that emerges explicitly in <i>The Boy and the Heron</i>, when Mahito discovers the 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino from which the film takes its Japanese title: <i>How Do You Live? </i>Yoshino was a professor imprisoned for his socialist politics while Japanese authoritarianism surged between world wars. Upon his release, he channeled his idealism into this children’s book, in which a boy and his uncle discuss and consider its titular question through a range of subjects and scenarios. Miyazaki’s films all pose different versions of this question: how do you live when your home is paved over? When you run out of money and food? When your family is afflicted by tuberculosis, by war? In other words: how do you live in a fundamentally unsustainable, destabilizing world?</div><div>While Disney films envision the kind of universe where heroes prevail over villains, Miyazaki’s characters <i>live</i> in their worlds: their triumphs and failures aren’t only consequences of their individual spirits, but also of their broader conditions. In <i>The Boy and the Heron</i>, Mahito realizes that the ravenous pelicans aren’t malicious, only desperate to survive. The same is true of the Tolmekians, the clan from <i>Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind </i>(1984) whose livelihood is threatened by the poisonous Toxic Jungle. Nausicaä, the sixteen-year-old princess of a neighboring village, believes that humans can learn to live in harmony with the forest. The Tolmekians insist that both groups’ survival is mutually exclusive, and plan to dominate Nausicaä’s kingdom with their God Warrior, a subterranean creature that remained dormant until it was unearthed, like fossils for fuel.</div><div><i>Princess Mononoke</i> (1997) also depicts an enchanted forest under siege, this time by the ironworkers of Tatara, who plan to take it over with their firearms and mine the earth. They, like the Tolmekians, have turned to their weapons as a shield against precarity. This is evident in the actions of their leader, Lady Eboshi, who employs sex workers and lepers: she isn’t evil, but she can’t imagine how to ensure her community’s survival without resorting to warfare. In doing so, both groups suffer from what the American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls <b>“</b>cruel optimism,<b>”</b> a condition “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Berlant draws a tacit distinction—and even conflict—between short-term survival and “flourishing,” an enduring, enriching existence for human and non-human life alike. Self-preservation drives Miyazaki’s characters toward certain objects: a stockpile of rifles, a God Warrior, a pair of vermillion pumps, a feast of helpless Warawara. But even if these secure some kind of survival, they ultimately stifle flourishing by reinforcing the precarity created by capitalism. A life comprising<b> </b>these pursuits feels “cursed,” as the dying pelican in <i>The Boy and the Heron</i> recognizes, because self-preservation is entangled with self-destruction.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38695/images-w1400.jpg?1710189800"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Princess Mononoke </i>(Hayao Miyazaki, 1997).</span></div><div>Those terms of survival are exposed to Mahito by a colony of compulsively homicidal parakeets. Unlike the pelicans, the parakeets have aggressively adapted to thrive in the face of food scarcity by arming themselves with oversized utensils. Their leader stages a coup to control the subterranean realm, which only destabilizes it and accelerates its collapse. This is the challenge Miyazaki finds with any transformative change: the pressure to survive, and thus adapt to the world, paradoxically leads us to reproduce those familiar, but destructive, behaviors, which only limits one’s sense of what is possible—and with it, the prospect of “flourishing.” When Mahito rushes to his mother’s hospital in Tokyo, he clumsily doubles back home to change his <i>yukata</i> for pants and sneakers; but when he runs from the estate after Natsuko, he instinctively grabs a knife and his bow and arrow before pulling on a replica navy officer’s hat—this is just a twelve-year-old boy who was raised in a violent world and has learned to respond to it accordingly. The question, then, is not just “how do you live,” but how do you do so without perpetuating destruction?</div><div>Those scenes recall another, from Miyazaki’s original swan song, <i>The Wind Rises </i>(2013)<i>.</i> Jirō, who as a boy dreams of flying planes—and of conversing with his idol, the airplane designer Giovanni Caproni—grows up to become the lead designer of Mitsubishi’s A5M fighter in the years before World War II. Midway through the film, Jirō falls in love with Naoko, who must recover from tuberculosis in Tokyo while he is stationed in Nagoya. When she suffers a lung hemorrhage, he scrambles toward the city with a desperation that we see shades of in Mahito. Naoko eventually dies, and the film ends in one of Jirō’s dreams: through a burning village and airplane wreckage, Caproni praises a fleet of Jirō’s fighters before gesturing toward an approaching Naoko, who encourages Jirō to live. The scene itself is soothing, but its implications are not: it suggests that recovery is only possible by surrendering to the delusion of dreams, the kind that enables you to turn away from the destruction of your creation and admire the elegance of its design instead.</div><div>This is bleaker than the outlook of Miyazaki’s earlier films, which, despite their darkness, eventually envision some form of recuperation. In <i>Totoro</i>, Satsuki learns that her mother’s return home from the hospital has been postponed—perhaps a sign that she is dying—which exacerbates a rift between her and Mei. Having been saddled with parental duties, Satsuki is frustrated when Mei protests that the delay isn’t fair, and commands her to grow up. But it is precisely because Mei is a child that Satsuki believes in the possibility of recovery. Mei’s sense of wonder is a conduit to a deep connection with the natural world: a pond full of tadpoles, a shiny acorn, and eventually the <i>kodama</i> Totoro, who transports the sisters to the hospital, where they learn their mother is only suffering from a cold.</div><div>That sense of possibility also emerges by the end of <i>Nausicaä</i>, which was inspired by stories of fish returning to Minamata Bay after it was purified of the industrial mercury that poisoned millions of humans and animals. Like Mei, Nausicaä communes with nature: while the rest of humankind plans to eliminate the remaining forest, she alone journeys to the heart of it, and even delights when the Mushigo Palms release their toxic spores. In the process, she discovers that the trees aren’t inherently toxic, and might eventually purify the blighted earth.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38694/images-w1400.jpg?1710189608"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind </i>(Hayao Miyazaki, 1984).</span></div><div>Miyazaki isn’t interested in sentimentalizing childhood, but in the way that children rely on their imagination to navigate, understand, and engage with the wider world. They can bear witness to the world’s violence, or even be subjected to it, but they aren’t yet desensitized into accepting this reality as the only inevitable outcome. I am reminded of this whenever the kids I nanny update me on their newest obsessions—J’s latest, along with “cool-sounding chess moves” and particle accelerators, is portals. On the nights I tuck him into bed, he soon shuffles out of his room, complaining feverishly of hands reaching toward him from a nebulous gateway in the wall: a terrifying image, but one that contains the possibility of other worlds.</div><div><i>The Boy and the Heron </i>has replaced <i>Spirited Away</i> as J’s favorite Miyazaki film, which surprised me a little, because I expected that he might find it too scary. When pressed about this, J simply replied—while practicing chess moves on his iPad—that he “likes Miyazaki’s style.” He should reserve the right, I think, to like what he likes without further explanation, though I do wonder if that gets to the heart of it: <i>The Boy and the Heron</i> feels quintessentially Miyazaki, saturated as it is in the uncanny terror that ebbs and flows through his other films. If <i>The Wind Rises </i>had been his final film, his career would’ve culminated with Jirō’s dream: a protracted sense of possibility buffered only by false comfort. But in <i>The Boy and the Heron</i>, Mahito finds his way back to reality. Running from the subterranean realm, which is rapidly caving in, he comes upon a corridor where doors lead to different versions of the world. He opens the door that will lead him back to the estate: to the war and to the loss of his mother, and surely other devastations. But after a moment of hesitation, he eventually returns to this life he knows—and with full awareness of the other possible paths, plants his feet firmly on the ground.</div>Kim Hew-Low/en/notebook/posts/author/852tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107592024-03-13T17:35:06Z2024-03-13T18:36:49ZRushes | Plagiarism Allegations, Argentine Cinema Defunded, John Carpenter Goes Full Noir<div><i>Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, <a href="https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/sign-up-for-the-notebook-weekly-edit-newsletter">sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter</a> and follow us <a href="https://twitter.com/MUBInotebook">@mubinotebook</a></i>.</div><div><b>NEWS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38742/images-w1400.jpg?1710351719"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Delinquents</i> (Rodrigo Moreno, 2023).</span></div><ul><li>The start of the Academy Awards ceremony was delayed by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2024/mar/11/oscars-ceremony-delayed-as-attendees-blocked-by-protesters-against-israel-gaza-war-video#:~:text=The%20annual%20Oscars%20broadcast%20kicked,to%20the%20show%20on%20time.">hundreds of protestors obstructing the red carpet</a> to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.</li><li><a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/global/asghar-farhadi-cleared-iranian-court-plagiarism-a-hero-1235940549/">Asghar Farhadi has been cleared of plagiarism charges</a> by an Iranian court after <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/07/did-the-oscar-winning-director-asghar-farhadi-steal-ideas">allegations were leveled by a former student</a>, who accused him of stealing the idea for <i>A Hero </i>(2021) from her documentary on the same subject, produced in his 2014 filmmaking workshop.</li><li>Meanwhile, <a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/the-holdovers-accused-plagiarism-luca-writer-1235935605/">Alexander Payne has been accused of plagiarizing <i>The Holdovers</i></a> (2023) “line-by-line” from a screenplay by Simon Stephenson he appears to have read on spec.</li><li><a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/thailand-planning-film-development-measures-1235937847/">Thailand is planning to reform its national film industry</a> as part of a “soft power” program, which may include increased production funding, more rebates for foreign productions, and a reduction of state censorship domestically.</li><li>Meanwhile, <a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/global/javier-milei-incaa-ventana-sur-1235940406/">Argentina will defund its national film and television institute</a>, INCAA, under the direction of right-wing President Javier Milei, affecting the country’s film schools, productions, festivals, and cinemas.</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED VIEWING</b></div><ul><li>John Carpenter’s music video for “My Name Is Death,” a song he performs with his son Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, is a film noir murder mystery in miniature, complete with hard-drinking detective and question-mark gobos.</li><div><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TDBnBdNyYiM?si=AVW9MGgZ1e2ZOUZ_" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><li>Takashi Miike has made a short film, <i>Midnight</i>, featuring the daring driver of a souped-up taxi on his nightly rounds, based on the manga by Osamu Tezuka, for Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 15 Pro” series.</li><div><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xd_LmXNBz5w?si=jwtq4xQwcf-RROUJ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div></ul><ul><li>Magnolia Pictures has released a trailer for Joanna Arnow’s <i>The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed </i>(2023). In these pages, Christina Newland has praised Arnow’s <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/controlling-desires-joanna-arnow-discusses-the-feeling-that-the-time-for-doing-something-has-passed">“talent for unsentimental dissection of self and others.”</a></li><div><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KVacS6T7jxs?si=qraoiWFh854GE5__" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED READING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38744/images-w1400.jpg?1710352092" alt="I Heard It through the Grapevine"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>I Heard It through the Grapevine </i>(Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, 1982).</span></div><ul><li>“We are compelled to confront not merely this country’s political life as a kind of static theater caught in an endless loop, but also its willful, determined reversals.” <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/james-baldwin-grapevine-documentary/">For <i>The Nation</i>, Kelli Weston finds James Baldwin retreading the freedom trail</a> in Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley’s <i>I Heard It through the Grapevine</i> (1982).</li><li>“Raúl Ruiz, thirteen years after his death, has managed to arrive at the Oscars.” <a href="https://brooklynrail.org/2024/03/film/Ral-Ruiz-and-The-Eternal-Memory">In the <i>Brooklyn Rail</i>, Jaime Grijalba traces the Chilean auteur’s long and circuitous journey to recognition (of a sort) by the Academy</a>, in the archival footage of Maite Alberdi’s <i>The Eternal Memory </i>(2023), which received a Best Documentary Feature nomination.</li><li>“Hou offers a persuasive vision of a world in which conflicts resolve themselves naturally and organically.” <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8407-becoming-hou-hsiao-hsien">In Criterion’s <i>Current</i>, Sean Gilman considers Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early romantic comedies</a>, made within the strictures of “healthy realism” then imposed on Taiwanese cinema by the Kuomintang party.</li><li>“This scholar/collector/artist/inventor turned amateur anthropologist was for much of his life indistinguishable from a derelict, surviving largely on handouts, tarot readings, and research gigs commissioned by fellow occultists.” <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/outsiders-outsider-harry-smith/">In the <i>New York Review of Books</i>, J. Hoberman reviews two recent books and an exhibition on Harry Smith</a>, the underground filmmaker and folk-art anthologist.</li><li>“Behind every such symphony of onscreen savagery is a village of craftspeople responsible for bringing its brutality to life.” <i><a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/best-action-movie-fights-scenes.html">Vulture </a></i><a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/best-action-movie-fights-scenes.html">rounds up the hundred greatest fight scenes of action cinema, featuring contributions from Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and more.</a></li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED EVENTS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38745/images-w1400.jpg?1710352184"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Neighboring Animals </i>(Mary Helena Clark, 2024), installation view.</span></div><ul><li>New York, through March 23: <a href="https://www.bridgetdonahue.nyc/exhibitions/mary-helena-clark/">Bridget Donahue Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Mary Helena Clark</a>, featuring <i>Neighboring Animals </i>(2024), a two-channel video about the mouth: “as a tool to bite and chew, as an instrument of speech, and as a site of disgust and desire,” per the press release.</li><li>Los Angeles, March 19 and 20: <a href="https://thenewbev.com/program/march-19-play-it-as-it-lays-puzzle-of-a-downfall-child/">The New Beverly presents an early-’70s double-bill of two women on the edge</a>, featuring Frank Perry’s <i>Play It as It Lays </i>(1972), based on Joan Didion’s first novel, and <i>Puzzle of a Downfall Child </i>(1970), the directorial debut of Jerry Schatzberg—both on 35mm.</li><li>New York, April 11–15: <a href="https://newfest.org/qtc-besties/">NewFest and the Brooklyn Academy of Music present the fourth annual Queering the Canon retrospective</a>, including a digital restoration of Rose Troche’s <i>Go Fish </i>(1994) and 35mm screenings of Gus Van Sant’s <i>My Own Private Idaho </i>(1991) and F. Gary Gray’s <i>Set It Off</i> (1996).</li></ul><div><b>RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38746/images-w1400.jpg?1710352270"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Zone of Interest </i>(Jonathan Glazer, 2023).</span></div><ul><li>“It’s Burn’s job to produce that second film, the one we hear.” <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/extradimensional-counterpoint-johnnie-burn-sound-designer">Johnnie Burn, the Academy Award–winning sound designer of <i>The Zone of Interest</i> and <i>Poor Things</i> (both 2023), discusses his craft with Rachel Pronger.</a></li><li>“I really want to make it clear that this is not a film about the hospital, but about the patients and their bodies.” <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/introduction-our-body">Claire Simon introduces her new documentary, <i>Our Body</i> (2023)</a>, <a href="https://mubi.com/films/our-body-2023">now showing on MUBI</a> in many countries.</li><li>“Proof, be it images, words, or recordings, turns out to be fragmentary and imperfect, and all of the witnesses are either biased or lack the complete picture, much like the viewer.” <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/theater-of-truth-on-anatomy-of-a-fall">Dora Leu considers the courtroom drama’s treatment of truth</a> via Justine Triet’s <i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>(2023) and Alice Diop’s <i>Saint Omer</i> (2022).</li><li>“Yes, my work is about black life. It is also a series of love stories, I think.” In an excerpt from <i>Devotion</i>, published in February by MIT Press, <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/excerpt-in-conversation-huey-copeland-and-garrett-bradley">filmmaker Garrett Bradley and art historian Huey Copeland talk</a> about the making of <i>America </i>(2019) and the rediscovery of <i>Lime Kiln Club Field Day </i>(1913), an early Black-cast comedy.</li><li>“In 2022, Shinzo Abe was killed, and it would take a figure from the 1960s to remember how this story should be told.” <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/menaces-and-martyrs-a-brief-history-of-the-political-assassin-on-film">Z. W. Lewis details a history of the political assassin in cinema</a>, from the Edison Studios’ <i>The Execution of Mary Stewart </i>(1895) to Masao Adachi’s <i>Revolution+1 </i>(2023).</li></ul><div><b>WISH LIST</b></div><ul><li><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730575/sonny-boy-by-al-pacino/9780593655115/">Al Pacino’s <i>Sonny Boy</i></a>, out this fall from Penguin Random House, “is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide.”</li></ul><div><b>EXTRAS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38749/images-w1400.jpg?1710354814"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Taking Public Transit to the Oscars </i>(Hayden Begley, 2024). </span></div><ul><li><a href="https://twitter.com/ian_gay_briel/status/1767195947870695815?s=46&t=pvqKBYanBGONBzQXXV8bIg">Ed Begley Jr. has been riding the Metro since before it was the Metro.</a> He took public transit to the Academy Awards again this year.</li></ul>Notebook/en/notebook/posts/author/44tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107492024-03-06T19:41:57Z2024-03-11T21:31:06ZMenaces and Martyrs: A Brief History of the Political Assassin on Film<div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38656/images-w1400.jpg?1709754159"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Revolution+1 </i>(Masao Adachi, 2023).</span></div><div>On July 8, 2022, Shinzo Abe, who had been the longest-serving prime minister of Japan in its postwar years, was shot and killed in broad daylight in a country with barely any civilian access to firearms. The suspect was immediately arrested, and commentators from all over the world began to speculate about the killer’s motive. After a few days, the police revealed that the 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, who had built his own gun and tracked Abe’s movements, had not originally planned to kill Abe. In fact, the most high-profile political assassination in decades was carried out by a man who cared little for politics. </div><div>Legendary Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi, sensing a story sure to be misconstrued by the press, immediately began production on a biopic—not of Abe, but of Yamagami. At the North American premiere of the film, <i>Revolution</i>+<i>1 </i>(2023), last July, he said that this quick turnaround was not intended to garner controversy, but to preempt the media-led myth about Abe and the killer becoming dogma. Adachi’s decision is tailored to our postmodern political moment, as he knows his film will immediately become part of “the discourse” which will then affect how audiences receive the movie, which will affect the discourse, ad infinitum. </div><div>In the ’60s, his left-wing politics alienated him from mainstream studios and distributors; his Japanese New Wave films were full of liberating depictions of sex and violence and calls for Communist political action.These films were shaped by their independent production model, such as the Adachi-scripted <i>Violated Angels </i>(1967), which was produced and directed by fellow New Wave legend Koji Wakamatsu in a mere three days using nonprofessional actors who improvised each scene. </div><div>Adachi left Japan in the early 1970s as part of the Japanese Red Army to assist the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He stayed in Lebanon for almost three decades before being extradited to his home country in 2000 to serve a brief prison sentence. His politics never moderated, and his commitment to revolutionary action is evident in his two post-release films, <i>Prisoner/Terrorist </i>(2007) and <i>Artist of Fasting </i>(2016): the former is a semi-autobiographical tale of his own time in prison, while the latter blends satire and performance art as it transposes a 1922 Kafka story to contemporary Japan. Now 84, Adachi made <i>Revolution+1</i> in the same spirit and at the same pace as his work from the ’60s—only the technology has changed.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38657/images-w1400.jpg?1709754528"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Revolution+1 </i>(Masao Adachi, 2023).</span></div><div>Adachi, not exactly a stickler for traditional narrative beats, composes a portrait of Tetsuya Yamagami through a series of flashbacks as the assassin wastes away in prison. Yamagami’s childhood was almost comically awful. His father’s suicide sends the family reeling. Though the family was relatively affluent and could have lived on their savings and insurance, his mother joins the Unification Church and steadily funnels all of their money into it, often leaving Tetsuya and his brother without food, new clothes, or medication. After high school, he cannot afford to go to university, so he settles for vocational school and a stint in the army, neither of which land him a career or any sort of stability. He flirts with political consciousness when he befriends a neighbor involved in eco-activism, but most nights are spent in his own head, where he rages against his family, the Unification Church (UC), and himself. His brother, suffering from untreated glaucoma, violently vandalizes a UC site, goes to prison, and eventually kills himself, spurring Tetsuya to action. Adachi emphasizes Tetsuya’s vague plans to attack UC leaders—notably not political figures—as well as the development of his DIY gun, designed to kill only the target at the end of the barrel.</div><div>This is all filmed on a prosumer digital camera that Adachi frequently overexposes to produce a garish white sheen over the image, which signals dreams, flashbacks, or surreal moments worthy of comparison to the digital <i>unheimlich</i> of <i>Inland Empire </i>(2006). There’s hardly a single shot without Tetsuya in frame (almost always in medium shots, unless a disturbing revelation demands a close-up), adding a documentary-esque quality that is juxtaposed with Tetsuya’s constant narration of emotion. In this way, Adachi asks his audience to understand Tetsuya’s plight but remain<b>s</b> distanced enough (both literally and through the surreal rain motif) to see him as a historical actor rather than an agitprop hero. </div><div>Though Japanese cinema—especially the films of Adachi and his contemporaries, such as Yoshishige Yoshida, Nagisa Oshima, Koji Wakamatsu, Shuji Terayama, and Akio Jissoji—has often portrayed political violence, the subject of political assassination has largely been relegated to the historical drama. Masahiro Shinoda’s aptly titled <i>Assassination </i>(1964) focuses on the tumultuous time of the Tokugawa Shogunate of the mid-19th century, as does Kinji Fukasaku’s <i>Shogun’s Samurai </i>(1978). Every adaptation of <i>The 47 Ronin</i> is a revenge thriller about 18th-century samurai avenging their daimyo through assassination, and Satsuo Yamamoto’s <i>Shinobi no Mono</i> (1962) depicts that classic Japanese assassin, the ninja, attempting to kill Oda Nobunaga in the 16th century. <i>Revolution+1 </i>breaks from the trope of murdered daimyos, continuing in the counter-tradition of adversarial guerrilla filmmaking by taking up the recent assassination of a real political leader. Though plenty of films have dealt with real-world assassinations, representations like Adachi’s are relatively rare; they inevitably constitute a political statement unto themselves, which may anger or alienate a public still working to process the aftermath of the murder.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38658/images-w1400.jpg?1709754643"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Assassination </i>(Masahiro Shinoda, 1964).</span></div><div>A year before the premiere of the Lumières’ <i>L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat </i>(1896), there had already been a filmed representation of an assassination. In <i>The Execution of Mary Stuart </i>(1895), Alfred Clark, working on behalf of Thomas Edison’s company, depicts the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. The trick film, which features the very first special effect in cinema, displays a row of spectators in period garb, their spears raised in soldierly attention in West Orange, New Jersey, made to stand in for Fotheringhay, England. There is no long walk to the gallows, no customary cushion for Mary’s knees, and no portrayal of the legendary pardon of the executioner. Instead, the eighteen-second film, the world’s first cinematic depiction of the death of a political leader, focuses only on the moment of execution. The blindfolded Mary, played by Robert Thomae, secretary and treasurer of the Kinetoscope Company, is replaced by a headless dummy as the axe falls. It’s closer to the Zapruder film than any political drama, as it depicts the moment of assassination in graphic detail but without any context, but, like most historical reenactment films of the 19th century, <i>The Execution of Mary Stuart</i> simply gives life to one of the more noteworthy moments of history. Yet, its violent subject and perverse pleasure made it a success among early cinema audiences, and its core special effect would influence the cine-magician Géorges Méliès.</div><div>After Kinetoscope’s treasurer’s head rolled, assassination became a mainstay fascination of Hollywood. Just one month after William McKinley was killed in 1901, Edwin S. Porter directed an Edison Studios short, <i>The Martyred Presidents</i>, which portrayed an American weeping over those assassinated few; later the same year, Porter directed <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/00694362/">a recreation of the electrocution of McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz</a>. At this time, the character of a President was sacrosanct, though the reprisal suffered by an assassin could be cheap entertainment. Before World War II, most Hollywood movies about assassination stuck largely to distant history or literary sources.<i> In the Days of Buffalo Bill</i> (1922), <i>Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ</i> (1925), <i>Abraham Lincoln</i> (1930), <i>Rasputin and the Empress</i> (1932),<i> Cleopatra</i> (1934), and <i>Juarez</i> (1939) all depict murder academically, often reducing the central killing to a narrative beat<b>.</b> European cinema was no different: <i>Young Medardus</i> (1923), <i>Napoléon</i> (1927), <i>The Fall of the House of Habsburg</i> (1928), and <i>The Iron Duke</i> (1934) are each set mostly in the 19th century and divorce the act of assassination from its immediate political motives, treating these moments as if they were the stuff of Greek tragedy. In other cases, the petty squabbles of history can take on a universal quality, recontextualized to fit any political moment.</div><div>This is not to say that studios shied away from politics entirely. Warner Bros. became known as the studio willing to show gangster violence and abject poverty during the Great Depression, prompting even MGM (thanks to maverick producer Dore Schary) to occasionally ditch the glitz for grimy adaptations of last year’s headlines. By the time the United States entered World War II, the studios were committed to adapting all kinds of war stories to aid the American propaganda effort. These movies would borrow imagery and characters from the Depression-era dramas as well as from the newsreels from the front line. As propaganda, they also served to invigorate an audience’s support of the war effort. Thus, Americans were primed to support an assassin in a movie, so long as they were killing Hitler.</div><div>The Nazi assassination movie laid the foundation for the revenge thriller, the secret-agent film, and any drama in which the audience's sympathy is supposed to lie with the assassin, rather than the victim. Fritz Lang, an Austrian expat with no love for Hitler, made two such films: <i>Man Hunt </i>(1941), in which Hitler’s would-be assassin is stalked throughout Europe, and <i>Hangmen Also Die! </i>(1943), loosely based on the assassination of the mastermind of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich. From that point on, at least in the cinematic language of Hollywood, then the biggest cultural exporter in the world, the assassin could be a hero. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38659/images-w1400.jpg?1709755116"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Hangmen Also Die! </i>(Fritz Lang, 1943).</span></div><div>Though English-speaking countries enjoyed this development primarily through the character of James Bond, the rest of the globe, equipped with their own production studios and distribution networks, used the figure of the hero-assassin to tell the stories of their own liberation. India produced many films sympathetic to nationalist Bhagat Singh and his assassination of a young British police officer (itself a case of mistaken identity): <i>Shaheed-e-Azad Bhagat Singh </i>(1954), <i>Shaheed Bhagat Singh </i>(1963), and the very successful <i>Shaheed </i>(1965). Such depictions of the violent revolutionary as hero did not resort to the genre trappings of the revenge thriller. </div><div>Some assassination films portrayed the act as politically righteous while others mourned their martyred subjects. <i>The Battle of Algiers</i> (1966) and <i>Long Days</i> (1980)—produced by its subject, Saddam Hussein, and allegedly edited by Bond movie veteran Terence Young—are two radically different examples of the former in terms of scope and political allegiance. Two films by Costa-Gavras, <i>Z</i> (1963) and <i>Missing</i> (1982), and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s <i>Death of a President</i> (1977) tackle 20th-century political subjects in an attempt to position the slain figure’s story somewhere between agitprop and literary tragedy.</div><div>It wasn’t long after the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy that conspiracies around the shooting developed, though it took ten years for the conspiracy film to follow. Most moviegoers are familiar with the inconsistencies of the Warren Commission thanks to Oliver Stone’s <i>JFK</i> (1991), but a speculative thriller titled <i>Executive Action </i>(1973), initiated by Donald Sutherland and partially funded by Kirk Douglas, beat Stone to the punch with its depiction of endless backroom meetings between capitalists, politicians, and the mob. The Dalton Trumbo–penned film starred Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, but it was pulled from theaters just a week after its release due to perceived tastelessness. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38660/images-w1400.jpg?1709755306"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Executive Action </i>(David Miller, 1973).</span></div><div>The Kennedy assassination was, even ten years later, a taboo subject for a supposedly liberated New Hollywood, but interest in conspiratorial machinations behind political killings continued in the likes of <i>The Parallax View </i>(1974), <i>Winter Kills</i> (1979), and <i>I… for Icarus </i>(1979), which take on the Kennedy assassination more or less explicitly, and films such as <i>Z</i>, <i>The Day of the Jackal </i>(1973), and <i>The Day That Shook the World </i>(1975), which clearly emerge from the same event. These films found their roots in the labyrinthine narratives of film noir, in which detectives follow false leads and can’t find a single authority to trust; the most radical broke with Hollywood tradition by ending without resolution. The conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s paint assassination as an act without lone heroes or villains—instead, an all-powerful monster, the system, acts as an agent of history. Whereas the murder of King Duncan in <i>Macbeth</i>—itself transformed into a political conspiracy thriller by Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation—alludes to power’s corruption of the individual, these films characterize power itself as a being that demands a calculated equilibrium and kills politicos as if balancing a spreadsheet.</div><div>Political assassination cinema stagnated after these conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. The old subgenres reappear again and again, though sometimes with a twist: the leftist agitprop film is reborn as the jingoistic Presidential bodyguard drama: <i>In the Line of Fire </i>(1993), <i>Air Force One</i> (1997) (both directed by Wolfgang Peterson), or even Albert Pyun’s <i>Captain America </i>(1990), in which the American President is protected by the titular spandex-laden hero against a villain whose gang assassinated John and Robert Kennedy, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr.. And, after many decades had passed, Stone’s <i>JFK</i> garnered controversy only for its extremely serious attempt to sow doubt about Oswald’s role; otherwise, the story now fit into the classic Hollywood mold of martyred public figures—as did <i>Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long </i>(1995), <i>Ghosts of Mississippi </i>(1996), and <i>George Wallace </i>(1997).</div><div>As the United States fell comfortably back in line with these historical reenactments, so too did other national cinemas: <i>Once Upon a Time in China III </i>(1992) and <i>Hero </i>(2002) are set in the 19th-century Qing Dynasty and the ancient Warring States period, respectively. <i>Jinnah </i>(1998) takes place mostly in 1947, the year of Pakistan’s independence. The Italian <i>Good Morning, Night </i>(2003) dramatizes the 1978 kidnapping of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. <i>The President’s Last Bang </i>(2005) is premised upon the 1979 assassination of Park Chung Hee, then President of South Korea. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38661/images-w1400.jpg?1709755557"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The President's Last Bang </i>(Im Sang-soo, 2005).</span></div><div>When killing a contemporary President, both comedies and thrillers nearly always avoid referring to actual figures, installing proxies such as <i>Protocol</i>’s (1984) “emir of Ohtar,” <i>Bob Roberts</i>’s (1992) populist folk singer candidate, <i>Bulworth</i>’s (1998) own lovable demagogue, and the mere symbol of Finnish authority in Matti Kassila’s <i>Farewell, Mr. President </i>(1987). David Cronenberg’s <i>The Dead Zone </i>(1983) is the rare pro–Presidential assassin movie, and it arrived just two years after John Hinckley Jr.’s attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.</div><div>In fact, no film was immediately made (though several TV movies appeared decades later) about Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate the movie-star President. In a bizarre reversal of events, Hinckley’s actions were motivated by fame, not politics. He was inspired by the sudden rise to prominence of obsessive fan Mark David Chapman, who had shot and killed John Lennon three months earlier, having become disillusioned with his longtime idol. Hinckley was obsessed not with Reagan but with Jodie Foster, who had acted in Martin Scorsese’s <i>Taxi Driver </i>(1976), about a gun-wielding loner who plots a likewise vaguely motivated political assassination before becoming an unlikely hero in the act of killing. Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life brought about a new kind of movie assassin: the starkiller. These films were never political in nature; rather, works like Scorsese’s own <i>The King of Comedy </i>(1983), Eckhart Schmidt’s <i>Der Fan </i>(1982), and, more recently, Todd Phillips’s <i>Joker </i>(2019)—an homage to both <i>Taxi Driver </i>and <i>The King of Comedy</i>—critique a media ecosystem in which a potential killer can see themselves as a lovable criminal, a Bonnie or a Clyde, and take the fast track to fame by taking the life of a celebrity. </div><div>In the first two decades of the 21st century, filmmakers restaged and reinvented assassinations from the past in films like Raoul Peck’s <i>Lumumba</i> (2000), Niels Muller’s <i>The Assassination of Richard Nixon</i> (2004), and Gus Van Sant’s <i>Milk</i> (2008). Right-wing pundit Bill O’Reilly’s <i>Killing</i> series retold the familiar stories of Lincoln’s (2011), Kennedy’s (2013), and Reagan’s (2016) attempted or successful assassinations in the extremely popular idiom of true crime, a newly resurgent genre. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38662/images-w1400.jpg?1709755651"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Revolution+1 </i>(Masao Adachi, 2023).</span></div><div>In 2022, Shinzo Abe was killed, and it would take a figure from the 1960s to remember how this story should be told. Adachi’s sympathy for Yamagami is evident in the film itself and in its exhibition history, as it was first previewed in Japan on the day of Abe’s state funeral as an act of solidarity with other protests. Public support for Abe in Japan was split before the assassination and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/10/how-shinzo-abe-ties-to-moonies-unification-church-blindsided-japanese-politics">significantly waned</a> after Yamagami brought Abe’s connections with the Unification Church to light.But Adachi’s entire point—indeed, the very reason why he made the film so quickly—lies in Yamagami’s purely personal and incidental motivations rather than any grand, unified political narrative. The director clarified at the North American premiere that Tetsuya is not a nihilistic agent of chaos like Travis Bickle or the Joker. He takes the abstracted rage at a wasted life typical of such characters and directs it against a political actor for imperfect political reasons. </div><div>Adachi’s film may be seen as agitprop, both by those who argued for its removal from Japanese theaters and by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/world/asia/shinzo-abe-funeral-unification-church.html">those now opposed to Abe’s legacy</a>, whether that’s due to the Unification Church’s influence on his party or his government’s neoliberal economic policies, which widened <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-japan-inequality/">income inequality</a> in Japan. But the real political center of the film is Tetsuya the person and the conditions that immiserated him. His actions fit our new era of ever-isolating, atomized individuals for whom the very concept of meaning, a communal invention, can’t take hold. Adachi’s Yamagami often looks to the night sky and yearns to be a shining star, a meaningful part of something bigger than himself. If there’s any through line in all of these films, it’s that assassination is a real-time rewriting of history; this could entail the creation of a martyr, the removal of an important actor from the global stage, or a fundamental change in the political imagination. While plenty of these films reaffirm the status quo, <i>Revolution+1 </i>demands that a moment of bloodshed be followed by serious political reflection.</div>Z. W. Lewis/en/notebook/posts/author/322tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107502024-03-06T20:37:30Z2024-03-11T14:06:52ZExcerpt | In Conversation: Huey Copeland and Garrett Bradley<div><i>From </i><b><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048798/devotion/">Garrett Bradley: Devotion</a></b><i>, published by MIT Press. In this interview from 2019, the art historian Huey Copeland speaks with the artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley on the occasion of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston exhibition </i>Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody.<i> This text first appeared in the exhibition catalogue.</i></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38663/images-w1400.jpg?1709757778"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>America </i>(Garrett Bradley, 2019).</span></div><div><b>HUEY COPELAND:</b> I’d like to begin by talking about the ways you’re engaging the archive in your work, recruiting a range of different materials, even outtakes from your own films. Your process—mixing and working on different projects simultaneously—seems to resonate with but also exceed what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” in terms of posing the question, “How do we return to and engage the archive in order to reframe it with all of its liabilities and possibilities”?<sup id="fnref1"><a href="#fn1" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> In this sense, your work also resonates with what I’ve recently called “black auto-citational practice,” a modality that you can see in Hartman’s work, in Arthur Jafa and Carrie Mae Weems’s work, or in Glenn Ligon’s work—which, in many ways, is <i>all</i> about returning to aspects of one’s own production, to those things that ultimately weren’t included in a final project, and saying, “Well, this material continues to have a life and can have a life of its own.”<sup id="fnref2"><a href="#fn2" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> It’s a mode of working that suggests a particular kind of ethical relationship or stance to archives, both institutional and personal ones. I wonder if you could talk about how you’ve been moving toward that approach and what’s been inspiring you or informing you as you try to develop relationships to the material and to the visual that honor both your engagements with communities and your sense of yourself as both a filmmaker and a facilitator?</div><div><b>GARRETT BRADLEY:</b> Yeah, okay. Cool. I guess I’ll start off specifically with <i>America </i>(2019), which I started in 2014 and for which I did a lot of archival research, including spending days watching films at the Black Film Archives in the Library of Congress. It was inspired by an article that a friend, the artist Byron Kim, had sent me about The Museum of Modern Art, New York’s discovery of what they thought to be the very first film with an all-black cast and integrated production: <i>Lime Kiln Club Field Day</i> (1913), starring Bert Williams and Odessa Warren Grey.<sup id="fnref3"><a href="#fn3" rel="footnote">3</a></sup> They started restoring it in 2004 and finally released it 100 years after it had been shot as a series of unassembled outtakes. <i>America</i> is very much, for me, connected to the discovery of this film. It is also connected to a survey I had read that the Library of Congress had done in 2013 which stated that 70 percent of the feature-length films made between 1912 and 1929 had gone missing.<sup id="fnref4"><a href="#fn4" rel="footnote">4</a></sup> If we know that this one film that does exist, out of the 7,500 [or so] that are missing, is extremely progressive, what would it mean to make the assumption that there is a whole body of work, lost to the archive, that is equally as progressive? And that’s what <i>America </i>is. It’s a chronology, a series of vignettes rooted in black and “American” history that function as visual illustrations and exist as a physical timeline. </div><div>As a person who works in the world with people, who’s making work that is often inspired by personal and peripheral experiences, by observing the things that are around me, I am always thinking, <i>Where can I help</i>? I think of myself as a facilitator, and right now, the best way that I can take action is through the communal and collaborative effort involved in making personal films about issues of relevance to me and the communities I interact with. With <i>America</i>, I actually started off thinking about the work in a physical way because I was digging through a timeline, I was digging through a chronology, a history that had gaps. And, to me, that felt really counterintuitive to two-dimensional space. It felt actually harder to translate that research, that chronology within a single screen than to actually create an accordion-like installation of a series of screens in physical space that people could move through and around. It was less about trying to make “art” or be in an art space. It was more about asking, what is the clearest and most efficient way of dealing with the subject matter that actually makes sense in my own brain, you know? How do we construct a chronology that is not necessarily linear? On a technical or formal level, we did this by using chiffon, which is highly transparent, as the material for the screens, creating a kind of layering effect. </div><div><b>COPELAND:</b> That’s totally fascinating. Hearing you say that, I think, “Well, of course that makes sense!” Because with <i>America, </i>even if you’re watching it on a laptop or on a big screen TV as a single channel work, there’s a way in which each moment within the film holds a multiplicity of other moments within it. Being able to actually physicalize the multiplicity of the film’s unfolding and to have these moments spatially held in relationship to each other seems to really make sense in terms of the experience you’re trying to generate.</div><div>It’s also very interesting to think about you as a filmmaker. I love that you emphasize that it’s a practice that has to do with engaging bodies and space, with working and moving in between sites and subjects and communities. Your language, in other words, underlines that the practice of filmmaking is always deeply corporeal and interpersonal. But I think there’s a way in which we train ourselves to receive films without thinking about the behind-the-scenes, the apparatus, the structural conditions of a film’s construction, because, of course, we want to immerse ourselves in the mirage that’s before us, to have this moment of suturing to the fantasmatic.<sup id="fnref5"><a href="#fn5" rel="footnote">5</a></sup> Even the choice of clips and stills from <i>Lime Kiln Club Field Day</i> that you use in <i>America </i>often seem motivated by a desire to reveal the actualities of production as well as the kinds of aesthetic and political engagements they represent. Though you’re not necessarily showing us how every shot of either film was framed and produced, there’s still this kind of indexical cue that asks us to examine how we think about cinema and film as fitting in with larger social apparatuses and the ways in which we can read with and against what is ultimately given us to see, so that we can begin to understand, to borrow a phrase from Jacqueline Goldsby, “the larger social construction or organization of the world at a given moment.”<sup id="fnref6"><a href="#fn6" rel="footnote">6</a></sup></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38667/images-w1400.jpg?1709758495"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Lime Kiln Club Field Day </i>(Edwin Middleton and T. Hayes Hunter, 1913).</span></div><div><b>BRADLEY:</b> Going back to Hartman and her term, critical fabulation, which I just love so much, leads to another question that you had prompted, which is the question of <i>possibilities versus liabilities</i> and how the different spaces of “traditional cinema” and visual art intersect, how they present different ways of moving through those two issues. I think, on one hand, filling gaps is a natural part of the human experience. I think our minds naturally create a narrative around the things that we don’t know. Part of what the practice of meditation, in some cases, really forces us to do is to move away from the narratives we formulate in the absence of information. Of course, there’s this other type of meditation that’s really mantra-base, which is, in some ways, about doing the exact opposite—filling that space up with new narratives rather than emptying it out. “Things will always work for my highest good.” “Everything is going to be okay.” I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned how to be more conscious of filling gaps and how to use that tool in a more crafted way in my work, in a material and in a physical way. And I think that as I’ve moved through my work, again going back to possibilities versus liabilities, it’s become more and more clear that these two things are always interconnected, they are never separate from each other.</div><div><b>COPELAND:</b> That’s fantastic! I think the question that naturally follows is about your real investment in engaging particular locations and populations, especially in New Orleans, whose history takes on a much larger significance when we think about the unfolding of life across the modern world and black life across the diaspora. Given the focus of your film work—where it takes place, who the subjects are—how do you imagine speaking to audiences in a range of different contexts as the work circulates and appears in different locations? It is very specific but also has this expansive quality precisely because of its engagement with questions of the everyday.</div><div><b>BRADLEY:</b> Yes, exactly! I think the question of the everyday and of the unfolding of black life across time could apply to all the work that I’ve been doing lately, but in particular this project <i>AKA </i>(2019), which is about upward mobility as it exists between women, between mothers and daughters. <i>AKA </i>came to me by way of looking back on films that I had watched as a child and trying to sift through those narratives and the questions they presented and what they would mean in a contemporary context. </div><div>In order for me to make an adaptation of a classic American film, even if it’s a Hollywood film, I needed to understand how it was going to be relevant in contemporary space in a contemporary moment. And the only way to do that was to talk to people who might feel in any kind of way directly connected to or reflected in that narrative. So, I went to family members, I went to friends, and I went on social media—which has been an ongoing resource for me. I always start off with a series of questions that are no different from the questions that I would ask an audience in a panel once the work is done. I think that language is really important for me as a way of creating an ethical bridge between the process and where the work ends up going, because oftentimes they’re so separate from one another.</div><div>What becomes more complex is the visual illustration of the feedback that I get. So, I had mothers and daughters coming together. I interviewed each of them separately. They were mothers and daughters who self-identified as being in a mixed-race household or in houses where everyone was the same race but had really different skin tones and felt like they could speak to feeling like they were treated differently than their mother, for instance, or differently than their daughter.</div><div>I just started off with questions: How do you see yourself? How do you think the world sees you? What did these older films get right, what did they get wrong? I’d send links to the films so they could re-watch them. What ended up happening was a series of dialogues and transcripts, and a lot of conversations, probably 12 one-hour-long conversations. I would pull certain pieces of dialogue out of those conversations. Then I would do what we were kind of talking about earlier in terms of filling gaps. This one woman in particular, Lindsay, she kept asking her mother, “Are you color struck?” “Are you color struck?” And she kept asking it over and over and over again. </div><div>To me, that one phrase, color struck, became the premise for the whole visual landscape of the piece.<sup id="fnref7"><a href="#fn7" rel="footnote">7</a></sup> What does color struck mean when you visualize it? How could I work with analog filtrations so that when the light hit the lens, you’ve got rainbows and stars across the screen, layered over everyday spaces? It’s just this really trippy, weird little piece. I don’t know if I’m sort of rambling here, but I think that my process is to always be open. It always starts with questions and it’s open to what those answers might be. The work comes from those answers and it doesn’t change when it’s brought out into the world. The meaning of it and the purpose of it doesn’t change in terms of how I talk about it. How people interpret it, maybe that’s different.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38665/images-w1400.jpg?1709757961"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>AKA </i>(Garrett Bradley, 2019).</span></div><div><b>COPELAND: </b>That’s really interesting, especially as it underlines your critical relationship to the normative structures of contemporary filmmaking, whether it be the process of casting or trying to think about the location. In your work, if I’m following, it’s not about imposing a predetermined structure that “content” is set into, but instead about simultaneously generating an understanding of what the content and the form are through conversations with this larger set of communities and interlocutors who are sometimes in the films and sometimes the audiences for the films. It gives us a sense that your work is coming from a particular place that is not being shoehorned into the world that a Hollywood production company imagines a film from New Orleans needs to look like or fit into.</div><div>As such, I think your process also interestingly puts pressure on the notion of auteur cinema. It’s not as if you’re imposing “the Bradley optic,” but more like you’re really trying to think carefully about how you’re visually and sonically constructing a material world that is connected to and an emanation from the place it was made. </div><div><b>BRADLEY:</b> I love this idea of challenging the notion of the auteur in cinema. And as you say, in many ways, my work is very much directed and dictated by the specific communities I engage—by specific places and specific people. </div><div>I would also say that yes, my work is about black life. It is also a series of love stories, I think. My love for the people that I work with and my love and compassion for circumstance. And my hope that in making something, it will induce the same level of compassion and imagination—the ability to imagine being somebody besides yourself, for the viewer, and then to bridge gaps. It isn’t just for black folks, it’s for all of us. It’s for us to think about how we can work within existing spaces and how to illuminate the beauty that we are and bring it on a mass scale to people so that they can connect with it.</div><div>I think you can see this in a feature-length documentary that I’m working on right now which is about a woman who I met in the process of making <i>Alone </i>(2017) and who I have been filming for the past two years. <i>Alone </i>was about my friend, Aloné Watts, and her having to deal with feelings of extreme loneliness and isolation as a result of her partner’s incarceration. I don’t know if you remember, but there’s a lady at the very end of the film who makes this analogy between slavery and incarceration, and you see her very briefly.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38666/images-w1400.jpg?1709758069"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Alone </i>(2017, Garrett Bradley).</span></div><div><b>COPELAND:</b> Yeah, like a little flash.</div><div><b>BRADLEY:</b> A little flash. While I was making <i>Alone</i> I contacted this organization called Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, and they connected me with a series of women that had gone through this process and could give advice to Aloné based on their own experiences navigating the intentionally complex prison system in the United States. So this was how I met Fox Rich, who robbed a bank with her husband in the ’90s. She served two years because she took the plea deal. But her husband was coaxed into not taking the plea deal and then ended up getting a numerical life sentence—60 years—for a first-time offense. He served 21 years, and when I met Fox it had been 20 years at that point. She was selling Cadillacs. She is an incredible human being. She started these “Power Parties” when she was in prison where she would get all the women to circle around her and she would talk about what it meant to be empowered and how to find the right partner for yourself.</div><div><b>COPELAND:</b> Amazing.</div><div><b>BRADLEY:</b> Ninety percent of my experience filming Fox was watching her on the phone. Her whole life is on the phone maneuvering the bureaucracy of the prison system. And so, I just started thinking about how when you’re making more traditional films, or you have financiers behind you, they have certain expectations for how stories are going to be told. I feel like there’s no reason why that should, in any kind of way, eclipse the possibilities for other, more nuanced, even more essentialist ways of telling the same story.</div><div>What would it look like to just take every single moment that we have of her on her phone, in her office, for the past two years and just have each one of those shots back to back, right? However long that string-out ends up being. Maybe it’s two hours of her on the phone. That, to me, says just as much as an hour and a half narratively crafted documentary piece of journalism that has all these other expectations on it in terms of its form and structure and how the audience is going to understand it.</div><div><b>COPELAND:</b> That sounds incredible. I love the way you’re pushing against certain filmic structures or avoiding them, but still invested in a kind of visually rhythmic propulsion, so that there is a logic to the film, though not at all the one through which we usually think of cinematic or imagistic moving image works as captivating. Does that make sense?</div><div><b>BRADLEY:</b> Totally.</div><div class="footnotes"><hr></div><ol><li id="fn1">On “critical fabulation” see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” <i>Small Axe</i> 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14. <a href="#fnref1" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn2">See, respectively, Huey Copeland, “A Seat at the Table: Notes of an Institutional Creatures,” <i>October </i>168 (Spring 2019): 63-78; and Huey Copeland, <a href="http://asapjournal.com/love-is-the-message-the-message-is-death-huey-copeland/">“Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death,”</a><i>ASAP Journal</i>, June 4, 2018. <a href="#fnref2" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn3">Felicia R. Lee, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/nyregion/coming-soon-a-century-late-a-black-film-gem.html">“Coming Soon, a Century Late: A Black Film Gem,”</a><i>New York Times</i>, September 20, 2014. <a href="#fnref3" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn4">David Pierce, <i><a href="http://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/pub158.final_version_sept_2013.pdf">The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929</a></i> (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress, 2013). <a href="#fnref4" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn5">In film theory, suturing describes a cinematic effect, imposed by a system of editing techniques, that structures a viewer’s suspension of disbelief and results in an identification between the viewer and the camera eye that maintains the illusion of the filmic narrative. See Stephen Heath, “On Suture,” in <i>Questions of Cinema </i>(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982): 76–112. <a href="#fnref5" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn6">Jacqueline Goldsby, <i>A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature </i>(Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006): 26–27. <a href="#fnref6" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn7"> <i>Color Struck</i> (1925) is a play by Zora Neale Hurston that explores the notion of “colorism,” which describes discrimination based on the color of one’s skin. In Hurston’s play, she examines the internalization of racism among and between African Americans of varying skin tones. <a href="#fnref7" rev="footnote">↩</a></li></ol>Huey Copeland/en/notebook/posts/author/892Garrett Bradley/en/notebook/posts/author/891tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107542024-03-10T22:32:39Z2024-03-11T23:07:35Z96th Academy Awards. Winners<div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38690/images-w1400.jpg?1710120236"></div><div><i><sup>Oppenheimer</sup></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>BEST PICTURE</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>American Fiction</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Anatomy of a Fall</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Barbie</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Holdovers</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Maestro</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Oppenheimer</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Past Lives</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Poor Things</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Zone of Interest</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE</b></div><div style="text-align: center;">Bradley Cooper (<i>Maestro</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Colman Domingo (<i>Rustin</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Paul Giamatti (<i>The Holdovers</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Cillian Murphy (<i>Oppenheimer</i>) – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;">Jeffrey Wright (<i>American Fiction</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE</b></div><div style="text-align: center;">Annette Bening (<i>Nyad</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Lily Gladstone (<i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Sandra Huller (<i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Carey Mulligan (<i>Maestro</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Emma Stone (<i>Poor Things</i>) – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE</b></div><div style="text-align: center;">Sterling K Brown (<i>American Fiction)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;">Robert De Niro (<i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Robert Downey Jr (<i>Oppenheimer</i>) – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;">Ryan Gosling (<i>Barbie</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Mark Ruffalo (<i>Poor Things</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE</b></div><div style="text-align: center;">Emily Blunt (<i>Oppenheimer</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Danielle Brooks (<i>The Color Purple</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">America Ferrera (<i>Barbie</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Jodie Foster (<i>Nyad</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Da'Vine Joy Randolph (<i>The Holdovers</i>) – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ANIMATED FEATURE FILM</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Boy and the Heron</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Elemental</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Nimona</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Robot Dreams</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>CINEMATOGRAPHY</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>El Conde</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Maestro</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Oppenheimer</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Poor Things</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>COSTUME DESIGN</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Barbie</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Napoleon</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Oppenheimer</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Poor Things</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>DIRECTING</b></div><div style="text-align: center;">Justine Triet (<i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Martin Scorsese (<i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Christopher Nolan (<i>Oppenheimer</i>) – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;">Yorgos Lanthimos (<i>Poor Things</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Jonathan Glazer (<i>The Zone of Interest</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>DOCUMENTARY FEATURE</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Bobi Wine: The People's President</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Eternal Memory</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Four Daughters</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>To Kill a Tiger</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>20 Days in Mariupol</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>FILM EDITING</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Anatomy of a Fall</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Holdovers</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Oppenheimer</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Poor Things</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>INTERNATIONAL FILM</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Io Capitano</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Perfect Days</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Society of the Snow</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Teachers' Lounge</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Zone of Interest</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Golda</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Maestro</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Oppenheimer</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Poor Things</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Society of the Snow</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ORIGINAL SCORE</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>American Fiction</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Oppenheimer</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Poor Things</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ORIGINAL SONG</b></div><div style="text-align: center;">The Fire Inside (<i>Flamin' Hot</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">I'm Just Ken (<i>Barbie)</i> </div><div style="text-align: center;">It Never Went Away (<i>American Symphony</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">Wahzhazhe (<i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i>)</div><div style="text-align: center;">What Was I Made For? (<i>Barbie</i>) – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>PRODUCTION DESIGN</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Barbie</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Napoleon</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Oppenheimer</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Poor Things</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>SOUND</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Creator</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Maestro</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Oppenheimer</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Zone of Interest</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>VISUAL EFFECTS</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Creator</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Godzilla Minus One</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Napoleon</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ADAPTED SCREENPLAY</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>American Fiction</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Barbie</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Oppenheimer</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Poor Things</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Zone of Interest</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Anatomy of a Fall</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Holdovers</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Maestro</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>May December</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Past Lives</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The After</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Invincible</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Knight of Fortune</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Red, White and Blue</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>ANIMATED SHORT FILM</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Letter to a Pig</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Ninety-Five Senses</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Our Uniform</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Pachyderme</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The ABCs of Book Banning</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Barber of Little Rock</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Island In Between</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Last Repair Shop</i> – <b>WINNER</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó</i></div>Notebook/en/notebook/posts/author/44tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107512024-03-06T21:44:56Z2024-03-07T17:27:22ZTheater of Truth: On "Anatomy of a Fall"<div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38668/images-w1400.jpg?1709761864"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>(Justine Triet, 2023).</span></div><div><i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>(2023) begins with a black screen and an auditory fragment: a short exchange between writer Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) and a young student who’s come to interview her about her career. When the film’s image and sound come into sync, both of them realize that the student’s phone has failed to record their conversation. Reality, seemingly, starts only when the “record” button has been pressed.</div><div>We never see the titular fall in Justine Triet’s courtroom drama, only a corpse. The moment when Sandra’s husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), plunges to his death from the attic of their chalet is presented only in simulations, both speculative flashbacks based on courtroom testimony and technical reenactments from expert witnesses. Though a trial is ostensibly a search for the truth, Triet's film is a metacinematic treatise on epistemology, showing only so much as to create ambiguity; each piece of audiovisual evidence only confirms a fragment of what really happened. Whether Samuel’s death was accidental, a suicide, or whether he was pushed to it by Sandra, here on trial for murder, is ultimately up to the audience, for there exists no objective, irrefutable evidence to confirm any version of the story. As the film glides through a myriad of mediated realities, we never gain access to a palpable truth. Samuel himself is mostly an imagined ghost; he appears diegetically only as a dead body, though he is resurrected in mediated formats like photographs, video recordings without sound, and sound recordings without image. Otherwise, he appears in subjective flashback sequences triggered by courtroom testimony—sometimes the characters are trying to fill in the gaps of the case themselves, and we’re watching them imagine what might have happened to Samuel, a projection of their private speculations rather than the facts.</div><div>These systematic recreations and unreliable accounts treat truth like volatile matter, and constantly underline not only the camera’s failure to capture reality, but also the faults in human perception itself. What may initially seem perfectly credible later becomes hard to believe. Proof, be it images, words, or recordings, turns out to be fragmentary and imperfect, and all of the witnesses are either biased or lack the complete picture, much like the viewer. Sandra obsessively repeats, to the court, to her lawyers, and even to her son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), that what they are hearing, from her and from others, is only a “part of reality.” At one point, Sandra’s lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), almost scornfully retorts, “I don’t give a fuck about what is reality.” The mission of this particular trial isn’t to determine reality, after all, but to invent a kind of truth, to build up a story that seems most believable and to perform it in court so as to satisfy the jury and judge. For the prosecutors, this trial is a story—stress, story—about a woman who has killed her husband; for the defense, it is one about a husband’s suicide.</div><div>The tragedy of this trial, and so of the marriage, is that for one of the spouses to emerge as innocent, the other must fall. For Sandra to win the trial, she must allow Samuel to be slandered, and for Samuel to be a victim, Sandra must be guilty, painted as an awful woman—even if neither of them truly hated the other. It matters little to the law if, in fact, Hüller’s character is actually a woman grieving the accidental death of her husband or, even more painfully, coming to terms with his suicide.</div><div>What Sandra should really concern herself with, Vincent suggests, is how others perceive her. In one instance during the trial, it is revealed that Sandra has been lying about how she got a bruise on her hand. Is this sufficient to suspect that she has been lying for the whole trial—that she is a murderer? It is all a matter of where in the courtroom the viewer places themselves, a game of sympathies rather than of hard facts. This trial is fueled by <i>fantasmes</i>, as Vincent aptly calls them, mere fabrications of what could never be understood.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38677/images-w1400.jpg?1709762421"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>(Justine Triet, 2023).</span></div><div>Courtroom dramas often thrive on narrative suspense and thespian-friendly outbursts, a cathartic “You can't handle the truth!” delivered at a breaking point. The courtroom is by its nature a performative space: convincing depositions have a particular oratorical quality to them, the prosecutors and the defendants could be perceived as actors, there’s an audience in the public gallery, the jury and the judge are akin to critics who need to be convinced, the trial takes place within a clearly delineated stage, and so on. These formalities and procedures invite an atmosphere of pretense. French courts are less entwined with showmanship and popular entertainment than American courts are—in the U.S., there’s a tradition of court shows and high-profile broadcast trials that unfold in a manner akin to reality TV, whereas European courts rarely allow cameras inside. Yet there are plenty of procedural theatrics in <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>; aside from the historical influence France has had over the methodology of law, the fact that French lawyers, and not only judges, wear robes in court imbues the trial with an immediate sense of ritual and tradition, a rather striking contrast in pomp with the more business-formal attire of their American counterparts.</div><div>Triet employs a rhetoric-heavy approach that heightens the court’s natural emphasis on performance, sustained by the fact that the two principal lawyers in the film behave like farcical opposites. The prosecuting attorney goes out of his way to be pedantic, overbearing, a caricature of villainy, accentuated by Antoine Reinartz’s brilliantly intense delivery. At the other end, Swann Arlaud’s Vincent Rezi is poetic and particularly charismatic, a gentle and affable presence outside of the courtroom. A platonic friend of Sandra’s from several years ago, he’s a potential love interest for her now, bearing just the smallest resemblance to her likewise gray-haired dead husband, while his discreet (if mostly rebuffed) confessions and gestures of his affection for her make him even more endearing. This almost archetypal antithesis between the two attorneys renders the trial as a game of trying to catch each other out on technicalities.</div><div>If Michelangelo Antonioni’s <i>Blow-Up </i>(1966) sought murder in the millimeters of the image, Triet looks for it in the corners and semantics of sentences. Within the court, there are fewer moments of conversation or interrogation, and more theatrical, standalone monologues and theoretical suppositions regarding what may have happened. Lengthy shots of characters, often alone in the frame, deliver either nitpicky debates on words such as “unlikely” and “improbable,” or narrative retellings of their entire lives. The most striking one is perhaps Vincent’s interpretation of Samuel’s last few months, a passionate monologue to which even Sandra objects when he returns to his box: “That was not Samuel.”</div><div>Both lawyers are very good with words, but the prosecutor seems to be allowed a greater (and wilder) degree of speculation about Sandra’s inner life and motivations—arguments that amount to character assassination. The judge intervenes less with him than with Vincent, revealing, perhaps, a certain bias for his style of argument and perspective. Reinartz’s lawyer is explosive, exaggerative, setting traps and putting words in people’s mouths: there’s a deliberate stagecraft that aims to discredit Sandra (as a wife, as a mother, and as a writer) less through fact and more through rhetoric. To some extent, one could say the prosecutor takes his role too seriously, as he appears to bear some personal enmity toward Sandra as much as her lawyer. Vincent is, by comparison, more composed, even dainty, trying to impress the court through poetic charm rather than aggression. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38678/images-w1400.jpg?1709762445"></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38674/images-w1400.jpg?1709762208"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption">Top: <i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>(Justine Triet, 2023). Bottom: <i>Anatomy of a Murder </i>(Otto Preminger, 1959).</span></div><div>Their way of interacting with each other, but also with the court, clearly evokes <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>’s namesake, Otto Preminger’s <i>Anatomy of a Murder </i>(1959). Preminger follows a similarly volatile trial, in which a young soldier, Lieutenant Manion, is judged for killing a innkeeper who, Manion suggests, raped his wife. As the only thing that is certain is that the murder has happened, his lawyer, Paul Biegler (James Stewart), uses temporary insanity to justify the action and hopefully win the case. Stewart’s character often appears more like a stand-up comedian than a dutiful lawyer, and his strategy depends heavily on making the audience laugh or terrorizing the more conservative parties in the court by introducing the word “panties” into the record. Much in the same manner, both Reinartz’s obnoxious lawyer and Vincent try to assert dominance by landing witty jokes. Just like Biegler, Triet’s lawyers—most often Vincent—easily get carried away by their rhetoric, so much that the judge must frequently intervene to warn against their poetics.</div><div>Both films play with the malleability of fact and the idea that a case is won by the better story; nonetheless, Preminger is more interested in the elasticity of law and morals than in the failings of perception. Lieutenant Manion has clearly committed murder—he’s even vaguely boastful about it—yet Preminger’s film questions to what extent this murder can be excused. If judged against his own moral compass, the Lieutenant was quite in the right to avenge the rape of his wife. If Lieutenant Manion was temporarily insane, as Biegler concocts to exploit the law, then the nature and meaning of this event changes completely. </div><div>Like Triet, Preminger also comments on gender roles and the social perception of women, although his film’s discourse on femininity is heavily rooted in its era. Preminger touches on notions of subservience and shame that are traditionally associated with female sexuality, particularly through Laura Manion’s character, who is often subjected to crude, prejudiced, and patronizing comments from the men in the film (although not Biegler). Much like Sandra, Laura’s faithfulness to her husband is also put on trial, with implications that she provoked the rape for which Lieutenant Manion sought revenge: the prosecutors sometimes treat her, rather than her husband, like the criminal who needs to be brought to justice. </div><div>Sandra, too, may seem guilty to audiences who are preconditioned to believe that a wife would readily kill her husband, but Triet's film deals with more contemporary questions about gender roles. The opening credits of <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i> comment on the apparent reversal of gender roles in Sandra’s relationship: a montage of old photographs presents her with a tomboyish haircut, whereas Samuel appears with long hair. It is Sandra who is the successful writer, while Samuel complains that he’s been relegated to a domestic role and can’t concentrate on his career. And yet, as if reprimanded for not staying within the limits of her gender, Sandra is vilified for her success and for her so-called “masculine” tendencies by the prosecutors, by the media, and most painfully by her husband, who blames her for his own problems as much as the problems they have as a couple.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38673/images-w1400.jpg?1709762102"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Saint Omer </i>(Alice Diop, 2022).</span></div><div>Triet’s exploration of gender roles—and particularly the unspoken question of whether Sandra is a good mother—calls to mind another recent courtroom film, Alice Diop’s <i>Saint Omer</i> (2022). Based on the real-life trial of a woman of Senegalese origin who killed her infant daughter, Diop’s film, like <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>, suggests that there are things that cannot be rationally explained or understood through courtroom proceedings. As the defendant, Laurence Coly, can only explain why she resorted to murder in terms of sorcery, <i>Saint Omer</i> further underlines the sociocultural frameworks through which we define notions like reality, knowledge, or evidence. While the film evokes an observational documentary in style and rhythm, Diop isn’t interested in determining truth, either, but in discussing broader issues surrounding motherhood, womanhood, and ethnic identity in France. Guilt is less important than the systemic and conditional forces that presaged the crime. </div><div>The trial draws out the prejudices of its audience and participants: witnesses look down on Laurence because of her African origin, and her eloquence in French seems suspicious to some. Her relationship with the father of the child also highlights an imbalance in power—in their own lives as unhappy lovers, but also in the eyes of the court: he’s a man, he’s white, he’s “true-born” French and much older than her, so he may elicit a different level of credibility and authority. The mention of sorcery, which to the white prosecutors sounds like a convenient excuse and to Laurence’s mother a most profound reality, reveals an impasse where one group condescends to another, not prepared to understand or even consider them because they belong to a different culture.</div><div>Diop constructs an overall sympathetic sentiment in her film—<i>Saint Omer </i>is less concerned with the suspense of proving the culprit’s guilt than with the hidden nuances of her plea; the trial is principally about a woman who has been marginalized for her entire life being allowed to genuinely speak—and be listened to—for the first time. The main character of the film is not Laurence, but an observer: from the beginning, the viewer is aligned with Rama, a writer researching the trial for her book, much like how Diop was also present in the audience for the real-life trial on which her film is based. This alignment creates a form of kinship, particularly through Rama’s drawing of parallels between Laurence’s life and her own. </div><div>In a manner that suggests theatrical soliloquies, characters look into the camera as they testify, as if they are appealing directly to Rama and to the viewer—particularly to a viewer who may relate more personally to the film’s considerations of womanhood, but also of ethnic identity, cultural experience, and racial prejudice. As Laurence’s lawyer stresses in her closing remarks, the trial may deliver nothing more than a verdict, and not actual justice. In <i>Saint Omer</i> there is a suggestion that justice shouldn’t seek to convict, to punish, but to correct wrongs, to weigh actions.</div><div>This irrelevancy of a verdict makes a compelling parallel with <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>, in which, likewise, the conditions that led to the fall are more important than the circumstances of the fall itself. As Daniel explains in his testimony, when one lacks concrete evidence of something, one must go beyond and look for why it has happened. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38676/images-w1400.jpg?1709762332"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>(Justine Triet, 2023).</span></div><div><i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>goes beyond a genre-locked courtroom drama and shares a postmodern suspicion about representation, media, and images with studies of relativity, like the aforementioned <i>Blow Up </i>or <i>The Conversation </i>(1975). The burden of proof in Triet’s murder mystery is also a metacinematic one—do you really <i>need to see</i> something in order to believe it? </div><div>The fact that Daniel is visually impaired echoes this ontological tension within <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>’s structure, between what one can or cannot see. The boy’s way of interacting with his family and surroundings questions the primacy of the image in our way of experiencing the world, further underlining how the camera is by no means an omniscient entity but a mediator of subjective realities. The images that come and go throughout the film—media coverage of the trial, the flashbacks, or the reenactments filmed by the police—all seem inferior to the kind of truth to which Daniel is attuned, one that escapes empirical evidence. The image has failed in <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>: it is an unreliable medium, unable to penetrate emotional and sociocultural subtleties. Yet the failure of the image is also the failure of language; neither words nor images can testify to Sandra's central dilemma: “How can you prove someone is your soulmate?”</div><div>Triet’s film follows a fairly classical dramatic structure, yet its multitude of unreliable images evoke a contemporary world oversaturated with audiovisual media. The courtroom drama has always dramatized the manipulation of information in the construction of a story, or a life. However, the internet, and social media in particular, provide other means to shape and exaggerate narratives, to present a certain version of oneself to the world. With cameras in our pockets, we film ourselves and our surroundings almost by reflex. There are so many tools for documenting and scrutinizing the real world, but none are able to accurately represent the more elusive nuances of everyday life. Technological advances have allowed for the increasingly easy fabrication of images and versions of the truth. <i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>avoids the most contemporary issues of media trickery, such as the current debate around AI, harkening back to more classical and general questions about perception—but it certainly echoes a greater modern landscape where truth and falsehood have become more difficult to tell apart. If we ever conceived of the camera as an objective tool, Triet argues for its lack of credibility and for a frame within which—as in her narrative feature debut, <i>Age of Panic </i>(2013)—reality and fiction are not mutually exclusive. </div><div>Triet makes it rivetingly hard to ascertain the nature of her film's images, which places an interpretive burden on the viewer. At the decisive moment in the trial, Daniel appears to have remembered a conversation with his father about death, an exchange which could be interpreted as a display of suicidal thoughts. During the flashback<b>, </b>we see Samuel, but hear Daniel speaking in his stead. Whatever allegiance the viewer has chosen throughout the trial will determine the nature of this image: if they think Samuel committed suicide, then this is a reliable memory; if not, then this is another fabrication.</div><div><i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>revels in these Schrödingerian images, able to carry multiple meanings at once. The most malleable piece of evidence in the film is, ironically, that which should have the greatest level of credibility. The audio recording of the couple having an argument, and an implied physical fight with sounds of crashing plates, could either be understood as a display of Samuel’s ardent desire to reclaim his life out of a stifling marriage, as the prosecution argues, or it could sound like a man on the brink, depressed and desperate. Crucially, Triet treats this audio recording as both a flashback and an in-court moment, cutting away from the flashback to the courtroom just as the two are implied to become violent—we hear clanging, breaking, and hitting. The director decides that this is as far as the viewer “can see,” which is perhaps the most demonstrative authorial intervention in the entire film. Sandra offers an explanation as to which sounds correspond to them hitting each other, and which came from Samuel hitting himself or the wall. Yet to a skeptical viewer, this seems not to be an isolated incident, but irrefutable proof of an irreparable marriage.</div><div>Triet’s film is particularly contemporary in how it fits into the discourses about modern relationships and cultural perceptions of women, yet its interest in questioning onscreen reality allows it to pose deeper, theoretical questions about recorded media. Just as nuances can be lost in translation from English to French, so too does the camera leave out greater truths. If a traditional murder plot compels the audience to search for a smoking gun, <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i> confounds that impulse. The question of guilt becomes irrelevant because it is impossible to determine, and deliberately so on Triet’s part; there’s only so much that you are allowed to see. And yet visible truth is irrelevant, too, because in this era of overexposure to the image, we seem to be yearning for something untouched, for something which has been hidden from the domineering reign of hypervisibility. Instead of inviting the audience to find the cracks in the case, it revels in them; <i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>is an ode to relativity, human imperfection, failing memories, and the epistemological curse of perception.</div>Dora Leu/en/notebook/posts/author/870tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107532024-03-07T17:45:03Z2024-03-08T21:08:33ZIntroduction | “Our Body”<div><i>Claire Simon’s <b><a href="https://mubi.com/films/our-body-2023">Our Body</a> </b>is now showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries.</i></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38684/images-w1400.jpg?1709836197"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Our Body </i>(Claire Simon, 2023).</span></div><div>At the beginning, as I say in the prologue of the film, the initiative came from Kristina Larsen, and I was delighted because she's a producer I have a lot of respect for. She told me that she had just spent two years in hospital, that she had discovered this world—the carers, from nurses to doctors, and the patients—and that the ward she was in encompassed everything that women go through in the course of a lifetime. I was very touched by her proposal, not least because when I made <i>Les Bureaux de Dieu</i> (2008), a fiction about family planning, I'd been angry with myself for not having included pregnancy follow-up, which is sometimes provided by family planning. The pill, abortion, pregnancy, controlling one's body, and the desire for a child are all part of the same movement.</div><div>It didn't take long, though, as I spent time in hospital, for the story to take shape: the stages along the path of life, from youth to death. All the more so as I don't like scouting. I was seeing incredible scenes without being able to film them, and it was driving me crazy! It's in the prologue, but it's no less true: between my home and the hospital, there's the cemetery! It made me laugh, but it also scared me. That's why I really insisted on this prologue, which is filmed in a single shot, both subjectively and objectively. I wanted to tell how excited I was by Kristina Larsen’s idea, how on board I was, but also how intimate and literally topographical it was. And so, when I first entered the hospital, I immediately had this thought of a disease that would strike me, cancer. Then my childhood came flooding back: the corridors with the sun streaming in, my sick father… These are my memories.</div><div>I really want to make it clear that this is not a film about the hospital, but about the patients and their bodies. It seems to me that this reverses the usual relationship, where the focus is more on the institution. When I first saw the rushes, I was delighted to see that the film is always on the side of the patients, even though the carers are not denied—that was never the intention.</div><div>What I had in mind was like a leitmotif: filming the body, filming women's bodies. That was all that mattered to me. Bodies in their beauty, in their materiality, in their singularity—in other words, the absence of standards, of canons of beauty. Or by playing with them, as in the case of the young woman whose oocytes are punctured. Both the doctor and the patient are beautiful women, and I thought that never in Hollywood could you film a scene like that with stars!</div><div>I kept on wanting to focus on these bodies. It's not easy to film the body in hospital, because it's largely hidden during operations and childbirth. So I wanted to go straight to the point in terms of representation: breasts, acts of palpation of flesh, bellies, skin. It was almost as if I were on the side of sculpture. I don't feel I've done it brutally, but, on the contrary, with as much love as possible. If the female body is hidden, pain is almost impossible to find. I felt like I was hunting it down. That's why I attach so much importance to the sequence in which the woman discusses her birth with a psychologist while breastfeeding her baby. It's as if you're listening to her voice-over as she gives birth... But it's strange that pain remains a blind spot.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38685/images-w1400.jpg?1709836226"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Our Body </i>(Claire Simon, 2023).</span></div><div>My intention was also to film how language relates to bodies; I was fascinated to see that naming led to designating and then palpating one's own body. I was fascinated to see how naming led to designating, and then palpating, one's own body, especially in the case of doctors who combine gesture with speech, as when a doctor points to the ovaries by touching the bottom of his male belly. The body, language, and the language of the body—that's what interested me.</div><div>As for the appointments and consultations, these face-to-face meetings, I wanted to film this but also to move between the bodies, as this seemed to me to be the most faithful to the intensity of these moments, to the mutual listening that is often extraordinary. The editor, Luc Forveille, who knows me well by now, really edited as I filmed, following this desire to show how things move between them. Then, given the situation, he made his own selection of rushes for my illness. He even told me: "I'll take care of the cancer. He had never taken so much control of the editing process as he did with <i>Notre corps</i>, and I think his work is magnificent—even if he is a man! On the contrary, in the hospital we were an all-female team, which was a prerequisite for making the film possible. Flavia Cordey was sound engineer and Clara François my assistant. These were young women who didn't have children at the time—or one of them had had one very recently—so it was like an initiation for them.</div><div>Another formal choice was to film PMA (Medically Assisted Procreation). It was extraordinary, and I really enjoyed it: playing with the ladders, then the way the laboratory technician teaches and initiates the boy at her side. These are extraordinary machines, but in the end it's the hands, the gestures; there's still the body there. MAP is coitus cut into slices at the hospital: the meeting, the kiss, the sperm collection, the oocyte puncture, putting a sperm into an oocyte and putting an embryo into a uterus when the couple hold hands... Knowing about the MAP process is not the same as seeing it. As far as the robot operation is concerned, it's the same impression of being in Dr. Frankenstein's office, and then there's the more trivial question of anatomy. When it comes to hiding women's bodies, there's also the inner dimension, the entrails. We talk about endometriosis, but what is it, what does it look like, where is it in the body? Representation is necessary to understand and domesticate pain, which is why doctors are constantly drawing. With the robot inside the body it's as if you're lost in a landscape, but with words and naming you get your bearings and it's less worrying. And that's what cinema is all about: providing a representation.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38687/images-w1400.jpg?1709836483"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Our Body </i>(Claire Simon, 2023).</span></div><div>Of course getting the possibility to film in the hospital, and especially surgery, needed an authorization from the Parisian hospital organization, the AP-HP (Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris), which we contacted, and it went well, on the condition no names would be said or readable. We then met the hospital's top brass. I also wrote a letter to all the hospital's staff, in which I explained my intention to follow the trajectory of the female body in a lifetime, recounting, through it, this exceptional service involving all the stages, both happy and unhappy. Kristina Larsen had been hospitalized there, so she knew the people who cared for her, the doctors. When we started filming, things became more refined, and we asked specific patients or caregivers if we could film them. For the most difficult things, there were authorizations including the viewing of the sequence by the subject when it was edited. On the whole, it was very well received with, of course, some rejections—often from men, I might add! Clara François did a fantastic job, making contacts and initiating conversations while Flavia and I were shooting. All three of us cried a lot during the shoot, which was of a very high emotional intensity.</div><div>For surgery scenes we had to be very careful, and above all we had to understand how things worked and moved around the block. Of course, we were all bundled up, but above all we had to avoid touching anything, not even brushing against it, otherwise we'd have to re-sterilize everything. That happened once, and I was so angry!</div><div>There was also the question of our resistance to the scenes we were witnessing. But when the amniotic fluid gushes out during the caesarean section I thought it would stain the camera's optics... Then I said to myself, "That's it, I'm ready to go to war!" Seriously, you're caught up in a movement, a drama, and it's so beautiful to see, understand, and witness it. What really struck me was that the body is a kind of chaos, and during any operation—scalpel, laparoscopic, robotic—the doctors are doing anatomy, they're constantly naming things; it's fascinating. I always had the impression of being in the presence of the Enlightenment! When I filmed the team meetings, it was like being among the Doges of Venice... except that their domain isn't religion, it's science and reason, and the sanction is life and death. Then there's their faith, the joy of saving an organ to preserve the chances of fertility and continence. We understand one word in ten, but we understand everything in the end.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38686/images-w1400.jpg?1709836332"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Our Body </i>(Claire Simon, 2023).</span></div><div>My father was hospitalized with multiple sclerosis at the age of 28, and I was pretty hard on the medical profession. I've often been dazzled by and admired the fact of seeing and naming—in other words, producing thought. Of course, it's also essential for patients to see and understand what we're naming, that it's not a matter of belief but of reason.</div><div>The film builds toward the final sequence, where the disease is strongest. This is sometimes the case, as the carer tells the patient. As far as I'm concerned, I didn't feel the fear until after the filming; as I said, it was the editing that was the hardest part. Ironically, I had once told Sonia Zilberman, a wonderful surgeon, that I had to film an announcement of a patient’s cancer diagnosis. She told me it was impossible. Then, when I fell ill, I had the opportunity. I asked the cinematographer, Céline Bozon, to film me during my announcement, and she did it remarkably well. I'd been overwhelmed... I think it shows! I heard what I didn't want to hear, what was waiting for me that I didn't want to admit. At the same time, I had some knowledge; I knew I wasn't unique. But I wanted to say at the end of the film that you only have one story: your own. Even so, seeing others helps enormously.</div><div>This is the moment when I completely join, through my illness, the community I'm filming. I was already a member as a woman, but now I share a patient's destiny. That's why it seemed essential to me to be filmed naked, as I've done for others. It's also a way of avoiding the overbearing position that I can grant myself as a filmmaker. It's important to see others, not to be a woman alone with questions about her body, her confrontation with doctors, with the hospital institution, but to know that there are others, that there's a community, that it's big, strong.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38683/images-w1400.jpg?1709836011"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Our Body </i>(Claire Simon, 2023).</span></div><div>I'm thinking of what Simone de Beauvoir writes at the beginning of <i>Le Deuxième sexe</i> about the reproduction of the species. Men and women are individuals, but women's physical condition sets them apart from men in this gynecological dimension. I had the feeling that, in certain cases, certain patients felt that being a woman was not necessarily a panacea. At the hospital, I found the reception of the desire for transition to be very benevolent and attentive. I've never felt criticized for expressing a desire for transition, which I think is a fair and remarkable thing.</div><div>Some doctors, in cases other than transition, sometimes couldn't understand why women didn't always want to have a child, why people might prefer not to suffer from endometriosis rather than think about their fertility. I got the impression that the women doctors were listening, without necessarily trying to build up their status as great doctors. This is obviously less the case with some men, who are inclined to build up their status, which becomes a statue. In such cases, I could feel my feminism returning!</div><div>Another feminist dimension for me is that the female body is shown in its beauty, as an object of desire, but its reality is always hidden. But that's precisely what I had access to here. This beauty is also democratic, or political, insofar as this is a hospital with a very broad social mix. Patients were often accompanied by their spouses. When we told them what we were doing and asked for permission, the husband would very often say no. As if his wife's body belonged to him, that he owned it. I used to take great pleasure in saying: “Excuse me, but I was asking Madame.” I don't think I've ever felt this strongly before, and there was nothing strictly social or cultural about it.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38688/images-w1400.jpg?1709836844"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Our Body </i>(Claire Simon, 2023).</span></div><div>Then, at the end of the shooting, an important doctor was sued for gynecological violence. It was very disturbing for me. I hadn’t filmed him in consultation. There was a protest in front of the hospital, and I spontaneously felt I had to film it. These women have come together to talk about their experiences, and among them is a nurse from the hospital. This brings us back to the question of patient consent, which goes beyond this particular hospital. I tried to tell the story from this general point of view: to show a female community of resistance to these questions of consent, violence, and even rape.</div><div>Our body: Lou, a pregnant woman suffering from cancer, says with great derision, "We women are made to suffer. We've always been told that, haven't we? Although the discovery of the epidural has changed things, we still feel that all the archaic things are there: sexual pleasure and the reproduction of the species are paid for by a demonization of the female body, or at least by anxiety, mistrust, and fear. This has determined the division established by men: we'll take care of power, you take care of life. Men know that their existence depends on this. They don't want to know where they come from. They don't like the idea that they come from a woman's desire…</div><div>I wouldn't want anyone to think that the film gives an idea of what constitutes a woman's existence: it's about the passage through hospital, which I don't confuse with life as a whole. Unlike general pathologies, when you break a leg or get cancer, like lung cancer, all the ailments here involve love, desire, sex life, feelings.</div>Claire Simon/en/notebook/posts/author/893tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107522024-03-07T05:17:07Z2024-03-07T15:18:56ZMUBI Podcast: "High & Low - John Galliano" — Kevin Macdonald Tackles Fashion and Forgiveness<div><i>Kevin Macdonald's <a href="https://mubi.com/films/high-low-john-galliano"><b>High & Low—John Galliano</b></a> releases in US and UK theaters on March 8, in Latin America March 14, and in Germany April 11. Find upcoming showtimes and tickets </i><a href="https://mubi.com/galliano"><i><b>here</b></i></a><i>.</i></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38679/images-w1400.jpg?1709790493"></div><div>Superstar fashion designer John Galliano wrecked his career when he was caught on video in a drunken, antisemitic rant circa 2011. Now, in a new documentary, Oscar-winning documentarian Kevin Macdonald (<i>Whitney</i>, <i>One Day in September</i>) asks audiences to gaze into Galliano’s eyes and decide for themselves if he deserves a second act.</div><div>On this special episode, Macdonald tells host Rico Gagliano about coming to terms with fashion, ambiguity, and the human mind.</div><div>Listen to the special episode below or wherever you get your podcasts: <iframe src="https://www.buzzsprout.com/1788738/14643959-high-low-john-galliano-kevin-macdonald-tackles-fashion-and-forgiveness?client_source=small_player&iframe=true" loading="lazy" width="100%" height="200" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="MUBI Podcast, HIGH & LOW - JOHN GALLIANO — Kevin Macdonald tackles fashion and forgiveness" data-height="natural"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mubi-podcast/id1569229544"><b>Apple Podcasts</b></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/mubi-podcast"><b>Stitcher</b></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7Jm8MYgroZT5qsvD2poToC"><b>Spotify</b></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xNzg4NzM4LnJzcw=="><b>Google Podcasts</b></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mubi.io/podcast"><b>More</b></a></div>MUBI Podcast/en/notebook/posts/author/842tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107482024-03-06T19:04:58Z2024-03-06T21:03:27ZExtradimensional Counterpoint: Johnnie Burn, Sound Designer <div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38648/images-w1400.jpg?1709752971"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Zone of Interest </i>(Jonathan Glazer, 2023).</span></div><div>When you start to really <i>hear </i>a movie, you’ll never be able to <i>unhear</i> it. The sound designer, like the cinematographer, is an artist disguised as a technician, a wielder of microphones and mixers whose deepest desire is to serve a cinematic vision. Sound design usually stays in the shadows, but sometimes a film comes along that really makes you listen: Jonathan Glazer’s <i>The Zone of Interest </i>(2023) is one of those films. Its soundscapes are intense, involving, and essential to our narrative comprehension of the film; this is sound design as storytelling, as counterpoint, as argument.</div><div>The artist in disguise behind <i>The Zone of Interest</i> is Johnnie Burn, a British sound designer who, over the past decade, has carved a reputation as the ear of new auteur cinema. Through longstanding collaborations with Glazer and Yorgos Lanthimos (Burn is also behind the surreal soundscapes of <i>Poor Things </i>[2023]), plus standout contributions to Trey Edward Shults’s <i>Waves </i>(2019), Francis Lee’s <i>Ammonite </i>(2020)<i>, </i>and Jordan Peele’s<i> Nope </i>(2022), Burn has established himself as the first choice for filmmakers who care as much about how their films sounds as how they look. Now his work on Glazer’s latest has landed Burn his first Oscar nomination (shared with Tarn Willers) for Best Sound.</div><div>A rigorous study of the banality of evil, <i>The Zone of Interest</i> unfolds mostly within a house on the grounds of the Auschwitz concentration camp where Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) lives in bucolic peace with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children. In interviews, Glazer has spoken about not wanting to reenact atrocities, with the attendant ethical risk of rendering such horrors as perverse entertainment. Instead he has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/10/jonathan-glazer-the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-under-the-skin-interview">talked about</a> making two films, “the one you see and the one you hear.” In <i>The Zone of Interest</i>, we do not see inside the camp; this horror is conveyed via a relentless grinding, an indistinct hum coming from just beyond the Hösses’ garden wall, within which we can occasionally discern gunshots and human cries.</div><div>Effectively, it’s Burn’s job to produce that second film, the one we hear, which discordantly plays alongside otherwise benign images. This layering creates unsettling cognitive dissonance; our eyes see tranquil domesticity, our ears hear horror, our mind fills in the blanks. This approach, which Glazer <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-12-12/composer-mica-levi-future-of-movies-zone-of-interest-under-the-skin-zola-interview">describes</a> as “ears first,” is established in the film’s opening moments: a black screen plunges the viewer into darkness for over a minute, accompanied only by composer Mica Levi’s hellish, swirling prelude. With nothing to look at, our ears search for sense but find only dread and panic.</div><div>During preproduction, Burn embarked on a year of archival research, building a bank of sounds. Fine details—knowing that the camp’s guns were old because modern weapons were sent to the front, for instance—were crucial. Acquiring old machines or finding ways to approximate them was important, but even more vital was finding a way to evoke the sounds of the people living, and suffering, within the camp’s walls. After experimenting with actors (“awfully hammy”), Burn eventually found the sounds he needed in the real world. The vocal samples in <i>The Zone of Interest</i> include snippets harvested from the streets of Berlin at 3 a.m., from outside of hospital emergency departments, and from riots in Paris. After principal photography concluded, Burn spent another extended period in close collaboration with Glazer, Levi, and editor Paul Watts as the film took shape in postproduction. The result of this process is an unusually complex soundscape, bookended by Levi’s eerie music.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38650/images-w1400.jpg?1709753110"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Under the Skin </i>(Jonathan Glazer, 2013).</span></div><div>That four-way collaboration between Watts, Levi, Burn, and Glazer was established while working on <i>Under the Skin </i>(2013), Burn’s first film as head of sound. Glazer’s road-movie/sci-fi/horror experiment casts Scarlett Johansson as a man-eating alien driving a van around the gray streets of Glasgow, picking up real Glaswegians, non-actors filmed with hidden cameras, as prey. For this hybrid creature Burn developed a fittingly chimerical working process, borrowing techniques from documentary to gather a library of sounds and then working closely with Levi to develop that alien soundscape: a wash of buzzing strings, manipulated street sound, and ambiguous drones. Glazer’s storytelling is opaque and fragmented, echoing the dislocation of Johansson’s protagonist, but Burn and Levi’s soundtrack connects those disparate pieces—the sci-fi imagery, inky fantasy sequences, documentary-style footage, and bleak Scottish landscapes—drawing the viewer through the sparse story.</div><div><i>Under the Skin</i> was a breakthrough for Burn, bringing him to the attention of both Yorgos Lanthimos and Jordan Peele. An invitation to work on <i>The Lobster</i> (2015) kicked off a series of collaborations, and Burn has worked on every Lanthimos film since. Although Glazer and Lanthimos are very different directors, both are driven by a perfectionist obsession with detail. Although Burn describes <i>The Favourite </i>(2018) as a film in which the sound is not especially conspicuous, rewatching with attuned ears reveals the layers that go into creating convincing audio. <i>The Favourite</i> unfolds in a clattering, rattling world of empty corridors and gusty rooms. The palace is opulently alienating, chilly, and claustrophobic, despite its size. The clink of jewelry and swish of skirts are subliminal reminders of gendered social expectations, evoking the rigid hierarchies that confine the female characters. The sounds of the courtiers are brittle and metallic (chinking metal, well-heeled feet on polished wood) while lower-status characters are associated with wetter sounds (bubbling saucepans, squelching mud). The squeaking of rabbits is central to the unsettling final shot, and ducks also play a prominent role (one early idea was to include a laugh track of quacks). In the mix, Burn blurs the boundaries between the film’s harpsichord-heavy chamber score and atmospheric sound, adding a level of uncanny modernity to otherwise familiar classical music. Burn’s work is about more than augmentation; it tells us about the characters and draws out key themes.</div><div>If working on a period piece like <i>The Zone of Interest </i>or <i>The Favourite</i> is about recreation, then fantasy projects are about invention. <i>Poor Things</i>, which follows the adventures of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a corpse reanimated by an eccentric scientist, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), takes place in a steampunk vision of the nineteenth century. There were no real locations to record, as the film was shot entirely in a studio, so Burn worked instead with found sounds: a horse and cart is accompanied by the sounds of a steam-powered machine, a cruise ship engine by human heartbeats, and Godwin’s digestion by churning test tubes (“We had to understand: would it be really annoying to just hear bubbling the whole time when you're trying to listen to the words?”). Combined with Jerskin Fendrix’s score, which explores how wind instruments rely on the interplay of both natural breath and mechanically drawn air, Burn’s work blurs divides between animal and machine. Fittingly for a film about stitched together creatures, the soundscape is itself a Frankenstein’s monster, a disarming fusion of the mechanical and organic.</div><div>I spoke to Burn before the Oscar nominations were announced, but it was already clear that this current wave of success has brought him to a new career peak. We fit in two interviews around his schedule, the first over the phone from a noisy Heathrow departure lounge as Burn set off to Los Angeles for a flurry of awards-season events, the second from his home office in Brighton.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38651/images-w1400.jpg?1709753154"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Favourite </i>(Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018).</span></div><div><hr id="true"></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b>Sound design is a niche area of the industry, and you don’t come from a film background. How did you find your way into this kind of work?</div><div><b>JOHNNIE BURN: </b>I always loved music. I grew up in welfare housing, and things were not affordable, but what I did absolutely love was the digital sampling equipment and synthesizers which were coming out. When I was in my teen years, it was a boom time for electronic music equipment. I would spend all my money going to Soho and going around music shops.</div><div>Weirdly, I ended up doing a business degree at City University in London. I would spend most of my time yawning and looking out the window. I had this weird thing where I left an Evian bottle running under a tap, when I went out for a run … and when I came back it exploded. It made me profoundly deaf for about twenty minutes, and I thought that I had lost my hearing. I remember going up to my bedroom, I must have been about nineteen years old. And I was putting my hands on the speakers and realizing that I couldn’t hear anything… I just decided there and then to quit university, and I went and got an apprenticeship at a recording studio in Soho. I worked there for about ten years, and that was my intro. They had this machine called a Synclavier. Every evening at 6 p.m. when the studio closed, this extraordinary piece of kit that Michael Jackson had made <i>Thriller</i> on was mine as long as I could stay awake. I didn't know until that point that my hobby was something you could get paid for.</div><div>Through that route, I met Jonathan Glazer, who is a not-half-bad director! He said to me, around 2002, “I'm gonna do a film one day, and you’re gonna do the sound for me. Can you figure out what you need to know, the difference between a 30-second TV commercial to movies?” That's how I got into movies.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b>How did that professional relationship in advertising lead you into films?</div><div><b>BURN:</b> I worked with Jonathan at this company, [then] I ended up leaving to set up my own business. One of the first things we did together was a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5CwOLYtq7U">Guinness commercial</a>, which is quite well known, with a surfer who goes out to sea and swims amongst horses. We also worked together on the video for UNKLE [featuring Thom Yorke], <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCG7qJAP7Qk">“Rabbit in Your Headlights,”</a> with a man walking through a tunnel constantly being run over by cars. Jon was very forward-thinking, really one of the first people to include real sound outside of the artist’s music in a pop video.</div><div>I’ve done all of Jon’s work for the last 25 years or something, so I’m very lucky. What’s been extraordinary for me is that I was always absolutely in sound [but] what Jon gave me access to was an extraordinary world of film. I was never a cinephile growing up, but because Jon is such a hands-on director, I’ve spent probably about three years in total nonstop, joined together, sitting in a room with one of the best directors of our time, with him constantly telling me what he likes about various different films, or why the sound that we're working on works with that shot. That was my film school, really. </div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> The first feature film you worked on with Glazer on was <i>Birth </i>[2004].</div><div><b>BURN: </b>To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing with film at all. For the rough mix of <i>Birth </i>Jonathan said, “You’re gonna be the head of sound for this,” and I was like, “Great!” You do something called a temp mix when you are about two months in; you throw it together the best you can and do a screening. [James Bond producer] Barbara Broccoli—she was one of the ten people there—stood up mid-screening and said, “Stop! I cannot watch this anymore!” Because I’d mixed it like a TV commercial. It was super loud and horrible. I actually got fired from <i>Birth</i>, but ultimately Jon hired me back on because he said to the producers, “This guy’s great. I can’t finish the film without him.” But it wasn’t so much a baptism of fire, more of a drowning in fire.</div><div>So <i>Birth </i>came and went, and I did a lot of great work on it, but I wasn’t the head of sound or the sound designer. And then, about four years before <i>Under the Skin</i>, Jon said, “By the way, I’ve got another film coming. You are definitely doing it. So you have to figure out exactly what you didn’t know, because we’re not going through that again.” So I did a couple of terrible movies which I’m really glad no one ever sees, bottom-dwelling things which I happened to find out about through someone. But they really helped me understand how to tell a story through sound.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b>What was it that you had to learn?</div><div><b>BURN: </b>It was twofold. One was the connections, knowing the right people to do the other teamwork things that we need—like foley, which is a whole big area of film that you don’t really do in commercial [work]. But more so, that sound can be such a powerful tool and have so much more to say than just the narrative of what you're saying. It can be juxtaposition and counterpoint. In a commercial you want to have things very clearly there and as loud as possible, an impactful call to action. In a film, you can play a sound which an hour later will appear again later. I had to learn how to use it in a “sound design” kind of way.</div><div>People use sound design in different ways. Sound design can mean music, this kind of score which can often be a bit more atonal. And sound designer can also mean the guy who is hired specifically to do the helicopter sounds or the spaceship. The way I tend to use it is more holistic. You’re the person in charge of how the whole aspect of sound is recorded, and how it is used narratively and to emotionally convey the whole narrative of the film from beginning to end, and also how that is presented to the audience.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38652/images-w1400.jpg?1709753276"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Under the Skin </i>(Jonathan Glazer, 2013).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> Then came <i>Under the Skin</i>, which was a real breakthrough, in that it allowed you and Glazer to establish your technique.</div><div><b>BURN:</b> I’m still really in love with the whole process and experience of that movie. It was extraordinary. It was really about discovering with Jon a way of recording sound in the real world and repurposing that documentary sound. We spent weeks on the streets of Glasgow. We had this microphone that we had in the handle of an umbrella, a directional pointy thing, so we cut the handle and stuck one of those in. It meant that we could pretend that we were just standing there with an umbrella, and you could stretch your arm out and when someone was walking past, we could point this microphone two feet from their face while they were talking and record exactly what they were saying. That’s the bulk of where sound came from, many hours hanging out on Sauchiehall Street with people screaming and shouting.</div><div>What that ended up giving us was a really warts-and-all soundscape. All that unusual stuff in the soundscape, the bits we only got because we were out in the street… That’s the bit that gave that extra dimension, the things that your brain usually filters out and Hollywood sound editors find extraneous, so filter out in the sound mix. Approaching the world in a different way was the challenge there. And because it was the first film that I was head of sound on, it was just enormously enjoyable, spending a year with Jon in this little room in Soho putting it together. I mean, I was shattered by the end of it. It was one of the first things that occurred to me when I was asked to do <i>The Zone of Interest</i>… I don’t know how I’ll do that without dying!</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b>What’s that working process like? How does a Jonathan Glazer film come together?</div><div><b>BURN: </b>Jon has a workshop in Camden, and [editor] Paul Watts sits in one room, Mica [Levi, the composer] sits in another room, and I sit in another room because I live in Brighton; I’m actually virtual. I have a screen and an open microphone that’s on every day all day, so whenever I play my work in Brighton it also comes out on a screen and a pair of speakers in [my] room [in Camden]. So Mica comes in to have a look at what I’m up to, and we speak about it, and that basically goes on for about a year. Jon wanders between different rooms with more or less focus on different days depending on where the cut and thrust of the film needs to be.</div><div>Jon absolutely doesn't use temp score, or anything like that. For him it's very much about putting the film together, rigidly, formally, and making it work without any Band-Aids. And then the process with Mica and the score is not to underscore or belabor the beats or emotions that we already know; it's to find more truth to the film and write some form of counter-narrative. Mica will play something, and Jon and I will sit there and listen to it and say, “That’s amazing. Do that.” And then I’ll say, “Okay, well, if that's the case, then you know, this fridge hum should be that pitch because it carries mood across. And you know, now I think that that person talking— their voice is too aggressive, so we should ameliorate that.“</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b><i>Under the Skin</i> and <i>The Zone of Interest</i> put an unusual emphasis on sound, in a way that has been widely commented on by critics.</div><div><b>BURN: </b>Unlike many directors, Jonathan is really, really aware of the dimension of sound, [that it can be] such a huge tool in the armory of a filmmaker. Often sound is seen as secondary; it augments, or it makes the thing not sound like a film set, or whatever. Jon knows it’s a layer, and it tends to be the side from which we need the truth more than we do for pictures. You can fool the eye much easier than you can fool the ear. In Jon’s films the sound will always have something to say beyond what you’re looking at. I think because sound is so cheap to capture, compared to pictures, people sort of overlook it. But if you’re presented with something which is an image and sound, you tend to believe the sound. It’s hugely powerful.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38653/images-w1400.jpg?1709753344"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Killing of a Sacred Deer </i>(Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> It sounds like a very distinctive process. How does working with Glazer compare to working with someone like Yorgos Lanthimos?</div><div><b>BURN: </b>Yorgos doesn’t ever give me a brief—I should be so lucky! He just says, “You’re the sound guy. Just do it.” That’s the brief. But it's more that there's an inherent brief. When you work with Yorgos, he hires you because you understand the films he wants to make, because he trusts and believes in you. Then he creates an environment where you're free to do whatever you want to and experiment within that.</div><div>Yorgos saw <i>Under the Skin</i>,and he really liked it. I worked with him on <i>The Lobster</i>, and then he got <i>The Killing of a Sacred Deer</i> [2017] greenlit. That was pivotal for our working relationship, because we got to the point in the process where Yorgos had pretty much edited the feature, which is when traditionally you head over to the sound department for three or four months of sound work. At that precise point, Yorgos said to me, “I'm really sorry, but Olivia Colman has just come free, and I can now go film <i>The Favourite</i>, so I'm going to have to leave you to it.” And you know, that was about it: “You’re going to have to do the sound for <i>The Killing of a Sacred Deer</i> on your own.” He pretty much said, “I'll see it at Cannes.” </div><div>It was really frightening. I remember I had never been so nervous in my life. Because I’d made all these decisions, and thrown them in the film, and now I was playing it to Yorgos in front of 3,000 of the world’s press. So that was really hair-raising! And then after, in the bar, I said, “So, did you like it?” And he said, “No, not really, but we can fix it.” But when it boiled down to it,he did [like it] actually; there was only so much that needed to change.</div><div>He forced me to start thinking more like a filmmaker. As a sound designer, you think, “I can make amazing sounds,” and you try and stuff them all in the film. But when the director leaves you to it, you stop saying “Do you like A, B, or C?” You start thinking, right, what is the only thing that would really work on this scene? What’s the film trying to say? Once you start thinking about it more clearly, there is only one right choice. It really fundamentally helped me to learn more about how to make film sound, and so for the subsequent films, like <i>The Favourite</i> and <i>Poor Things</i>, Yorgos has said, “You know what you’re doing, play me it when you’re ready.”</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38655/images-w1400.jpg?1709753571"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Poor Things </i>(Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b><i>The Favourite</i> and <i>Poor Things</i> are interesting to compare. They’re both period films, but <i>The Favourite</i> is very much set in one real location, while <i>Poor Things</i> is on a studio set.</div><div><b>BURN: </b>With <i>The Favourite</i>, Yorgos did the first draft of the picture, then we went [to Hatfield House] and reenacted every single shot. Every time anyone walked down a corridor on <i>The Favourite</i>, what you’re hearing was me in size ten stilettos, or one of my team in boots. We spent a couple of days recording every single door. It was amazing going in and realizing that when you walk into the room of such an old house, everything rattles. That was one of those fortuitous discoveries that you wouldn't get [otherwise] because you'd never sit in front of a sound effects database back in Soho or Hollywood and choose to put rattling pots and timber into a film like that.</div><div><i>Poor Things</i> was the first set build for Yorgos, so there wasn’t a location which I could visit to strip of sound. There were not actually any real-world locations, so the process of making the sound was to go and record things in the real world, and then manipulate them so that they sound unusual, or to repurpose them. For instance, the ship's engine was a heartbeat, because the ship looks really unusual, so putting on the chug of a dull diesel engine would have made it more boring than it looks. Finding a slightly unusual sound for it, something with more character, but still subtle, was key to creating the world.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b>Again with <i>Poor Things</i>, you’re also working with a really distinctive composer, Jerskin Fendrix. Symbiotic relationships with composers such as Levi and Fendrix seem to be quite central to your work, given that sound design often seems to cross over into music and vice versa.</div><div><b>BURN:</b> Again, it’s quite an unusual process. Many composers work by being sent the film, and they’re asked to underscore the emotion that they’re looking at, and write some music to go with that. But Yorgos doesn’t want to do that at all; he sees that as a way to create something that you would already expect. So Jerskin wrote the entire score before it was even shot, and then Yorgos, along with the picture editor, put that to the film—and somehow, miraculously, it works.</div><div>The version I saw [first] already had the music on, which was brilliant because the instrumentation is so singular and specific. It really caused me to have a rethink of what I had imagined, and I made my work more spare and singular to suit. I'm not a musician, but I really understand music and music production, so I enjoy making sound design which is commensurate with score, and which will carry on pitch and tone and rhythm and things across scenes so that everything dovetails together nicely, like having bespoke cupboards fitted.</div><div>It's something that came up, actually, when I first met Jordan Peele [to work on <i>Nope</i>]. He was saying that was the bit that really excited him. He first called me, and he was like, “I think I need to understand what you do. Talk me through what you did on <i>Under the Skin</i>. I really need to understand how you can make a soundscape sympathetic to a musical score, how you can make it all work.”</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38654/images-w1400.jpg?1709753484"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Nope </i>(Jordan Peele, 2022).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b><i>Nope</i> presented another challenge, because you had to build this unseen, alien creature.</div><div><b>BURN: </b><i>Nope</i>, more than any other film I’ve worked on, was about placing you in the middle of a soundscape, in the movie theater, and understanding that small disturbances can become quite unnerving. Whereas originally, I thought it was gonna be about creating the sound of a monster, it ended up being more about creating the sound that the monster made within the environment—the disturbance in the environment, which became a lot more freaky to the viewer. I spent quite a bit of time outside in the desert of Santa Clarita, California, where it was filmed, understanding what it felt like when a gust of wind blew down the valley and you heard the bushes move… That’s quite scary! It was about making the hairs on the back of your neck tingle by manipulating the natural environment to sound just a little bit odd, but not so odd that it wasn’t believable.</div><div>For the monster, we got a bunch of very talented actors and asked them to scream like they're on a roller coaster having fun. Then when we dropped a hat, they suddenly had to make that become not fun anymore. And we mixed around with the difference between the fun screams and pain screams. I also spent a bit of time around the Six Flags amusement park recording from a distance people on roller coasters screaming, because that has a really unusual drift in the air. Then it was also about blending that with just the sound of a whistling wind, so you weren’t sure if you were just hearing wind or just the sound of people screaming.</div><div>It was so much fun working on <i>Nope</i> because it was a film which used sound really well to describe what you can’t see. That gives you great creative license. I think it's just really powerful for mental imagery, because the images in your head are going to be more scary than the ones that we can give you, because they’re personal.</div>Rachel Pronger/en/notebook/posts/author/789tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107472024-03-06T17:30:54Z2024-03-06T18:29:29ZRushes | IATSE Bargaining, Temenos, the Preferred Beer of the Rebel Alliance<div><i>Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, <a href="https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/sign-up-for-the-notebook-weekly-edit-newsletter">sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter</a> and follow us <a href="https://twitter.com/MUBInotebook">@mubinotebook</a></i>.</div><div><b>NEWS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38642/images-w1400.jpg?1709747841"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>A Different Man </i>(Aaron Schimberg, 2024).</span></div><ul><li><a href="https://deadline.com/2024/03/iatse-teamsters-contract-talks-what-to-expect-1235844497/">IATSE, Teamsters, and the Hollywood Basic Crafts unions began bargaining jointly</a> with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after a <a href="https://variety.com/2024/artisans/news/iatse-teamsters-strike-rally-hollywood-1235925985/">thousands-strong rally in Los Angeles</a>. In <i>Variety</i>, <a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/iatse-matthew-loeb-amptp-contract-ai-streaming-1235927256/">IATSE president Matthew Loeb discusses the union’s priorities</a> and the threat of another strike after the current contract expires on July 31.</li><li>In an open letter, Carlo Chatrian, the outgoing artistic director of the Berlinale, and Mark Peranson, the festival’s head of programming, <a href="https://twitter.com/CarloChatrian/status/1763566000560025822?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1763566000560025822%7Ctwgr%5E0ce38ab7880c9d4c507c894460001ef8f3eb0351%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fvariety.com%2F2024%2Ffilm%2Ffestivals%2Fberlinale-director-carlo-chatrian-closing-ceremony-antisemitism-1235927597%2F">respond to the backlash that followed the closing ceremony</a>, at which a number of award recipients called for a ceasefire in Gaza: “This year’s festival was a place for dialogue and exchange for ten days; yet once the films stopped rolling, another form of communication has been taken over by politicians and the media, one which weaponizes and instrumentalizes anti-Semitism for political means.”</li><li><a href="https://www.filmlinc.org/daily/53rd-new-directors-new-films-lineup-announced-taking-place-april-3-14/">The lineup for this year’s New Directors/New Films has been announced</a>, including the New York premiere of Aaron Schimberg’s <i>A Different Man </i>as the Opening Night selection. The festival will take place April 3 to 14.</li></ul><div><b>REMEMBERING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38643/images-w1400.jpg?1709747894"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Diary of a Young Comic </i>(Gary Weis, 1979).</span></div><ul><li><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/arts/television/richard-lewis-dead.html">Richard Lewis has died at 76.</a> In <a href="https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/richard-lewis">a 2008 conversation with Kate Simon for <i>Interview</i></a>, the comedian and actor spoke about his love for the films of Buster Keaton, John Cassavetes, Jean Eustache, and others. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest,” <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C36JWjBvcJo/?hl=en">writes Larry David</a>, a longtime friend and collaborator. “But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”</li><li><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/01/paolo-taviani-brothers-italian-films-padre-padrone-dies-92">Paolo Taviani has died at 92.</a> With his brother, Vittorio, he wrote and directed such celebrated and politically engaged films as <i>Padre Padrone </i>(1977), <i>The Night of the Shooting Stars </i>(1982), and <i>Caesar Must Die </i>(2012). “The story of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is also that of Italian cinema after the end of the Second World War,” <a href="https://www.screendaily.com/news/locarno-pays-tribute-to-filmmaker-paolo-taviani-who-has-died-aged-92/5191156.article">writes Giona A. Nazzaro</a>, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival.</li><li><a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/eye-on-the-screen-david-bordwell-1947-2024">David Bordwell, the film theorist, has died at 76.</a> In addition to his definitive studies of such filmmakers as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, and Sergei Eisenstein, Bordwell was deeply engaged with commercial Hollywood cinema, including the role of the spectator. “His legacy will clearly be vast and lasting,” <a href="https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2024/03/03/gone-but-far-from-forgotten/">writes his wife and collaborator, Kristin Thompson</a>, “which to me provides the best consolation for his loss.”</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED VIEWING</b></div><ul><li>Janus Films has released a trailer for its much-anticipated restoration of Med Hondo’s slave-ship musical, <i>West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty </i>(1979), a landmark of anti-colonial African cinema.</li></ul><div><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q5JpfsM-g0c?si=edUo6IxEwS2giRy1" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><ul><li>Altered Innocence has released a trailer for Vera Drew’s <i>The People’s Joker </i>(2022), a trans coming-of-age story whose freewheeling use of intellectual property resulted in it being <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/tiff-pulls-the-peoples-joker-unauthorized-trans-batman-movie-1234762588/">dropped from TIFF 2022</a>, where our own Chloe Lizotte commended its <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/toronto-dispatch-the-search-for-wonder">“infectious visual anarchy.”</a></li></ul><div><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/W9KlASSUq4M?si=WvXD09x9dq5ZbMCR" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><div><b>RECOMMENDED READING</b></div><ul><li>“Sometimes I’m sleeping and they call me: ‘The bulldozers are coming.’” <a href="https://filmmakermagazine.com/125182-interview-basel-adra-yuval-abraham-no-other-land/">In <i>Filmmaker</i>, Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, two of the four co-directors of <i>No Other Land</i> (2024), speak to Nicolas Rapold</a> about making a documentary in the occupied West Bank.</li><li>“Within living memory it was possible to believe in the proximity of a new world.” <a href="https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/591608/suneil-sanzgiri-s-here-the-earth-grows-gold">In e-flux, Phil Coldiron reviews “Here the Earth Grows Gold,” Suneil Sanzgiri’s current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.</a></li><li>“As an action flick, <i>Tenet</i> is a true original, a sci-fi thriller built around a conceit so elaborate that it occasionally achieves Zen-koan levels of paradoxical placidity.” <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/tenet-is-a-backward-movie-for-an-upside-down-world.html">For Vulture, Bilge Ebiri revisits Christopher Nolan’s <i>Tenet</i> (2020) in light of <i>Oppenheimer</i> (2023).</a></li><li>“The crack in the promise of the Academy Awards is that American pictures don’t cut it any more.” <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/david-thomson/on-the-red-carpet">David Thomson’s mordant Oscars preview in the <i>London Review of Books</i></a> rounds up the presumptive winners. The audiences, he suggests, are the losers.</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED EVENTS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38644/images-w1400.jpg?1709748246"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Black Mama, White Mama </i>(Eddie Romero, 1973).</span></div><ul><li>New York, through March 31: <a href="https://www.spectacletheater.com/grier-markov/">Spectacle presents a four-film retrospective of Pam Grier’s and Margaret Markov’s performances in exploitation films of the 1970s</a>, including two in which they co-star: <i>Black Mama, White Mama </i>(1973) and <i>The Arena </i>(1974).</li><li>New York, March 19: <a href="https://www.lightindustry.org/smallwood">Light Industry presents an illustrated lecture by Christine Smallwood</a> to accompany the release of <i>La Captive</i>, her new monograph on Chantal Akerman’s 2000 film, from Fireflies Press.</li><li>Brussels, March 14 through July 21: <a href="https://www.bozar.be/en/calendar/chantal-akerman-travelling">Bozar presents “Chantal Akerman: Traveling,”</a> an exhibition of images and documents from the filmmaker’s archive accompanied by a complete retrospective of her movies.</li><li>Temenos, June 26 through 30: <a href="https://www.thetemenos.org/temenos-screenings/temenos-2024/">This year’s screening of Gregory Markopoulos’s <i>Eniaios</i> will feature Cycles XV – XVIII.</a> The project, with installments scheduled every four years since 2004, represents a monumental reconfiguration of Markopoulos’s life’s work, projected in the open air of the Greek countryside.</li></ul><div><b>RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38645/images-w1400.jpg?1709748606"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Priscilla </i>(Sofia Coppola, 2023).</span></div><ul><li><a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/fairy-tale-starts-to-melt-sofia-coppola-discusses-priscilla">Sofia Coppola speaks with Phuong Le</a> about “the loneliness of sequestered adolescence” and “moments of filmmaking déjà vu” in <i>Priscilla </i>(2023).</li><li><a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/island-of-misfit-toys-julio-torres-on-problemista">Julio Torres, cult comedy writer and now director of <i>Problemista</i> (2023), tells Kamikaze Jones his dream collaborators</a> from among the “grande dames of international art cinema.”</li><li><a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/rarefilmm-against-the-world">George Iskander considers the imperiled mission of Rarefilmm</a>, a website whose community of volunteers preserve and make accessible orphan films from underappreciated national cinemas.</li></ul><div><b>WISH LIST</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38646/images-w1400.jpg?1709748726"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>God's Comedy </i>(João César Monteiro, 1995).</span></div><ul><li><i><a href="https://www.elumiere.net/asociacion/illuminatedhours.php">Illuminated Hours: The Early Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler</a></i> (Asociación Lumière) collects interviews, writings, and production documents by the American poet laureates of 16mm film.</li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/spectrumasie/status/1763151539344912780?s=46">The restored filmography of João César Monteiro</a>, among the most revered and challenging Portuguese directors of his generation, will be the subject of a Spectrum Films box set this year in the distributor’s Section Parallèle collection.</li></ul><div><b>EXTRAS</b></div><ul><li>Recently rediscovered: In the 2003–2004 premiere of the original <i>Star Wars </i>trilogy on Chile’s Channel 13, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and even Emperor Palpatine can be seen <a href="https://www.vidaextra.com/cine/en-el-canal-13-de-chile-los-personajes-de-star-wars-simulaban-que-agarraban-cervezas-cuando-las-peliculas-se-iban-a-publicidad">choosing the crisp, refreshing taste of Cerveza Cristal</a>.</li><li>Can heartbreak feel any better in a place like this? <a href="https://deadline.com/2024/02/amc-theatres-nicole-kidman-preshow-campaign-new-spots-1235841574/">AMC Theatres has begun to roll out three new pre-roll spots starring Nicole Kidman</a>, a strategic maneuver they’re calling “Phase Two.”</li></ul>Notebook/en/notebook/posts/author/44tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107462024-03-04T21:50:54Z2024-03-16T13:21:32ZIsland of Misfit Toys: Julio Torres on “Problemista”<div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38636/images-w1400.jpg?1709589819"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Problemista </i>(Julio Torres, 2024).</span></div><div>As a former <i>Saturday Night Live</i> writer, co-creator of the bilingual HBO cult favorite <i>Los Espookys</i>, and government-certified “alien of extraordinary ability,” Julio Torres has been preoccupied with the secret life of objects: the existential dilemmas that plague baubles and trinkets divorced from their original purpose. In <i>Problemista</i> (2024), Torres’s debut feature, the efficacy of form and function, as it applies to the predominant social order and the flimsy structures that reinforce it, is up for constant reconsideration. Through fabulist vignettes and an iridescent array of signs and symbols (the egg, the hourglass, the mythical hydra), the film offers a buoyant critique of institutional frameworks, especially the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the American immigration system, but also the avarice of corporate banks and the innumerable hypocrisies of the art world. Contributing a singular perspective to the discourse surrounding “the queer art of failure,” Torres views conventional notions of utility with puckish skepticism and advocates for a deliberate misuse of the proverbial toolkit (or toybox) when addressing both genre and his overall design for living. </div><div>Torres stars as the meek and aspirational toymaker Alejandro, who has moved to New York City from El Salvador in hopes of landing a job at Hasbro. His ideas for novelty playthings, like a slinky that refuses to descend the stairs, are Fisher-Price by way of Andy Kaufman, and they do not appear to generate much enthusiasm from his prospective employer. In order to secure a work visa, Alejandro must overcome endless logistical hurdles and navigate a prickly relationship with the high-strung art-world pariah Elizabeth (played with frenzied vitriol and motor-mouthed desperation by Tilda Swinton), whom he encounters while working as an archivist at the cryogenic facility where her husband, Bobby (an unsung painter played by RZA), is frozen. Narration by an unseen Isabella Rossellini provides an oracular, matriarchal ambience to what soon becomes an unlikely buddy comedy with lysergic bursts of social satire. </div><div>With tableaux reminiscent of a cubicle-bound Remedios Varo and set design from Katie Byron that posits what the office sequence from Jean-Luc Godard’s <i>Tout va bien</i> (1972) would look like as an escape room by Michel Gondry, Alejandro’s journey to self-discovery is mediated and diffracted by the gig economy and the looming prospect of deportation. One of <i>Problemista</i>’<i>s</i> most inspired creations is the personification of Craigslist, embodied by Larry Owens as a malevolent djinn spouting the titles of classified ads from within a swirling torrent of cyber-detritus. In scenes like this, Terry Gilliam comes to mind as a key progenitor: a sketch comedian with an outré sensibility turned surrealist auteur, concerned with the mechanics of broken systems and the narrative potential of the neo-mythological impulse. With Torres, the resulting conceptual sprawl and penchant for niche bits is bolstered by a fascination with the tradition of gay male diva worship, a winsome opposition to neoliberal complacency, and a revitalized approach to cinematic expressionism.</div><div>On the day of the limited US release of <i>Problemista</i>, I spoke to Torres about queer community, the epistemology of the “<a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/karen">Karen</a>,” labyrinths, astrology, and the joy of obstacles.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38638/images-w1400.jpg?1709589893"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Problemista</i> (Julio Torres, 2024).</span></div><div><hr id="true"></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> In both <i>Los Espookys</i> and <i>Problemista</i>, there's a narrative emphasis on crafting, building, and designing in the most literal sense—as a means of self-actualization. How does the act of making inform your ethos as an artist?</div><div><b>JULIO TORRES:</b> I was really raised with the motto "If it doesn't exist, make it," or "If it doesn't exist, don't settle for the things that do exist." That is not only such a big part of the way that I operate visually, but also the core of this movie: if you are presented with options A, B, and C, but you want D, or some secret, unlisted option, make it. </div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> You frequently collaborate with your mom and your sister; they're both designers, and your mom's an architect as well. </div><div><b>TORRES:</b> My mom, other than being the direct influence for Alejandro's mother in the movie, designed the magical playhouse castle that we see in the opening scene. I asked her to draw something up, and we gave it to the production designer, who made it happen, and that was such a joyous moment.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> Did you have a particular transitional object or toy that you were sentimentally attached to as a child?</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> I had a lot of them. I definitely had a revolving door of Barbies that I really cared about, which inspired the Esmeralda Barbie in the movie. I had a Cinderella and an Ariel Barbie. I loved anything that made me feel like a little storyteller. I was more into dolls and figurines than active objects, because to me I was not the one having fun—I was just a storyteller, and the stories were passing through me. A ball or a puzzle weren't that interesting to me, but I did have these little wooden blocks that I would use to make labyrinths and mazes. I love making little mazes.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> For the Barbies to traverse? </div><div><b>TORRES:</b> No, the Barbies were too big for the mazes.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38639/images-w1400.jpg?1709589918"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Problemista </i>(Julio Torres, 2024).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> How did writing for sketch comedy inform your work? </div><div><b>TORRES:</b> You know, I never set out to be a sketch comedian, or a stand-up comic for that matter. I had a certain sensibility, and those were the vessels that were available to me. Now I have fallen in love with it, and I want to keep doing it. But I really don't think of myself as a sketch comedian who has now made a movie. I think of myself as a creator who has found different avenues, and at that time it was that, and now it's this, and tomorrow I don't know.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b><i>Problemista</i> features many luminaries of queer New York City nightlife: your former roommate and classmate Spike Einbinder, performers like Charlene Incarnate and River Ramirez, who has my favorite line in the film, music by Macy Rodman, and a score composed by OHYUNG. How is making a film conducive to celebrating and maintaining that community?</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> The only way that I know how to work is by making work with people that I like, know, respect, and admire. These are the people [who] are all those things. That brings me more joy than casting someone who was chosen by committee and then being with them on set and then never again. Not only am I grateful that these people are a part of this movie but I'm also so interested in their work outside of this movie: I want to see a Spike movie, I want to see an immersive River theatrical piece, I want to see Charlene in a music video.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> We need the Macy Rodman rock opera, obviously.</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> Yeah, we need the Macy Rodman Super Bowl halftime show. </div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> I see a ritualistic aspect of your standup in terms of manifesting collaborations. Earlier iterations of your work seem to be conjuring collaborations with Tilda Swinton and Isabella Rossellini into existence. What are your formative memories of encountering each of these actresses' work for the first time?</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> It's interesting because before meeting them, Tilda and Isabella were abstract concepts to me, in the same way that Spike, River, and all these other people are fully created worlds unto themselves to those who have never met them. None of these people are empty canvases for a director to impose meaning on. I feel a kinship with people like that, people that have an allure that precedes them. In terms of where I came across them for the first time, with Isabella it was definitely<i> Blue Velvet </i>[1986]. I think Lynch was one of those first gateways to cinema that I had. A fellow Aquarius director.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> You and Lynch are both palpably Aquarius in many ways.</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> Spike has an incredible David Lynch impression if you haven't seen it, so maybe Spike is manifesting a project with Lynch… We will see. </div><div>With Tilda, I feel like she was directly downloaded into my consciousness from the get-go. It's like if you asked me, "When was the first time you tried Coca-Cola?" I definitely know that <i>Orlando</i> [1992] had an early impact, and also randomly <i>The Beach </i>[2000]. She's pretty sinister in it.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38640/images-w1400.jpg?1709589987"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Problemista </i>(Julio Torres, 2024).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> What other grande dames of international art cinema do you hope to work with?</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> Okay, this is maybe a deep cut, but a woman who has stayed with me for the longest time who I really want to make something with—I don't know what; I hope our paths cross at one point, if she'll have me—is Alfre Woodard. Particularly for her arc on season two of <i>Desperate Housewives</i>. I love her. I've had an admiration for Anjelica Huston and Penélope Cruz from a distance forever. I recently had the immense privilege of working with Rosie Perez, and hopefully there's more soon.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> There are certain archetypes, like the wicked stepmother or the eccentric widow, that you often engage with. Are there difficult women in the history of cinema that you gravitate toward? Or better yet, are there characters in the cinematic landscape that you consider Problemistas?</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> I think that Adam Sandler's character in <i>Uncut Gems</i> [2019] is a certified Problemista. He's really addicted to, and thriving within, problems. Anna Faris in <i>Smiley Face</i> [2007] is a Problemista. Like, "Girl, what are you doing?"</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> It's funny hearing those two examples because the word <i>Problemista</i> for me evokes a glamor or perhaps an expertise in amassing problems.</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> Oh no, for me it's not an expert. It's a person who gravitates toward problems, who creates problems, and who thrives within problems, within conundrums and catch-22s, and there's a loneliness to it that I have a connection with… Lucille Bluth [of <i>Arrested Development</i>] is not a Problemista. She's too in control. </div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> That's a great distinction. So there's a haplessness that comes with being a Problemista? Is Tanya McQuoid [of <i>The White Lotus</i>] a Problemista?</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> [<i>After a moment of exuberant contemplation.</i>] Nooooo, because she doesn't like it, because she's not thriving in it. She's quite literally drowning in it. She's not picking at a wound, she's trying to heal.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> I feel like in <i>Problemista</i> there's an empathetic deconstruction of what viewers might classify as "Karens" through various characters, including Elizabeth, but also the doctor at the cryogenic facility, and to an extent, River's character at Bank of America. Do you identify these characters as "Karens”?</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> I don't, and the term wasn't in my mind when I was writing it. I think it was actually at the tail end of writing the script that the term entered the collective consciousness. A distinction that I make is that, to me, a "Karen" is someone who weaponizes her status in an oppressive system to her advantage: [for example,] calling the cops on someone. But I don't think that's what Elizabeth is doing. I think that she's just fighting for dear life. She's a wounded animal, and she's clawing at whatever she sees. She's not interested in punishment. She's interested in survival. A lot of it is rooted in trauma responses. When she's being rude to the waiter, she's being rude to the waiter in hopes that Alejandro will learn how to survive, or advocate for himself. It's a very flawed, painful way of going through life, and it's not prescriptive. I'm not saying, "Try this at home." But I do think he manages to learn something from it.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38641/images-w1400.jpg?1709590041"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Problemista </i>(Julio Torres, 2024).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> The film has a tangible compassion for difficult characters backed into various corners.</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> Everyone's trapped in the movie, and River manages to convey that feeling so incredibly well for the 30 seconds they have on screen. You see the gears turning, and you see the calculation of "No, it's me or him."</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> This is mirrored in the overall production design. Were there any visual references that were particularly meaningful for you when developing the look of the film?</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> I was very into New York City as labyrinth: endless staircases, hallways, noise, people always in motion, everyone struggling to fulfill their own quest, everyone on the verge of drowning, so they don't have the time or the energy or the resources to keep the person next to them from drowning. A big game of snakes and ladders, which is what it feels like a lot of the time.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> In the past you've spoken about vacuous gestures of representation in contemporary queer cinema. I thought it was interesting that the first overtly queer moment of <i>Problemista</i> is when Alejandro has a transactional erotic exchange as a hired cleaning boy. I wanted to ask you about that decision.</div><div><b>TORRES:</b> There's a lot of people who will probably think, "Oh, poor thing! He had no choice," but for me, it's a moment of joy. The only way Alejandro can address his need for sex and intimacy is through this excuse of obtaining money. He's so busy keeping his eye on the prize and trying to stay afloat that he hasn't allowed himself to experience desire, and the only way he can is by making it part of the assignment. There's worlds within Alejandro that we don't get to see.</div>Kamikaze Jones/en/notebook/posts/author/889tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107432024-02-28T23:02:01Z2024-03-16T13:20:19ZFairy Tale Starts to Melt: Sofia Coppola Discusses "Priscilla"<div><i>Sofia Coppola's </i><a href="https://mubi.com/films/priscilla"><b><i>Priscilla</i></b></a> <i>is now showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries.</i></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38626/images-w1400.jpg?1709161923"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Priscilla </i>(Sofia Coppola, 2023).</span></div><div>Sofia Coppola’s <i>Priscilla</i> (2023) is deceptively soft to the touch. In adapting Priscilla Presley’s 1985 <i>Elvis and Me</i> memoir, the filmmaker brings an astonishing life story to the big screen, but also all of the beautiful, enviable objects that line the cage of celebrity. From luxurious Cadillacs to a lush array of sparkly designer dresses, accessorized with equally shiny handguns, these markers of luxury hum with palpable allure. At the same time, a sense of foreboding looms large. The opening shot lingers on the perfectly manicured feet of Cailee Spaeny’s Priscilla as they gingerly step across a shaggy, coral-pink rug. The seductive, tactile tableau conjures pleasure and comfort, yet it also foreshadows how Priscilla will sink further and further into a gilded sepulcher throughout her turbulent relationship with Elvis, embodied here by Jacob Elordi. </div><div>Celebrated for her keen sensitivity to the aesthetics of girlhood, as seen in <i>The Virgin Suicides</i> (1999), <i>Marie Antoinette</i> (2006), and elsewhere, Coppola—along with costume designer Stacey Battat and production designer Tamara Deverell—furnishes the world of Priscilla with instantly iconic details. Their Graceland, constructed on a soundstage, resembles a wedding cake with a hollow core; the creamy white furniture of the resplendent living room as well as the gaudy lavishness of Elvis’s bedroom bear witness to the couple’s marital breakdown. While the film’s stylized artifice reflects the promulgation of Priscilla’s image to the public, such domestic extravagance is rendered lifeless by Coppola’s muted approach, a juxtaposition that heightens the quietly harrowing tragedy of this emotionally measured film. As her husband and his circle foist a new identity upon her, Priscilla loses the teenage opportunity to sculpt her own inner world, finding herself frozen into an ornamental existence; there is little difference between her and the decorative objects of Graceland. Once the glitz and glamor of celebrity are stripped away, there remains a young woman who, like many of Coppola’s heroines, is forced into a state of perpetual waiting for a change that can’t arrive soon enough.</div><div>On the day of our interview, Coppola had a packed schedule, including an in-depth conversation with Richard Curtis at the British Film Institute and an appearance at Hatchards bookstore, where she signed copies of her art book, <i>Archive, 1999-2023</i>, which includes visual references as well as behind-the-scenes materials surrounding her filmography. The event was fervidly covered by a legion of teenage girls and young women on social media, a testament to Coppola’s beloved and enduring legacy. In our conversation, we dig deep into the loneliness of sequestered adolescence, a satin-wrapped solitude steeped in the melancholy of fairy tales. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38628/images-w1400.jpg?1709222733"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Priscilla </i>(Sofia Coppola, 2023).</span></div><div><hr id="true"></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> For each film, you have a mood board of visual references. What did you have in mind for the <i>Priscilla</i> mood board?</div><div><b>SOFIA COPPOLA:</b> We had so many photos of Priscilla from her life. I think the first ones were her wedding photos. There's one image of her with a flower arch standing next to him with this giant wedding cake. To me, that was the strongest image. I was really excited to recreate that moment. She felt sort of framed in this flower archway and they looked a lot like the figures on top of a wedding cake. That became the starting point for the visual world and the kind of over-the-top romance of her world. William Eggleston also did photos of Graceland. [I used] his still lives for reference for the opening and then pieced together pictures from her life and from that era.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> There's a lot of melancholy in Eggleston's photography. Does that influence the look of the film as well?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I always loved his photos and his color palette and, yeah, I thought of him right away. Also because he was from the South at that time.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> What was it like for you to work on a soundstage, compared to shooting on real locations?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> That was really interesting. It's the first time I've done that, and I had thought I never wanted to do it. Real places feel like real places, and how can you make [a soundstage] feel naturalistic and real? I was impressed that you can make it feel real by having a great cinematographer and a great production team. It was really exciting to work in a new way because we could shoot so much in a day. We could run back and forth from her childhood Germany bedroom to Graceland. I guess it's kind of how TV is done, but it felt like an Old Hollywood studio where the sets and the props are all next to each other. And they just go to another room and make the movie.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> I thought of the Las Vegas set in [Francis Ford Coppola’s] <i>One from the Heart</i> [1981] as well. Sometimes a set can feel more real than a location. And there's a tactile quality in Tamara Deverell's production design. Lots of close-ups of shaggy rugs, satin beddings, and drapes.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> She's just so talented. And she was so thoughtful about the textures and the shine. It just felt like Graceland in 1960s Memphis, and Elvis has to have a lavish feeling. It was so in contrast to [Priscilla’s] childhood in Germany, which felt like all the fabrics were scratchy, and it was always winter there.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> Her bedroom is quite cute and quite pink.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> It was really cute, yes, but it's all faded colors and kind of sad.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38634/images-w1400.jpg?1709246077"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Priscilla </i>(Sofia Coppola, 2024).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> What was it like shooting a feature on digital? Because that's also new for you.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> Philippe [Le Sourd] suggested it because our shooting schedule was so short. He said, "I really think we need to shoot digital." We both love film, and I prefer to shoot on film, especially for period movies. It just has a different feeling. But with digital, we can move more quickly. I was really happy and impressed with the look he was able to make on digital because I'm kind of sentimental and snobby about film. Philippe had shot digital before, when we did a short film for the New York Ballet. So I knew that he could make anything look beautiful.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> And the wedding footage was shot on film.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> Yes, that was shot on 16mm, as well as the home movies. Priscilla shot a lot of home movies and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc_T6lOdnkc">you can see them on YouTube</a>, so that was a big reference. We shot all the pool parties on 16mm, and also the prop Super 8 cameras had film in them that we used. We wanted to have that feeling of their real home movies. The actors had fun shooting it, and it's nice to have a different texture too. </div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> I'm also curious about your writing process. On the one hand, it feels like adaptation as you were bringing Priscilla's memoir to screen. But you were also working with a real-life, living person. Were there any moments when you and Priscilla might have different interpretations of the same event?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I tried to always defer to her and how she saw it. I wanted to feel her point of view. So I really went by the book. And then we went through the script. I think sometimes she was—you know, she's still protective of his legacy. I think I had to push a little more to include the darker side. But she understood that it had to have the highs and lows and the light and the dark to have a full picture of a complex relationship.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> When I read the book, I was amazed to see that the scene when she took the pills and didn't wake up for two days actually happened.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I know; I was so shocked! I remember reading that in the book. You're like, <i>What? That is so crazy?</i> A lot of the stuff in the book is really surprising.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> Did you try to reserve judgment when it comes to a moment like that?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I mean, when I read the book I definitely had opinions. But then when I made the film, I wanted it to be non-judgmental. I want to really show what it was like through her eyes. And I saw it sort of like <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>, her going through this strange world.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> It reminds me of a dark fairy tale, almost like the Bluebeard story. She has come into this house, and there's this mysterious, intimidating figure.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I don't know Bluebeard as much, but I did think about it being like a fairy tale, because there are this fairy tale prince and the beautiful castle. And then, to me, the idea was that the fairy tale starts to melt, and it's not. In the end, she gets out.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38635/images-w1400.jpg?1709246150"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Priscilla </i>(Sofia Coppola, 2023).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> Cailee Spaeny's performance here is extraordinary. She's great at playing not just a teenager, but a teenager who is trying desperately to seem like an adult. Is that tension already in your script?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I think it's just in the situation that we were talking about. Cailee also talked to Priscilla, and she knew Priscilla felt like he really saw her and made her feel grown up. But it's true. It's tricky for an actor to be playing a younger person playing at being older. </div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> That comes through in the costume as well. In the beginning of Priscilla's transformation, the clothes seem to be wearing her instead of her wearing the clothes.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> Priscilla talks in the book about being uncomfortable. These clothes, they felt too grown up for her. So it was important to commission specific clothes and how Cailee would be in them, how she holds herself in the early days when they go to Vegas and she's not comfortable with it yet. Stacey [Battat, <i>Priscilla</i>'s costume designer] really thought about that too and made Priscilla look really, really young when she first goes to Graceland. It was really important to have her feel young and fresh-faced before her transformation.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> Some of your other films have an ensemble of female characters. In this one, Priscilla can't really connect to her peers, but she is also not comfortable around the older women, who are the wives and girlfriends of the Memphis Mafia, either. </div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I feel her story was that she was so isolated. And I know there are women who feel isolated within a relationship. Priscilla talked about how she wasn't able to be friends with the wives of the Memphis Mafia because she saw what they were doing when the wives weren't around. It put her in this terrible position of not being able to really connect to them. I thought about how lonely that would be if she wasn't allowed to have friends from school and she couldn't really have an honest relationship with the other women.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> It's interesting how you almost never see her taking the flight to Memphis. She just goes straight from her parents' house to yet another house. She doesn't have any time to just be by herself.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I think she never had a chance that most people do to kind of develop your identity in that age, which is so important. She didn't do that ’til after she left him. And then she had a period where she finally discovered herself.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> I also read Priscilla didn't keep any clothes from her time with Elvis. And in the film, the house is full of beautiful shiny things, but it seems as if nothing really belongs to her. It's like she's living in someone else's house.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> Yeah, definitely. She talked about how she didn't even know what her taste was. Because it was always Elvis, his taste. When she left to move to LA, she was able to discover what she liked. Elvis's clothes were saved in a museum. When I asked Priscilla about her clothes, she said at that time, people just gave old clothes to Goodwill. They didn't really think of keeping them. But I was like, where were those clothes? I wish she had them because I wanted to go through them. It would have been fun.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38633/images-w1400.jpg?1709225036"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Priscilla </i>(Sofia Coppola, 2023).</span></div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b>Speaking of light and darkness, how do you achieve the balance between an appreciation for beautiful and feminine things and also an understanding of the trappings of femininity?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I felt like there's an aspect of it that's fun. And then there's also an aspect that is confining. At first it was fun that he was buying her clothes, and then it turns into this pressure that she has to be his ideal woman. It starts out fine, and then you realize that it's actually constraining.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b>What was it about Jacob Elordi that made you think of him for the Elvis role?</div><div><b>COPPOLA: </b>He was really thoughtful about it. He did a lot of research. He worked on his voice and movement, but then he kind of put that away and just made it about a relationship between this man and woman. He didn't focus too much on the Elvis persona because we didn't want him to feel like a caricature ever and he did such a good job of just having the essence of who he was through her eyes.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> His Elvis also had this sort of vulnerability and insecurity in the beginning.</div><div><b>COPPOLA: </b>Yes, that was really important. Priscilla talked a lot about that in her book and how when she first met him, she's always trying to connect with that side of him. I felt that Jacob was able to show that sensitivity.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK: </b>I really love the opening title as well, which was created by the Peter Miles studio. Was the cursive font also a part of the mood board?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I actually don't know what the font is called; I just asked for a cursive. It reminds me of old movies, where they would use the satin background for the title. I think I saw it in <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore </i>[1974]. It's also an 1940s, 1950s Old Hollywood thing.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> The smash cuts of all the iconic elements of the Priscilla image are also very evocative. It made me think of your first film, <i>Lick the Star </i>[1998]. The opening credits for that short have close-ups of Audrey Heaven's lips and eyes.</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> Oh yes, you're right. That's so funny; I totally forgot about that! It does look like that. I guess I just love the idea of just, like, a fragment of what's to come in the story. So you get just a little glimpse of it. And then you start with the story and then get into it. It's a little tease of what the feeling is.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> Do you have a lot of these moments of filmmaking déjà vu?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I do. I didn't think about the <i>Lick the Star </i>connection. But when we were shooting them in the bedroom, it's similar to <i>Marie Antoinette</i>. There are a lot of scenes like that. So as I was shooting, I was like, "Oh my God, this is the same scene." But I just kind of go with it. It's just how I work. But I don't feel like we're done. I always feel that there are new challenges. There's a similar approach and vocabulary because it's from me.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> Alongside girlhood, you've also explored different aspects of Americana. You've done suburbia, Southern Gothic, and now Memphis royalty. What's next?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> It was fun to do these ones, but I'm not sure yet. I always like building a whole world that's so different from today. That's what excited me about doing different periods, or just constructing a world that has a really strong visual sense. It doesn't feel like today, so you can kind of escape into another world.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> Is there a genre that you haven't done that you would like to do, like a musical?</div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> I don't know. I wouldn't know how to do that. I'm kind of curious about science fiction because it's so not my thing.</div><div><b>NOTEBOOK:</b> It can be with a fairy tale angle. </div><div><b>COPPOLA:</b> Yeah, I don't know yet. It's fun to look at genres because you can put your own stamp on it. That will make it interesting.</div>Phuong Le/en/notebook/posts/author/809tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107442024-02-29T05:35:44Z2024-02-29T15:25:33ZMUBI Podcast: Sofia Coppola—"Priscilla," From Source to Soundtrack<div><i>Sofia Coppola's <a href="https://mubi.com/en/us/films/priscilla"><b>Priscilla</b></a> (2023) will stream exclusively on MUBI starting March 1, 2024, in the UK, Germany, Turkey, India, and Latin America.</i></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38627/images-w1400.jpg?1709185235"></div><div>In a wide-ranging interview, Sofia Coppola tells host Rico Gagliano all about the making of her new Priscilla Presley biopic—from the Kubrick flick that inspired her opening sequence ... to picking the soundtrack full of pop tunes by just about everyone except Elvis.</div><div>It's a follow-up to last week's career-spanning look at the themes threaded through Coppola's films and fashions—and a fitting end to our season.</div><div>Season 5, titled "Tailor Made," dives deep into the worlds of film and fashion. Each episode tackles a landmark movie that captured a major fashion look of an era, and then decodes what that look meant—to the culture that spawned it, the people who wore it, and the audiences who watched it onscreen.</div><div>Listen to episode 5 below or wherever you get your podcasts: <iframe src="https://www.buzzsprout.com/1788738/14599084-sofia-coppola-priscilla-from-source-to-soundtrack?client_source=small_player&iframe=true" loading="lazy" width="100%" height="200" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="MUBI Podcast, Sofia Coppola — PRISCILLA, from source to soundtrack" data-height="natural"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mubi-podcast/id1569229544">Apple Podcasts</a></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/mubi-podcast">Stitcher</a></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7Jm8MYgroZT5qsvD2poToC">Spotify</a></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xNzg4NzM4LnJzcw==">Google Podcasts</a></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="http://mubi.io/podcast">More</a></b></div>MUBI Podcast/en/notebook/posts/author/842tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107422024-02-28T20:22:24Z2024-03-16T13:19:23ZRarefilmm Against the World<div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38625/images-w1400.jpg?1709153337"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Balegari </i>(Petar Lalovic, 1982).</span></div><div>Jon Whitehead keeps a low profile. He barely has any hits on Google, and his avatar on Twitter is a man in silhouette. He's not a fugitive, though there are days when he can feel the law closing in. He describes himself as a “man on a mission to find and preserve the rarest and most obscure films ever made." In 2014, Whitehead started the website Rarefilmm. With a team of volunteers, he has since digitized, subtitled, and uploaded nearly 3,000 “forgotten” films for the benefit of an enthusiastic community of users, on whose voluntary donations the site subsists. These are orphan films—films for which the copyright has expired or which the rights holders have neglected, and which have little potential of being professionally restored—many of which cannot be found anywhere else on the internet. They come from around the world: Kazakhstan, Yugoslavia, Ghana, Albania, and other underappreciated national cinemas.</div><div>On December 1, 2023, almost all of those films went offline. In 2022, the European Union passed the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in August of last year. This sweeping piece of legislation includes many reforms to how online platforms and websites service users, but most relevant to Rarefilmm is that websites can now be held responsible for all of the content they host. And so, on December 1, 2023, Ulož, the Czech-based platform on which Rarefilmm relied for hosting, ended public file-sharing in order to ensure compliance with the new law. Overnight, Rarefilmm’s entire library was deleted. </div><div>Whitehead has spent the months since beginning to rebuild. He and a small team of volunteers plan to re-upload every single film that has been posted over the last decade onto alternative file-hosting platforms. Users can ask for specific films to be prioritized; their requests are usually fulfilled within a day. It hasn’t been easy work. In his statement on the future of the site, Whitehead <a href="https://rarefilmm.com/the-future-of-rarefilmm/">wrote</a>, “Now, Uloz going down also means that I’ll have to re-upload every single file and also change every single dl [download] link on the site (again!)… this will take a few months at least. As you can imagine I’m very tired of this, and this also makes me question if it’s even worth it.”</div><div>The ethos of Rarefilmm recalls that of the Internet Archive, which, since its founding in 1996, has been archiving films, websites, print media, music, and books and making them available for free. Unlike Rarefilmm, the Internet Archive also solicits user uploads, and hosts a wide variety of user-made and user-obtained content. In 2020, several publishers, including Hachette Book Group, Wiley, and Penguin Random House, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive in the district court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that their book-lending program, initiated at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, represented copyright infringement. In August 2023, the court ruled against the Internet Archive. On December 15, the Internet Archive appealed. The case is ongoing. </div><div>This is not the only challenge the Internet Archive faces: in August 2023, several record labels filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive for its preservation of 78 rpm records, an obsolescent medium which mostly ceased production 70 years ago. This case, too, is ongoing. It's not hard to imagine that film studios and distributors might also turn on the Internet Archive. These cases may become landmarks that will shape the landscape of media preservation for years to come.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38621/images-w1400.jpg?1709152584"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Fast Film </i>(Virgil Widrich, 2003).</span></div><div>In the digital era, the library and the archive are difficult to disentangle. In the eyes of the law, however, the two are afforded different privileges. Under United States copyright law, archives are allowed to create reproductions with the provision that they not be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” But should the distinction of scholarship belong only to academia when the internet might otherwise put all human knowledge at our fingertips? Since their inception, websites like the Internet Archive and Rarefilmm—vastly different in size, but similar in mission—have dedicated themselves to making media accessible. Traditionally, though, facilitating access is not the primary responsibility of an archive. As<b> </b>John Klacsmann, the archivist at Anthology Film Archives in New York, told me over the phone in February, “An archive is really about safeguarding original or unique objects, primarily, and a library is about providing access.… I think with the Internet Archive, it’s a little bit blurry. They’re doing both things, in a sense.” These lines are blurred because for digital archives, dissemination <i>is </i>a form of preservation; they preserve material by sharing and spreading the files widely. If a file is downloaded by users all over the world, the risk of it disappearing is mitigated.</div><div>The Library of Congress estimates that 75 percent of silent films and almost 50 percent of early American sound films are now lost. Last year marked the centennial of 16mm film, a medium in which many artists continue to work. As enduringly beautiful as celluloid is, it is notoriously susceptible to damage, degradation, and loss. Before 1952, almost all 35mm prints were made with cellulose nitrate, which is highly flammable. Storage fires throughout the 20th century destroyed thousands of films, and those that have survived have lost fidelity. Over time, cellulose nitrate emits acid gas, causing the color of prints to fade, eventually leaving only red, and the film can even degrade entirely into toxic powder. In the 1940s, the industry transitioned to acetate film, which is not flammable but still susceptible to decay, as the film base decomposes into acetic acid—vinegar. In the 1990s, the industry settled on using polyester film for archival purposes, a film base that is finally safe and resistant to degradation.</div><div>Before the rise of home media, a film ceased to be financially useful to studios after its theatrical run. Many films were intentionally destroyed by the studios that made them; there was no reason to keep them around after they were screened, since they would rarely be shown again. Little by little, studios realized the need to restore and preserve their film collections. In 1990, Martin Scorsese and other filmmakers established The Film Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the restoration and preservation of film prints. Restoration involves meticulously cleaning the dirt and dust from a film, splicing torn film, and restoring damaged or missing frames using adjacent ones. Depending on the condition of a print, the process can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $450,000, and it can take years. Once a film is restored, new prints and digital copies are made in order to ensure redundancy. Studios now have a vested interest in guaranteeing the safety of their film prints, but the results of their efforts are rarely made accessible to the public. “You don't hear about it,” Klacsmann tells me, “because they make these [film] elements, and then they just go to some salt mine in Kansas, where they sit in the cold.”</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38620/images-w1400.jpg?1709152468"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Cairo Station </i>(Youssef Chahine, 1958).</span></div><div>The goal of Rarefilmm and the Internet Archive is to provide access, not to preserve master copies or produce high-fidelity transfers. As they accumulate more and more material, these digital libraries are coming into possession of films whose physical media are lost or extremely difficult to find. Many of the films on both platforms are in 1080p resolution, or lower. Sometimes, however, these low-resolution copies inadvertently became the only way to view a film, or even the only extant copy of a film. Mohammed Shebl's queer Egyptian remake of the <i>The Rocky Picture Horror Show</i> (1975), titled <i>Fangs</i> (1981), has experienced a surge of interest among film programmers in recent years and developed its own cult following, but it only exists as a low-resolution (416 x 312 pixels) copy on the Internet Archive. By all accounts, the original print is lost, and this is the only way to watch the film. </div><div>For Whitehead, access is integral to preservation. “There's a lot of very selfish collectors who don't care at all about film preservation,” he tells me in an online exchange. “All they care about is making their collections bigger and bigger, and they will go to great lengths to try to hoard as many rare things as possible.”</div><div>Once Rarefilmm secures a physical copy of a movie (either a film print or a home-media release), it is scanned or transferred to a digital video file and, sometimes, manually subtitled. Whitehead and other volunteers also adjust the film's audio if<b> </b>the quality is particularly poor. Even if the archive and digital library share similar goals and principles, the nature of the work of the digital library draws critique. When I spoke to Kyle Westphal, a projectionist and co-programmer for the Chicago Film Society, he emphasized their focus on digital restoration processes: “Generationally and ideologically, I don't have the same regard and affection for these services.… Fundamentally, I don't think it's a system that sets up the feedback loop that allows high-quality work to be done.”</div><div>Even as film archives and preservationists are increasingly using digital technology to restore and copy prints, the rise of digital threatens the future of film-on-film. “Every time someone says, ‘We don't have to shoot on film,’ or ‘We're going to do this preservation digitally and not make a backup film negative’... well, that's kind of an existential threat to the ecosystem,” Westphal says. Even as the future of cinematic exhibition on film remains uncertain, the physical medium itself is here to stay. Polyester film is more stable than digital storage or analog tape. Hard drives must constantly be powered on, but polyester film is passive; once a print is made and stored, it can last for centuries. It’s so stable that Microsoft, owner of Github, an online code repository, recently archived a majority of that website by printing it to 186 film reels that are now being kept in an Arctic vault, <a href="https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/">the “Arctic World Archive.”</a> It’s clear that the future of cinema will rely on both digital and physical media—not just one or the other.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38622/images-w1400.jpg?1709152807"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Madagascar </i>(Fernando Pérez, 1995).</span></div><div>The question, then, is whether the archival work of amateur digital preservationists serves a more specific purpose, pointing to the structural importance of access. Both Rarefilmm and the Internet Archive aim to host movies for which the copyright has expired, or which were never copyrighted in the first place, and they both allow users to submit Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests. The DMCA, passed by the US Congress in 1998, allows content owners and creators to request copyrighted content be taken down from platforms. Sites that fail to abide by DMCA takedown notices face stiff penalties, and litigating erroneous takedown requests can be an expensive exercise in futility.</div><div>Streaming services have made millions of films accessible to film lovers around the world at the click of a button, but titles come and go from these platforms regularly. Distributors can revoke access to films on a whim, or even censor them. Last June, viewers of <i>The French Connection</i> (1971) on the Criterion Channel, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime realized that a scene featuring a racial slur had been edited by the rights holder, Disney, without any notice. The DMCA imposes digital rights management (DRM) regulations: section 1201(a) makes it illegal for consumers to circumvent DRM (for example, encryption, screen-capture restrictions, and watermarking) on copyrighted material, even if the media was obtained in a legal manner, and even if it is to be used in accordance with the fair-use doctrine. So, if a film is still under copyright, there is no legal way to preserve it via distributing copies. In 2023, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a brief in a US Court of Appeals, arguing that section 1201(a) violates the First Amendment by barring fair use of copyrighted works. The case is ongoing.</div><div>Despite the complications arising from the Digital Services Act, Rarefilmm has no plans to cease operations. "I’m not going to give up,” Whitehead wrote on the site, “especially when we’re so close to that beautiful 10 year anniversary." He’s not alone, either. When the news broke about Rarefilmm’s library going down, supporters of the site came out in droves to show their support. Whitehead and other volunteers scoured Ulož in the wake of the legal decision to see if there were any movies uploaded by other users that they could salvage before the file sharing was restricted. Together, they managed to find, save, and re-upload an additional 140 films. Slowly but surely, Whitehead is rebuilding, though the future of Rarefilmm, the Internet Archive, and similar projects is unclear. For Whitehead, this work is personal and important. In a tweet from February 10, he writes, “The whole situation… going down hit me harder than I thought it would.… [H]opefully I'll start feeling like a normal person again soon.”</div>George Iskander/en/notebook/posts/author/888tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107412024-02-28T17:21:02Z2024-02-29T19:41:04ZRushes | Berlinale Hackers, Hot for Cronenberg, Crying at the Chocolate Factory<div><i>Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, <a href="https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/sign-up-for-the-notebook-weekly-edit-newsletter">sign up for our weekly email newsletter</a> and follow us <a href="https://twitter.com/NotebookMUBI">@NotebookMUBI</a></i>.</div><div><b>NEWS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38610/images-w1400.jpg?1709140972"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Dahomey </i>(Mati Diop, 2024).</span></div><ul><li>Mati Diop’s <i>Dahomey </i>(2024), a documentary about the repatriation of artifacts plundered by French colonists to the present-day Republic of Benin, <a href="https://www.screendaily.com/news/mati-diops-dahomey-wins-golden-bear-at-berlinale/5190969.article">won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale</a>. It is only the second film from the African continent to take the festival’s top prize.</li><li><a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/berlin-festival-anti-semitic-hacking-award-winner-statements-1235923611/">The Berlinale has filed criminal charges against activists</a> who hacked the festival’s Instagram account on Sunday to post <a href="https://twitter.com/derJamesJackson/status/1762040006720319816">calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza</a>, which the festival deemed “anti-Semitic.”</li><li>The festival has also <a href="https://www.berlinale.de/en/2024/news-press-releases/254826.html">released a statement</a> disavowing the acceptance speeches of award winners who used their platform to speak out against the occupation and war. Such speeches included those by <a href="https://twitter.com/JustJewsUK/status/1761827160736620741">Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau</a>, whose <i>Direct Action </i>won Best Film in the Encounters section, and by <a href="https://twitter.com/yuval_abraham/status/1761857460434825366?s=20">Yuval Abraham</a>, whose <i>No Other Land</i>, co-directed with Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, won the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary. Abraham, who is Israeli, reported <a href="https://thefilmstage.com/berlinale-faces-crisis-as-no-other-land-director-receives-death-threats-and-berlin-mayor-threatens-artists/">receiving death threats</a> after his speech was excerpted on television in his home country.</li><li>Last week’s <a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/spirit-awards-disrupted-pro-palestine-protester-1235922247/">Independent Spirit Awards were disrupted by a demonstration against the bombardment of Gaza</a>, which made use of a loudspeaker. “I don’t know what they’re saying,” said Babak Jalali as he accepted the John Cassevetes Award for <i>Fremont</i> (2023), “but whatever they’re saying is probably a lot more important than what I’m about to say.”</li></ul><div><b>REMEMBERING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38611/images-w1400.jpg?1709141162"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Saga of Khayal </i>(Kumar Shahani, 1989).</span></div><ul><li><a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/kumar-shahani-legacy-shubhra-gupta-9180209/">Kumar Shahani, a pioneer of India’s Parallel Cinema movement, is dead at 83.</a> Shahani is known for such films as <i>Mirror of Illusion </i>(1972), <i>The Saga of Khayal </i>(1989), and <i>Kasba</i> (1990), as well as for his writing and teaching. His passing brings with it a sense of an ending, Shubhra Gupta writes in his obituary for the<i> Indian Express</i>, “of the passionate young votaries who embraced, without wavering even slightly, the art-for-art’s-sake credo.”</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED VIEWING</b></div><ul><li>Kevin Costner has unveiled a shoot-’em-up, make-’em-cry trailer for his four-part western historical epic, <i>Horizon: An American Saga</i>, the first two chapters of which are scheduled for a summer release.</li></ul><div><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YYsReoZMj1k?si=8G3uG7-evTncBodh" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><div><b>RECOMMENDED READING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38612/images-w1400.jpg?1709141371" alt="The Fly"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Fly</i> (David Cronenberg, 1986).</span></div><ul><li>"Cronenberg’s genius consists in his rare ability to see that elevation can attend disgust, and almost all his movies raise the possibility that a hideous ordeal might double as a reprieve from banality.” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/all-good-sex-is-body-horror">In the <i>New Yorker</i>, Becca Rothfeld considers sexual ecstasy, consent, and transformation via the films of David Cronenberg</a>, “the father of the body-horror genre.”</li><li>“Deciding that innovative fight choreography is more valuable than my personal privacy, I donated all of my precious data and signed up for a one-month trial.” <a href="https://www.screenslate.com/articles/action-item-iqiyi">For Screen Slate, R. Emmet Sweeney surveys the recent direct-to-video action offerings of iQIYI</a>, the second-largest streamer in China.</li><li>“Oh my god, my cinephilia is being ratified in real time.” <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/article-film-criticism-needed-a-push-the-oral-history-of-cinema-scope-canadas/">Barry Hertz has assembled an oral history of <i>Cinema Scope</i>, “the most influential English-language film magazine of the past quarter-century,” in the <i>Globe and Mail</i></a>, with contributions from editor and publisher Mark Peranson; filmmakers like Guy Maddin, Denis Côté, and Pedro Costa; writers and programers like Erika Balsom and Andréa Picard; and more.</li><li>“Disney is a religion that one is born into, the same way a 15th-century English baby was predestined to be baptised Catholic.… [W]e see Mickey Mouse around us like our ancestors saw the cross.” <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/02/disney-adult-superfan-industrial-complex">Amelia Tait investigates “the ‘Disney adult’ industrial complex” for the <i>New Statesman</i>. </a></li><li>“Sloppiness just isn’t in the Coens’ wheelhouse, and yet there’s something promising—and even liberating—about the possibility of a genuinely cockeyed romp.” <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2024/2/26/24083195/coen-brothers-movies-drive-away-dolls-review">In his review of Ethan Coen’s <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i> (2024) for The Ringer, Adam Nayman compares the looseness of that film to Joel’s “frustratingly impersonal” craftsmanship in <i>The Tragedy of Macbeth</i> (2021)</a> and ponders the implications of the brothers’ separate creative sojourns.</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED EVENTS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38615/images-w1400.jpg?1709141904"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Face of Another </i>(Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966).</span></div><ul><li>New York, March 1 through 14: <a href="https://filmforum.org/series/japanese-horror">Film Forum and Japan Society present “Japanese Horror,”</a> a survey of the genre spanning more than 90 years, including films by Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Masaki Kobayashi, and many others—much of it screened on 35mm.</li><li>London, March 9: <a href="https://www.ica.art/films/site-and-simulation-aria-dean">The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents “Site and Simulation,” a program curated by Aria Dean</a> including her own <i>Abattoir, U.S.A.! </i>(2013) and other shorts by Diego Marcon, Rachel Rose, Harun Farocki, and Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. </li></ul><div><b>RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38616/images-w1400.jpg?1709141926"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>To Be or Not To Be </i>(Ernst Lubitsch, 1942).</span></div><ul><li>Peter Goldberg offers <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/translation-jean-eustache-on-ernst-lubitsch">a new translation of a rare piece of criticism by Jean Eustache</a>, a consideration of “the fusion of comedy and drama, of drama and life” in Ernst Lubitsch’s <i>To Be or Not To Be </i>(1942).</li><li>Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton—director and screenwriter, respectively, of <i>The Sweet East </i>(2023)—drop by Posteritati to <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/mubi-picks-at-posteritati-sean-price-williams-nick-pinkerton">discuss their favorite movie posters</a> and whether Robert Bresson ever had sex.</li></ul><div><b>EXTRAS</b></div><ul><li>“We were told to hand the kids a couple of jelly beans and a quarter cup of lemonade at the end.” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/27/glasgow-willy-wonka-experience-slammed-as-farce-as-tickets-refunded">At an off-brand “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” in a Glasgow warehouse, children were brought to tears</a> by the decidedly un-scrumdiddlyumptious production value.</li><li>“I don’t think we’ve made any progress on border issues since the movie was made,” says John Sayles, director of<i> Lone Star</i> (1996), who tells <i>The Guardian </i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/feb/26/texas-border-wall-lone-star-conflict">he was recently moved to urinate on Trump’s border wall</a>.</li></ul><div><hr id="true"></div><div><i>Correction: A previous version of this article included erroneous information announcing a new John Waters film, about which the filmmaker has issued a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/peacheschrist/posts/pfbid02BGQ7noY3kEvmCDuDW3rzPFpNSJY1SEpP6CmYJyFZEpb31cCcuYNUREHT1oA8dbYYl">statement</a> via the performer Peaches Christ: "We have no start date or green light to begin production...." We apologize for the error.</i></div>Notebook/en/notebook/posts/author/44tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107402024-02-26T20:36:58Z2024-03-11T14:12:43ZTranslation | Jean Eustache on Ernst Lubitsch<div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38609/images-w1400.jpg?1708980239" class="caption caption-caption"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Mother and the Whore </i>(Jean Eustache, 1973).</span></div><div>Jean Eustache orbited the world of criticism without ever fully falling into it. His intellectual biographer, Alain Philippon, describes him as a marginal figure at <i>Cahiers du Cinéma </i>in the 1960s and yet actively involved in the debates unfolding in its offices.<sup id="fnref1"><a href="#fn1" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> Though Eustache was close with future <i>Cahiers </i>editor-in-chief Jean-Louis Comolli and the magazine championed his films from the start, his critical output was minuscule. He started contributing to <i>Cahiers </i>only after completing his first short, <i>Bad Company </i>(1963). Even then, he wrote little, publishing a few brief pieces on some early films by Paul Vecchiali, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Costa-Gavras. Luc Moullet would later admit that prior to <i>Bad Company</i>, he thought him the only person at <i>Cahiers</i> “that had absolutely nothing to do with the movies.”<sup id="fnref2"><a href="#fn2" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> Indeed, Eustache was often at the offices to pick up his wife, who was employed as a secretary at the magazine. </div><div>Eustache loved cinema, but unsystematically. His tastes were on par with his comrades’ at <i>Cahiers</i>, but unlike Godard or Rivette, he did not write about film history to stake a claim in contemporary cinema. Dreyer, Bresson, Guitry, Mizoguchi, and above all Renoir and Lang were his saints,<sup id="fnref3"><a href="#fn3" rel="footnote">3</a></sup> but he never theorized their work in writing. Instead, Eustache’s reflections on cinema have come through interviews and writings on his own movies, which reveal an artist constantly recontouring the limits of his form. </div><div>Although last summer’s touring restoration of his complete oeuvre—previously seldom-screened and hard to find—has finally made Eustache more accessible, none of his film criticism is available in English. This lack has only bolstered Eustache’s romantic mien. Reading him through his bracingly and openly autobiographical films can feel overdetermined; our interpretation of them gets sieved through his personal struggles, from his difficult childhood to his early death by suicide at 42. Considering his writing allows us further insight into Eustache as a thinker of film. His brief, theoretically dense 1962 review of Ernst Lubitsch’s masterpiece <i>To Be or Not To Be</i> (1942), published in the journal <i>Cinéma 62</i>, offers insight into his thinking on cinema just as he was making the leap into filmmaking. This text, perhaps Eustache’s only one that looks back on a movie from the past, is all the more interesting because French film culture of his moment often overlooked Lubitsch; his films didn’t benefit from the critical reappraisal of Hollywood cinema in the 1950s that elevated the profile of directors like Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock. Though Lubitsch was by no means forgotten by <i>Cahiers</i>, it wasn’t until 1968 that he was fully embraced in an issue dedicated to his work.<sup id="fnref4"><a href="#fn4" rel="footnote">4</a></sup> Comedy benefited less from these reevaluations than genres like suspense or the western, so it’s especially notable that Eustache is interested in Lubitsch for the ways he troubles the line between comedy and drama.</div><div>At first blush, Lubitsch and Eustache seem like unlikely bedmates. The former was a cosmopolitan artificer of a weightless bourgeois world. The latter was a naturalist, a provincial proletarian, a grave chronicler of disillusion and the sad passions. But Eustache’s Lubitsch is a formal master deftly laying bare the fundamental relationship between comedy and drama, the actor and reality. We can find kernels of Eustache’s later filmmaking in this analysis. In Eustache’s films, doubling and repetition are often used to underline the dramatic structure of experience, to complicate the relation between reality and appearance. If, for him, tragedy and farce easily transform into each other, Eustache’s focus on the myriad reversals, dupes, and ellipses in <i>To Be or Not To Be</i> suggest he may have gleaned some of this from Lubitsch.<sup id="fnref5"><a href="#fn5" rel="footnote">5</a></sup></div><div>Eustache’s tantalizingly brief argument about Lubitsch’s mise-en-scène is the article’s most interesting, if beguiling, aspect. In his 1967 essay “Death of a Word,” André S. Labarthe argued that "mise-en-scène" had become an irrelevant critical term in light of the stylistic innovations of the New Wave, Eustache’s films included.<sup id="fnref6"><a href="#fn6" rel="footnote">6</a></sup> Here, Eustache is already critically interrogating the concept, arguing that Lubitsch has unsettled mise-en-scène, subordinating it to the direction of actors and the script rather than treating it as an autonomous element of film grammar. In this early piece, we can see Eustache’s formal sensibility taking shape. Serge Daney justly eulogized Eustache as “an ethnologist of his own reality.”<sup id="fnref7"><a href="#fn7" rel="footnote">7</a></sup> He was also an engineer who continuously resurveyed the structure of his medium.</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38608/images-w1400.jpg?1708979944"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>To Be or Not To Be</i> (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942).</span></div><div><hr id="true"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>To Be or Not To Be</b></i><sup id="fnref8"><a href="#fn8" rel="footnote">8</a></sup></div><div>In their offices, German officials discuss the greatness of their country, of their Führer. Hitler appears, preceded by a chorus of “<i>Heil Hitlers</i>” in the halls. Everyone salutes him. Carried away by their enthusiasm, he salutes himself: “<i>Heil myself</i>.<i>” </i>The director objects, because we are in a theater rehearsal in Poland, 1942.<sup id="fnref9"><a href="#fn9" rel="footnote">9</a></sup> They are preparing a biting work called <i>Gestapo</i>, and “<i>Heil myself</i>” wasn’t in the script.</div><div>What we believed to be reality turns out to be theater. Inversely, comedy will soon turn out to be reality. Later on the lead actor of the company, Joseph Tura, ends up playing the roles first of a Gestapo colonel and then of a Nazi professor spy—both in real life. (One sees that we’re not far from the question posed by the sublime Camilla in <i>Le Carrosse d’or</i> [Jean Renoir, 1952]: “Where does theater end, where does life begin?”) The more he acts, the more he becomes himself through his characters, to the point of anticipating their reactions before ever actually meeting them: while Tura is passing himself off as Colonel Erhardt of the SS, the actual professor reveals that in London they call him “Concentration Camp Erhardt.” He laughs in the same way as the real Colonel Erhardt does later on when Tura, now playing the professor, reveals the nickname to him.</div><div>It’s significant that the real professor—indeed, this is the key to the film—dies behind the curtain on the stage where <i>Gestapo</i> was being performed at the opening. A fundamental inversion complicates Lubitsch’s mise-en-scène: the real character actually dies on stage, a place dedicated to performance (to falsehood); and the actor (an unreal character by definition), taking over in real life, will be even realer than the actual professor. In this life, as in the theater, truth lies in appearances. When they’ve recovered the body of the professor, who has a beard, the Gestapo sets up a confrontation between the corpse and the impersonator. Alone in the room, Tura shaves the dead man and puts a false beard on his chin. He thus proves through mere appearances, when the SS colonel yanks the beard from the dead man, that the impersonator was not the one the colonel thought. Theater wins the day. But does it hold onto it? No, because soon after, SS officials barge in and tear the fake beard from Tura, revealing his trick. After having won, the theater loses, but then in the next shot, Tura is in a room arguing with members of the Polish resistance. A remarkable ellipsis: believing him to be in danger, they got him away from the Gestapo in this manner. This ceaseless shift of appearances and <i>coups de théâtre</i> in the true sense of the term make the actor the driving character of comedy and, paradoxically, makes comedy the key to drama.</div><div>In the end, Lubitsch is talking about serious things. The abrupt changes of tone to which our young filmmakers have accustomed us receive an almost existential justification. If nothing is put forward that can’t subsequently be denied, comedy is surpassed while simultaneously granted its letters patent. The fusion of comedy and drama, of drama and life, leads to seriousness. It’s enough that an action happens in one scene or another (life or comedy) for it to have the opposite effect: at the beginning, the audience laughs at the farcical “Gestapo” troops. But when this same farce unfolds in real life, it has consequences that could not be more tragic. Here, however, tragedy and comedy share a common origin. The film will be all the funnier if the actors play real characters and the real characters behave like performers. When Joseph Tura is going to visit Colonel Erhardt of the SS dressed as the professor, the scene is amusing because it deals with Tura; if it were really the professor, for instance, he would have handed over the list of names, and the comedy would have been destroyed, metamorphosed into pure drama. And it would be remiss not to mention the gag—one of the most sublime in the history of cinema—where one of the actors, disguised as Hitler, orders German soldiers on his airplane to jump into thin air in order to get rid of them, and they do it.</div><div>Based as it is upon the actor, the mise-en-scène shines through above all else in the direction of actors. Their body language, their manner of speaking, of moving through the shot, confirm Lubitsch as one of the greatest <i>directors</i>.<sup id="fnref10"><a href="#fn10" rel="footnote">10</a></sup> Carole Lombard’s marvelous expressions or Jack Benny’s extraordinary impressions of a mutt with wounded pride reveal a profound understanding of the actor’s art and its possibilities. The young cinephiles who know practically nothing about Lubitsch (it’s not their fault, since the distributors have not spoiled us in this area), will be able to detect the debt Mankiewicz and Preminger owe him.</div><div>At this level of expression and stylization, it is evident that mise-en-scène is in place well before shooting. It is already there in the construction and development of the script, which contains all the film’s possibilities, possibilities that become the “subject” when the film takes shape. This explains the apparent simplicity of the mise-en-scène and movements, mostly reframes, which risks unsettling an audience used to “watching” a mise-en-scène.</div><div><i>Cinéma 62</i>, no. 65 (April 1962): 118.</div><div><i>The translator wishes to thank Elena Comay del Junco for her feedback on an earlier draft.</i></div><div class="footnotes"><hr></div><ol><li id="fn1">Alain Philippon, <i>Jean Eustache</i> (Paris, France: <i>Cahiers du Cinéma</i>, 1986), 11. <a href="#fnref1" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn2">Luc Moullet, “Blue Collar Dandy,” <i>Film Comment</i> 36, no. 5 (September/October 2000): 38. <a href="#fnref2" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn3">Philippon, 14. <a href="#fnref3" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn4"><i>Cahiers du cinéma</i>, no. 198 (February 1968). <a href="#fnref4" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn5">For a Spanish-language analysis of doubling in <i>The Mother and the Whore</i> (1973) and its relation to Eustache’s reading of <i>To Be or Not To Be</i>, see Andrea Queralt, “Eustache - Lubitsch, o la imposible filiación de un cinéfil,” <i>Lumière<a href="https://www.elumiere.net/numeros_pdf/Lumiere_num4.pdf">, no. 4</a></i> (2010): 401. <a href="#fnref5" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn6">André S. Labarthe, “Mort d’un mot,” <i>Cahiers du cinéma</i>, no. 195 (November 1967): 66. <a href="#fnref6" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn7">Serge Daney, “Le fil (mort de Jean Eustache),” <i>Libération</i> (November 16, 1981), trans. Steve Erickson. <a href="#fnref7" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn8">The piece appears with the title “Jeux Dangereux,” the original French release title of the film. It appeared in a section called “Revus…et corriges!,” devoted to films from the past. In this issue, Eustache’s article appeared alongside Bertrand Tavernier’s writing on Lubitsch’s <i>Heaven Can Wait </i>(1943) and Anthony Mann’s <i>Devil’s Doorway</i> (1950). <a href="#fnref8" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn9"><i>To Be or Not To Be</i> was released in 1942, but the scene takes place in 1939, just before the war. <a href="#fnref9" rev="footnote">↩</a></li><li id="fn10">English in the original. <a href="#fnref10" rev="footnote">↩</a></li></ol>Peter Goldberg/en/notebook/posts/author/887tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107392024-02-26T17:12:53Z2024-02-26T18:51:43ZMUBI Picks at Posteritati: Sean Price Williams & Nick Pinkerton<div><a href="https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/tag/MUBI%20Picks%20at%20Posteritati"><b><i>MUBI Picks at Posteritati</i></b></a><b><i> </i></b><i>is a series in which we invite our favorite artists to the prestigious movie art gallery in New York City to discuss their favorite movie posters of all time.</i></div><div><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Gxr46OSlQVA?si=wmcoZ90Cm9wp86SL" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><div>We met with celebrated cinematographer Sean Price Williams and prolific film critic Nick Pinkerton, now making waves for their first film as a writing-directing team in <i>The Sweet East</i>. As the film plays in theaters nationwide, they stopped by Posteritati to share their selection of the best movie posters of all time, including Raymond Savignac's cartoonish designs for Robert Bresson, Walerian Borowczyk's handwritten erotica, and more.</div>Notebook/en/notebook/posts/author/44tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107382024-02-22T06:28:57Z2024-02-22T15:01:59ZMUBI Podcast: Sofia Coppola—from "Virgin Suicides" to "Priscilla"<div><i>Sofia Coppola's </i><a href="https://mubi.com/en/us/films/priscilla"><i>Priscilla</i></a><i> (2023) will stream exclusively on MUBI starting March 1 in the UK, Germany, Turkey, India, and Latin America.</i></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38607/images-w1400.jpg?1708584073"></div><div>There’s maybe no working filmmaker more associated with film fashion than Sofia Coppola. But in this brief history of her super stylish body of work, we figure out the thematic stitching inside those perfect fits.</div><div>Host Rico Gagliano talks with Coppola, her brother (and collaborator) Roman, and her award-winning costume designers past and present, to learn how the director depicts her characters’ search for identity in beautiful, difficult worlds.</div><div>Season 5, titled "Tailor Made," dives deep into the worlds of film and fashion. Each episode tackles a landmark movie that captured a major fashion look of an era, and then decodes what that look meant—to the culture that spawned it, the people who wore it, and the audiences who watched it on screen.</div><div>Listen to episode 4 below or wherever you get your podcasts:</div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="https://www.buzzsprout.com/1788738/14551911-sofia-coppola-from-virgin-suicides-to-priscilla?client_source=small_player&iframe=true" loading="lazy" width="100%" height="200" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="MUBI Podcast, Sofia Coppola — from VIRGIN SUICIDES to PRISCILLA" data-height="natural"></iframe><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mubi-podcast/id1569229544"><b>Apple Podcasts</b></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/mubi-podcast"><b>Stitcher</b></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7Jm8MYgroZT5qsvD2poToC"><b>Spotify</b></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xNzg4NzM4LnJzcw=="><b>Google Podcasts</b></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mubi.io/podcast"><b>More</b></a></div>MUBI Podcast/en/notebook/posts/author/842tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107372024-02-21T15:46:09Z2024-02-28T17:57:40ZRushes | Bresson and Gance Restored, "The Image of the Palestinian Woman," the Los Angeles Festival of Movies<div><i>Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, <a href="https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/sign-up-for-the-notebook-weekly-edit-newsletter">sign up for our weekly email newsletter</a> and follow us <a href="https://twitter.com/NotebookMUBI">@NotebookMUBI</a></i>.</div><div><b>NEWS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38602/images-w1400.jpg?1708531245"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Hard Truths </i>(Mike Leigh, 2024).</span></div><ul><li><a href="https://deadline.com/2024/02/mike-leigh-marianne-jean-baptiste-hard-truths-first-look-1235825351/">Mike Leigh’s forthcoming </a><i><a href="https://deadline.com/2024/02/mike-leigh-marianne-jean-baptiste-hard-truths-first-look-1235825351/">Hard Truths</a></i><a href="https://deadline.com/2024/02/mike-leigh-marianne-jean-baptiste-hard-truths-first-look-1235825351/"> will reunite him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste</a>, star of <i>Secrets and Lies </i>(1996). It will be the British director’s first film set in the present day since <i>Another Year </i>(2010).</li><li><a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/jia-zhangke-we-shall-be-all-china-mk2-1235915254/">Jia Zhangke has divulged some details of <i>We Shall Be All</i></a>, now in the early stages of post-production. In production off and on since 2001, the film will be his first feature since <i>Ash Is Purest White </i>(2018). “I travelled with actors and a cameraman to shoot, without a script, without any obvious story,” the director told <i>Variety</i>. “This is a work of fiction, but I have applied many documentary methods.”</li></ul><ul><li><a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/global/robert-bressons-four-nights-of-a-dreamer-anatomy-of-a-fall-mk2-films-1235913444/">Robert Bresson’s rarely seen <i>Four Nights of a Dreamer</i> is being restored by MK2 Films</a>, set for a spring release. The director’s tenth film, an adaptation of a Dostoevsky story transposed to post–May ’68 Paris, is the only one yet to be restored.</li><li>In more restoration news, <a href="https://thefilmstage.com/the-7-hour-version-of-abel-gances-napoleon-a-restoration-16-years-in-the-making-will-premiere-this-summer/">the seven-hour “Apollo version” of Abel Gance’s silent epic <i>Napoléon</i> (1927) has been restored</a> with "a mixture of detective work, digital wizardry, and extraordinary dedication" under the direction of Georges Mourier, backed by Cinémathèque Française. Sixteen years in the making, the new version will finally grace the screens this summer.</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED READING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38603/images-w1400.jpg?1708531464"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Sparrow </i>(Youssef Chahine, 1972).</span></div><ul><li>“We gaze upon Binoche and Magimel in much the same way that we would examine a bottle of Clos de Vougeot or an Anjou pear, paying close attention to how they have aged and ripened.” For 4Columns, <a href="https://4columns.org/anderson-melissa/the-taste-of-things">Melissa Anderson reviews Trân Anh Hùng’s <i>The Taste of Things</i> (2023)</a>, a food-focused film that glorifies French gastronomy as “perhaps the signal achievement of the country.”</li><li>“‘On my thirtieth birthday,’ he recalled in one interview, ‘I suddenly said to myself, Damn, I’m getting old! I realized that I had to change my life.’” Off the back of recent retrospectives of the filmmaker’s work, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/07/filming-and-forgetting-taipei-edward-yang/">Dennis Zhou examines Edward Yang for the <i>New York Review of Books</i></a><i>, </i>seeing how the trajectory of Yang’s life is visible in his films. </li><li>“I don’t know if you become a photographer when you take pictures consciously or when you start printing them.” <a href="https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/i-need-places-to-tell-a-story-wim-wenders-in-conversation-with-michael-almereyda">In<i> Interview</i>, friends Michael Almereyda and Wim Wenders talk about photography and Wenders’s two 2023 films, <i>Anselm</i> and <i>Perfect Days</i>.</a></li><li>“Who will show the collective and individual heroism of these women, who broke the stranglehold of social and familial disapproval to serve their people?” In a 1977 text translated by Jonathan Mackris for Sabzian, <a href="https://sabzian.be/text/the-image-of-the-palestinian-woman">Heiny Srour (</a><i><a href="https://sabzian.be/text/the-image-of-the-palestinian-woman">The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived</a></i><a href="https://sabzian.be/text/the-image-of-the-palestinian-woman"> [1974]) looks at “Arab fiction films dealing with the Palestinian cause” that depict the role of women in the struggle</a>, such as <i>The Dupes </i>(Tewfik Saleh, 1972) and <i>The Sparrow</i> (Youssef Chahine, 1972). </li><li><a href="https://wochederkritik.de/en_US/magazin-2024/">Greg de Cuir Jr. is guest editor of the 2024 Woche der Critik magazine</a>, which focuses on sustainability and systemic change within film culture. In the six articles he has commissioned, “authors pose questions about the Anthropocene, the multiverse and cinema’s use of resources.”</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED EVENTS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38604/images-w1400.jpg?1708531610"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Still Walking </i>(Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008).</span></div><ul><li>New York, ongoing through February 24: Across ten features, <a href="https://japansociety.org/film/family-portrait-japanese-family-in-flux/">Japan Society’s series “Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux”</a> examines “the shifting dynamics and struggles of the Japanese household in contemporary cinema.” Highlights include a screening of Hirokazu Koreeda’s <i>Still Walking</i> (2008), the US premiere of Keiko Tsuruoka’s <i>Tsugaru Lacquer Girl </i>(2023), and a 35mm presentation of Yasujiro Ozu’s <i>Tokyo Twilight</i> (1957).</li><li>Los Angeles, April 4 through 7: <a href="https://lafestivalofmovies.org/">The Los Angeles Festival of Movies</a>, a new festival co-presented by Mezzanine and MUBI, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2024-02-20/los-angeles-festival-of-movies-new-film-festival-indie-vidiots-mubi-mezzanine">will open with Jane Schoenbrun’s<i> I Saw the TV Glow</i> (2024)</a> and will include the LA premiere of Eduardo Williams’s <i>The Human Surge 3 </i>(2023).</li><li>Nyon, April 12 through 21: Visions du Réel has announced that <a href="https://www.visionsdureel.ch/en/program/ateliers/special-guest-john-wilson/">the special guest for their 55th edition is John Wilson, best known for his HBO series, <i>How To with John Wilson</i></a>. The festival will screen a selection of episodes of the show plus some of his previous short films, described by artistic director Emilie Bujès as “joyful, personal, droll, collaborative and highly contemporary.”</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED LISTENING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38605/images-w1400.jpg?1708531697"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Store </i>(Frederick Wiseman, 1984).</span></div><ul><li><a href="https://wiseman-podcast.captivate.fm/episode/interview-2-with-frederick-wiseman">Frederick Wiseman himself is back on Shawn Glinis and Arlin Golden’s <i>Wiseman Podcast</i>.</a> This time they discuss what Glinis and Golden call “the second era” of the documentarian’s filmography, covering <i>The Store</i> (1984) through <i>Belfast, Maine</i> (1999). </li></ul><div><b>RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38606/images-w1400.jpg?1708531749"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>L'homme atlantique </i>(Marguerite Duras, 1981).</span></div><ul><li>"<i>My</i> cinema is not made for people who love cinema. I didn’t think about those people for a second." <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/no-other-reason-marguerite-duras-s-my-cinema">Beatrice Loayza reviews <i>My Cinema</i> (Another Gaze Editions, 2024)</a>, a newly translated book of Marguerite Duras’s interviews, correspondence, and production notes.</li><li>Has Yorgos Lanthimos finally defected from Team Pervert? <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/frankenpixie-dream-girl-on-yorgos-lanthimos-s-poor-things">Philippa Snow finds <i>Poor Things</i> strangely resistant to the darker side of the erotic.</a></li></ul>Notebook/en/notebook/posts/author/44tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107362024-02-20T15:41:23Z2024-03-11T14:11:51ZFrankenpixie Dream Girl: On Yorgos Lanthimos's "Poor Things"<div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38598/images-w1400.jpg?1708444616"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Poor Things </i>(Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023).</span></div><div>Little from Sofia Coppola’s <i>Priscilla</i> (2023) has haunted me quite so much as a line from the half-dreamy, half-perverse meet-cute between its fourteen-year-old heroine and her future husband, Elvis Presley: “Why,” Elvis says, upon learning that the girl he’s planning to romance is still a child, “you’re just a baby.” Strangely, no romantic prospect who sets eyes on Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), the lovable Frankengirlboss at the center of Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, <i>Poor Things </i>(2023), thinks to say the same thing, in spite of the fact that she begins the movie spitting out her food and wobbling unsteadily on her feet. </div><div>Physically, Bella is—to deploy a phrase I’m certain many female readers will remember hearing in their teens—<i>mature for her age</i>, thanks to her unusual construction: a professor of surgery named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), subtly nicknamed “God,” has sewn her together from the body of an adult female suicide and the brain of that woman’s unborn child, producing a happy, curious baby-woman with a perfect face and body and a total lack of sexual self-consciousness. In having three male characters admit to their desire to fuck Bella more or less immediately, <i>Poor Things</i> makes a bleakly funny, baldly provocative point straight out of the gate: that a girl who is hot, always turned on, and as intellectually developed as a toddler would be very, very popular with men. Or, as one of her suitors puts it, scarcely able to contain his glee: “What a <i>very</i> pretty r—rd!”</div><div>So far, so bracingly nasty—if the film’s suggestion that a man might so desire a naïve, easily controlled lover that one with a baby’s brain would be ideal is a grim exaggeration of the truth, well, hyperbole is the stuff of satire, and some men are more satyrical than others. It’s a pity, then, that Lanthimos’s latest begins at a point of such high savagery only to gradually devolve into something more like an X-rated fairy tale. God, a brilliant scientist, is shunned by the establishment for both his unconventional methods and his strange, carved-pumpkin face; he makes Bella as a curiosity, and learns to love her like a daughter. One day, he brings home a gentle protégé named Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), and the introduction of a man into the pair’s topsy-turvy, surgically enhanced Garden of Eden is enough to induce Bella to a sexual awakening. She discovers masturbation, and in lieu of biting into a forbidden apple, she inserts one from the fruit bowl into a forbidden place, instead. (<i>Poor Things</i> takes a great many liberties with its quasi-Victorian setting but, alas for Bella, not enough to provide her with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana#:~:text=As%20late%20as%20the%20Victorian,in%20Eighty%20Days%20(1872).">a more comfortably-shaped fruit</a>.) </div><div>Bewitched by her spontaneity and whimsy, McCandles decides he must marry Bella; the fact that she expresses these qualities by doing things like fingering herself in polite company is an amusing riff on the flogged-to-death archetype of the manic pixie dream girl, whose failure to comply with society’s rules does not exempt her from conforming to the beauty standard. As is typical in cinematic romance, a challenger appears: Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a lawyer-cum-Casanova-cum-absolute-moron who, visiting God under the auspices of doing some legal work, meets Bella and immediately senses her untapped potential. When the two run off together to spend day and night doing what Bella describes as “furious jumping,” the film transitions from Goreyesque black and white into glorious Technicolor, and we’re meant to see the shift as being indicative of a transformation in our heroine, who develops like a Polaroid as she is shaken by the act of love. (Enlightenment, as it turns out, is only a cock away.) For all of its <i>Wizard of Oz</i> (1939) visual flair, this polarity—crepuscular gloom for home and childhood, dazzling luridness for erotic maturity—is an unintentional mirror of the film’s refusal to believe in emotional, perhaps even sexual, shades of gray. </div><div>From here, <i>Poor Things</i> follows an eerily similar trajectory to that of Greta Gerwig’s <i>Barbie </i>(2023), being a kind of bildungsroman about a sheltered, man-made heroine venturing out into the intimidating “real” world and <a href="https://graziamagazine.com/articles/greta-gerwig-final-line-barbie-movie/">discovering what one does with a vagina</a>, if not necessarily in that order. In Lisbon, she learns about dancing and pastel de nata; on a cruise, she quirkily meets an “interesting older lady” and a noble Black philosopher, and begins thinking about politics and socialism and basic existentialism; docking in Alexandria, she learns that poverty exists and has a fleeting breakdown; in Paris, she needs money after giving hers away, and thus ends up embodying another classic filmic cliché, that of the tart with a heart. This is an odyssey of feminine empowerment written by one man (<i>The Favourite </i>[2018] screenwriter Tony McNamara) and directed by another, both of whom are comfortable enough with the material to be a little horny, but not comfortable enough to make it genuinely thorny. It has relatively little salt hidden beneath its kooky sugar, and nothing about this latest film from the director of such cool, peculiar works as <i>Dogtooth </i>(2009) and <i>The Killing of a Sacred Deer </i>(2017) is quite as peculiar as the fact that it’s so thoroughly agreeable, so <i>cute. </i></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38599/images-w1400.jpg?1708444713"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Killing of a Sacred Deer </i>(Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017).</span></div><div>Lanthimos’s earlier movies are at times so full of cruelty, psychosexual and otherwise, that his detractors have accused him of being a hollow imitator of the grand master of <a href="https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-16/essays/sadomodernism/">sadomodernism</a>, Michael Haneke. (There is a scene in <i>Sacred Deer</i> in which an icy bourgeois mother, played by Nicole Kidman, is faced with the terrible dilemma of deciding whether she, her husband or one of her children should be killed: the casual way that Kidman says “we could always have another baby” in response, as if she were suggesting ordering dessert, has stayed with me since the film was first released, to say nothing of the character’s penchant for pretending she is under general anaesthetic during sex.) That this newest outing can be casually compared to <i>Barbie</i>—an extremely entertaining, feminist film that is nevertheless also a two-hour advertisement for a doll—is a volte-face for the director, as if Gaspar Noé had decided to produce a right-on YA film about a plucky, perky teenage girl. </div><div>Alasdair Gray’s weirder, chewier 1992 novel, on which the film is based, is also a feminist bildungsroman written by a man, but it has its complications and its contradictions, and it has the guts to muddle pain and pleasure far more boldly than in Lanthimos’s adaptation, in a manner that feels truer to their commingling in actual life. Gray’s Bella, who also loves fucking, is a robust woman with a strong Manchester accent; rather than an “interesting older lady,” she meets a male white supremacist on her cruise, and is exposed not merely to philosophy and socialism, but to evil. Although much of the text is presented as a memoir by McCandles, a long middle section consists of Bella’s letters, giving us the opportunity to look inside her head, rather than observing her as a pretty, wacky curiosity. “I am a plain, sensible woman,” she grumbles, in a later section that purports to be her irritable correction of her husband’s version of events, “not the naïve Lucrezia Borgia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci described in the text.” By contrast, the Bella of the movie faces problems like a high-functioning robot, rather than a person with a baby’s brain: curious but unmoved, she seems less as though she has not yet been programmed by society than as though her motherboard is on the fritz. From the off, we know all of her misadventures will eventually come to lose their “mis,” righting themselves into instructive, breezy passages of forward-thinking libertinism, our heroine adapting so smoothly and easily to adversity that it is as if she were never struggling in the first place. </div><div>Part of this feeling of perpetual safety on the audience’s part is down to Emma Stone’s performance, which draws on the actress’s own weapons-grade charisma to produce a character so candy-hearted that her triumph seems assured. Stone is a gifted physical comedian, and her Bambi eyes and slightly gawky body lend themselves to pratfalls and reaction shots. Her most interesting work of late, however, has been in Showtime’s <i>The Curse </i>(2023-2024): as Whitney Siegel, a bohemian gentrifier with a show on HGTV, she is quietly terrifying, flipping her likability like a renovated house until it feels borderline dangerous, like a lure to capture prey. Bella and Whitney are both, in a sense, female monsters—one just happens to have been made in a lab, and the other has been shaped by entitlement and cash. The difference is that in the latter role, Stone is allowed to be repugnant, furious, sometimes cruel. Those enormous eyes are even better at telegraphing ugliness and rage than they are at making her look like a vewy sexy baby in a couture christening gown. Whitney, after all, does not only have an adult woman’s body, but an adult woman’s mind, and the minds of adults are often strange and frightening, full of jagged edges and bizarre compulsions and X-rated fantasies that might not transfer quite as alluringly to the screen. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38601/images-w1400.jpg?1708444841"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>The Curse </i>(Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, 2023-2024).</span></div><div>Critically speaking,<i> Poor Things</i> has a robust built-in mechanism of self-defense vis-à-vis sex: it is written as if to ensure the presence of the phrase “sex positive” in its reviews, and as such, questioning its giddy depiction of fucking for fun and profit can make one appear conservative or dour—or, worse, like a member of the dreaded anti-horny lobby. After all, as an act, sex <i>is </i>marvelous fun, and Bella has a marvelous time throughout, and the audience is treated to at least two marvelous montages of Stone, a very beautiful and very thin white actress, engaged in some marvelously liberating onscreen fucking in a minimum of three positions. Still, other than a brief scene of lesbian cunnilingus and a shot of Bella in a ball-gag looking terribly bored, all that furious jumping remains staunchly heterosexual and vanilla, and if Bella, with her supposed disdain for other people’s rules and limitations, ever develops a kink herself, we do not see it. (Some four-letter words, it seems, remain beyond the pale, even for Tony McNamara.) By 2024, it also seems to me that we have moved on from the <a href="https://www.theonion.com/women-now-empowered-by-everything-a-woman-does-1819566746">“Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does”</a> school of feminism, and as such there may be room for a more nuanced depiction of both sex and sex work than <i>Poor Things</i> is qualified—or willing—to provide. “I knew [sex work] was as good and as terrible as other, lower-wage work I’d done,” the writer and former adult performer Lorelei Lee <a href="https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/essays/cashconsent/">wrote</a> in 2019, in a brilliant, even-handed, and instructive essay about sex work and empowerment feminism for <i>n+1</i>. “I knew, too, how quickly people stopped listening when they began to feel pity. So I pretended. I pretended all of it was a kind of adventure.” </div><div>Lanthimos’s movie makes it all seem like a big adventure, too, and one has to wonder whether its reluctance to show Bella truly hurt has something to do with a similar fear of losing our attention. Truthfully, I cannot recall a scene in which I was not technically enjoying myself, even when I had the sense that I was chewing something like a fondant fancy, pastel-bright and full of empty calories. For all of the swearing and the nudity and the clever little quasi-Victorian grotesqueries of its design, there is a strange resistance in <i>Poor Things</i> to the darker side of the erotic, and although violence and sex are ever-present, there is no acknowledgement that the two things ever combine. In the novel, Bella asks her madam what the most “important things are.” “Love and money,” says the madam. “What else is there?” “Cruelty,” Bella answers plainly. Per Gray’s telling, when she leaves the brothel, it is because she refuses an invasive gynecological examination; remembering her time there, she observes that it taught her “how weak and lonely women are used.” </div><div>Like Bella herself, the movie of <i>Poor Things</i> is both gorgeous and a hoot, but at times its brain seems scarcely large enough to fill its Frankenhead, and its ideas about good, evil, sex, and capitalism prove to be about as complex as those one might reasonably expect to hear being espoused by a precocious teenage girl, per Bella’s mental development by the end of the film. Even the genuinely bracing ugliness of its original conceit—that of the dream girl who is also mentally an infant, then a schoolgirl—seems to melt away into acceptance, as if the entire film has lost its nerve. This is, in other words, not a work for freaks, but one for tourists in the world of freakdom, and as such it leaves one wondering whether Yorgos Lanthimos has finally defected from Team Pervert. It is certainly, as Dr. Frankenstein so famously cries out in the 1931 film, <i>alive</i>, but being alive and being adequately thoughtful about the nature of living are two very different things. </div>Philippa Snow/en/notebook/posts/author/413tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107332024-02-13T16:05:43Z2024-03-11T14:11:01ZNo Other Reason: Marguerite Duras’s “My Cinema”<div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38583/images-w1400.jpg?1707841658"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>L'homme atlantique </i>(Marguerite Duras, 1981).</span></div><div>In 1981, coinciding with the release of Marguerite Duras’s seventeenth film, <i>L’homme atlantique, Le Monde </i>published a short text—“a warning”—by the writer and filmmaker: </div><blockquote><section>It has become customary for the majority of cinemagoers in France to act as though cinema is something that is owed to them, to protest and scream bloody murder at the appearance of films that weren’t made for them alone.</section><section> </section><section>Therefore, I would like to tell these viewers not to step foot in the cinema that is screening "<i>L’homme atlantique," </i>that there is no use in doing so because the film was made in total ignorance of their existence.</section></blockquote><div>Later that year, in an interview conducted by Anne de Gasperi, Duras doubled down on her exclusionary rhetoric. “<i>My </i>cinema is not made for people who love cinema. I didn’t think about those people for a second,” she said. That Duras distinguished between her cinema and that of the entertainment-seeking moviegoer should come as no surprise. The French writer, born in 1914 in Vietnam (then Indochina), rose to the heights of literary fame precisely because her work was so emphatically <i>her own. </i>That is: indulgent, repetitive, narcissistic, oblique—qualities that applied to her artistic output as well as her public persona, that inspired her haters as well as her disciples.</div><div>In the case of her warning about <i>L’homme atlantique, </i>Duras was anticipating the uproar against the film’s extended sequences of pure black. Briefly, we see waves lapping gently against the shore, a mustachioed gentleman (Yann Andréa, Duras’s final companion before her death in 1996) wandering around a seemingly abandoned hotel. However, for the majority of the film, we stare at a black screen as Duras talks about memory and mortality in voiceover. The writer’s fixation with speech in her films is linked to a unique literary mandate, a preference less for the written medium than for the alchemy of words. Her experimental approach to language, characterized by pauses, pithy allusions, and an almost neurotic repetitiveness, conjures mental images and states of being that transcend concrete description. Richer are the stories we carry coated with dust, warped by trauma, their details obscured by the amnesiac’s spotted perspective. Duras’s work strives to embody experience and give shape to existence, always steeped in the passage of time.</div><div>By presenting us with a black screen, Duras invites us to summon images roused by her narration; the blackness, a vessel of emptiness, is a space to be looked at, devoid of fixed objects to be seen. In the context of an elegiac monologue, this pool of nothingness courts the disintegration of perception, the fragmentation of memory as one slips into death. <i>L’homme atlantique</i> denies us the representational images by which standards of cinematic quality are measured, and, in different ways, so does the rest of her cinematic oeuvre, filled as it is with primordially stretched-out long takes, still bodies heavy with introspection, narration and dialogue that dance around meaning. Movies, with their origins in dime-ticket spectacle, are often anchored to a certain kind of audience-pleasing legibility. This Duras actively ignored, rearranging the essential ingredients of cinema—light, movement, sound—to serve her own purposes, her own obsessions. She made nineteen films between 1967 and 1985, and all of them she made to “fill my time,” as she said. “It is only because I haven’t the strength to do nothing that I make films. For no other reason.”</div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38584/images-w1400.jpg?1707842145"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Le camion </i>(Marguerite Duras, 1977).</span></div><div><i>My Cinema</i>, a collection of texts by and interviews with Duras translated by Daniella Shreir, is decidedly <i>not</i> a guidebook to Duras’s films. Such an objective would be antithetical to the artist’s project. Instead, this book is composed of primary sources such as those cited above. It is an opportunity to ride Duras’s singular wavelength, with materials that extend the films rather than solve them, that live in their universe. Shreir—the founder and co-editor of Another Gaze, as well as a seasoned translator of French (see the 2019 Silver Press edition of Chantal Akerman’s final book, <i>My Mother Laughs</i>)—does a fine job of capturing what Shreir calls the Durassian “flavor of the text.” This is no small feat when translating a writer of such elusive intent. The book is structured chronologically, beginning with Duras’s first film, <i>La musica </i>(1967), which she co-directed with Paul Seban, and ending with her final one, <i>Les enfants </i>(1985), formally her most commercial film, an existential comedy about a child in the body of an adult man who learns too quickly the terrors of our mortal coil. </div><div>With the exception of a miscellaneous section containing interviews about Duras’s filmmaking writ large, each of the book’s parts is dedicated to a single movie, represented by an assemblage of interviews, press-kit materials, and production notes. The two lengthiest chapters cover <i>India Song </i>(1975)—the most well-known and celebrated of Duras’s (historically derided) directorial efforts—and <i>Le camion </i>(1977)—a critique of Marxism and an expression of Duras’s disenchantment with the French Communist Party. Among the small number of English translations devoted to Duras’s cinema, <i>The Darkroom</i>, published in 2021 by Contra Mundum, deals exclusively with <i>Le camion, </i>though only the corresponding press kit in<i> My Cinema </i>overlaps with <i>The Darkroom</i>’s components. (Compare these two translations and you’ll find Shreir’s richer lexicon better suits the lofty side of Duras’s declarative sentences.)</div><div>Duras approved of <i>Hiroshima, mon amour </i>(1959), the film by Alain Resnais for which she wrote the screenplay. But, generally, she found film adaptations of her work to be vastly disappointing. René Clément, Peter Brook, and Jules Dassin all translated her early novels for the screen, but Duras believed none of them to have understood her work’s intentions. Classical narrative annoyed her. “I consider the content of commercial cinema to be chewed over, pre-digested, and served up for the consumption of a public whose intellectual faculties are made to work at twenty percent of their capacity,” she explained. These disillusions encouraged Duras to make her own films, as did a desire to slow down her novelistic output. The solitude of writing had at the time become unbearable to her, so much so that from 1973 until 1980 she ceased writing books. During this stretch, she produced the majority of her films. </div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38582/images-w1400.jpg?1707841551"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Woman of the Ganges</i> (Marguerite Duras, 1974).</span></div><div>Beginning with <i>Woman of the Ganges </i>(1974), about a man who returns to a coastal ghost town and basks in the memories of the passionate affair he once had there, Duras began to launch a more radical offensive against the conventional union of sound and image. Disembodied voices observe the man disinterestedly, and speak indirectly of lost loves—not just the man’s, but their own and everyone’s who haunts this forsaken setting. “The past—relieved, uncluttered from the accident of personal biography—would have been treated as private and collective at the same time,” Duras wrote in a letter to Pierre Schaeffer, the director of the French broadcasting company that had commissioned the film. As suggested by Duras’s side of the correspondence (“I was unaware that what you wanted from me was a film about Trouville… I believed that what you wanted was a film by me”), Schaeffer was not particularly happy with the finished product. </div><div>Duras was often accused of being redundant. In her novels, plays, and films, she returned again and again to her childhood in Indochina, recycling characters and places whose qualities she would tweak—or outright contradict—with each turn. Jacques Rivette, in a conversation with Duras from 1969, observed this tendency thus: “You seem to be displaying more and more a desire to give successive forms to each of your… I don’t want to use the word stories.” Take <i>India Song, </i>which features forlorn images of a French ambassador’s wife in Lahore, the circumstances of her oppression elucidated by the rotating voices of unseen narrators. In <i>Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert</i> (1976), the full soundtrack to <i>India Song</i> (both the score by Carlos d’Alessio and the narration) is repurposed to accompany new images of the same château, now in a state of decay, seemingly years after the events of the other film. The images we see in <i>L’homme atlantique </i>are discarded shots from <i>Agatha et les lectures illimitées </i>(1981), itself a postmortem meditation on an impossible love, this time in the form of a dialogue between a (mostly obscured) brother and sister. Here, too, we return to Duras’s preferred vision of purgatory: gray, empty beaches and streets. </div><div>Duras may be best known as a writer, but her cinema is a natural extension of her desire to destroy and “assassinate” inadequate yet dominant structures of experience—those she considered to be passive and pleasurable, forms of “advertisement” rather than the violent, dark truths she sought to unearth. “How to endure [this darkness] while also being aware of it?” she wrote. Like other experimental filmmakers of the time, Duras created an alternative, rooted in the materiality of image and text, to mainstream cinema’s narrativized delineation of experience. From here, she created a small universe cut from the cloth of her own personal tragedies. Her animating force was the relentless tide of memory, which laps at our heels until death. </div>Beatrice Loayza/en/notebook/posts/author/582tag:mubi.com,2005:Notebook::Post/107342024-02-14T12:56:15Z2024-02-28T17:58:05ZRushes | Carl Weathers Tributes, New Chloë Sevigny Short, Eiko Ishibashi Live in New York<div><i>Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, <a href="https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/sign-up-for-the-notebook-weekly-edit-newsletter">sign up for our weekly email newsletter</a> and follow us <a href="https://twitter.com/NotebookMUBI">@NotebookMUBI</a></i>.</div><div><b>NEWS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38596/images-w1400.jpg?1707926575"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Goodbye, Dragon Inn </i>(Tsai Ming-liang, 2003).</span></div><ul><li><a href="https://www.indiewire.com/news/box-office/american-cities-without-movie-theaters-1234912768/">It’s getting harder to go to the movies.</a> IndieWire surveys the state of cinemagoing in the US region by region as multiplexes continue to shutter. From downtown Detroit, the closest first-run theater is now in Canada.</li><li><a href="https://hyperallergic.com/871345/moma-shutters-as-500-protesters-infiltrate-atrium-in-support-of-palestine/">More than 500 pro-Palestinian demonstrators staged a sit-in at MoMA</a> on Saturday, protesting the museum trustees’ alleged investments in weapons used by the Israeli military in Gaza. The museum closed its doors to the public and rescheduled planned programming.</li><li>After confirming that three sitting representatives of the far-right AfD party had been invited to tomorrow night’s Berlinale opening ceremony, amid public outcry, <a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/global/berlinale-disinvites-far-right-officials-opening-ceremony-1235902214/">the festival has now disinvited them</a>.</li></ul><div><b>REMEMBERING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38593/images-w1400.jpg?1707925235"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Rocky II</i> (John G. Avildsen, 1976).</span></div><ul><li>The tributes to Carl Weathers continue to roll in after his death last week at the age of 76. <a href="https://people.com/sylvester-stallone-reveals-carl-weathers-rocky-audition-story-8575668">Sylvester Stallone spoke about Weathers’s “bad mood” audition</a> for the part of Apollo Creed in <i>Rocky </i>(1976). The AV Club reminds us that <a href="https://www.avclub.com/carl-weathers-came-up-with-his-own-weirdo-arrested-deve-1851223156">Weathers himself pitched the cheapskate angle for his <i>Arrested Development </i>character</a>.</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED VIEWING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38594/images-w1400.jpg?1707925598"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity</i> (Chloë Sevigny, 2024).</span></div><ul><li><i>Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity</i>, <a href="https://thenewgroup.org/production/lypsinka/">a new short film directed by Chloë Sevigny, can be streamed for free on The New Group Off Stage’s website until February 16</a>. Featuring Lypsinka, the surrealist stage creation of John Epperson, the film combines Sevigny’s imagery with audio made by Epperson that remixes extracts from a 1965 Judy Garland recording and Joan Crawford’s 1971 memoir, <i>My Way of Life</i>.</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED READING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38588/images-w1400.jpeg?1707915685"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Bunny Lake Is Missing </i>(Otto Preminger, 1965).</span></div><ul><li>“Our imaginations forge our borders as surely as our borders forge us.” Launching a new column for Reverse Shot focused on architecture and film, <a href="https://reverseshot.org/features/3187/bunny_lake">Kelli Weston writes about Otto Preminger’s </a><i><a href="https://reverseshot.org/features/3187/bunny_lake">Bunny Lake Is Missing </a></i><a href="https://reverseshot.org/features/3187/bunny_lake">(1965)</a>, transplanted from the Upper East Side New York setting of the source novel to multiple locations across London. </li><li>“I have a formula; filmmaking is like my voyage, but writing is home.” <a href="https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/werner-herzog-janna-levin-science-vs-fiction">Werner Herzog agrees to speak with Janna Levin for Pioneer Works’s Broadcast publication</a>, on the condition that their conversation is not an interview and that they do not talk about Herzog’s films.</li><li>“Despite an ostensibly cinematic premise—a mysterious woman moves to a small town and inspires a messy, quiet girl to seek freedom—with a more timid Eileen, the film’s meaning becomes both glaringly obvious and infuriatingly opaque.” In the<i> Los Angeles Review of Books, </i><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/where-did-you-go-eileen-on-ottessa-moshfegh-and-william-oldroyd/">Brianna Di Monda compares Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel </a><i><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/where-did-you-go-eileen-on-ottessa-moshfegh-and-william-oldroyd/">Eileen</a></i><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/where-did-you-go-eileen-on-ottessa-moshfegh-and-william-oldroyd/"> to William Oldroyd’s 2023 film adaptation</a>. </li><li>“I wanted to make movies because of my family, and not because of the movies that I used to watch.” For <i>BOMB</i>, <a href="https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/02/09/rosine-mbakam-by-elissa-suh/">Elissa Suh interviews Rosine Mbakam about her narrative feature debut, </a><i><a href="https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/02/09/rosine-mbakam-by-elissa-suh/">Mambar Pierrette</a></i><a href="https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/02/09/rosine-mbakam-by-elissa-suh/"> (2023).</a></li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED EVENTS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38589/images-w1400.jpeg?1707915775"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Nervous Translation </i>(Shireen Seno, 2017).</span></div><ul><li>New York, February 16 through 22: “A bombastic explosion of form offers new ways of seeing Philippine myths, pasts, presents, and futures.” Curated by A. E. Hunt for BAM, <a href="https://www.bam.org/backstage/programs2/bamcinematek-bam-film/bam-film-2024/when-the-apocalypse-is-over/">“When the Apocalypse Is Over” is a varied survey of recent independent films from the Philippines,</a> featuring work by Shireen Seno, Whammy Alcazaren, and more. </li><li>New York, February 22 through March 7: Doc Fortnight, MoMA’s festival for nonfiction cinema, returns, <a href="https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5665">boasting an impressive selection</a>. As well as new films by Zhou Tao, Aura Satz, Riar Rizaldi, Kaori Oda, and more, the lineup includes <a href="https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/9407">a program of shorts from the Caribbean</a> curated by the Puerto Rico–based Sociedad del Tiempo Libre, <a href="https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/9409">a conversation between artist Tiffany Sia and scholar Pavle Levi</a>, and a spotlight on the <a href="https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/9408">Iranian filmmaker Gelare Khoshgozaran.</a></li><li>Berwick-upon-Tweed, March 7 through 10: <a href="https://bfmaf.org/">Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has also shared</a> a carefully curated selection which mixes retrospective titles, like <a href="https://bfmaf.org/programme-item/phantom-beirut-2/">Ghassan Salhab’s </a><i><a href="https://bfmaf.org/programme-item/phantom-beirut-2/">Phantom Beirut</a></i><a href="https://bfmaf.org/programme-item/phantom-beirut-2/"> (1999)</a>, with new work, such as <a href="https://bfmaf.org/programme-item/dreaming-and-dying/">Nelson Yeo’s Locarno-winning </a><i><a href="https://bfmaf.org/programme-item/dreaming-and-dying/">Dreaming and Dying</a></i><a href="https://bfmaf.org/programme-item/dreaming-and-dying/"> (2023)</a>. Alongside previously announced focuses on Basma Alsharif and Eduardo Williams, also exciting is <a href="https://bfmaf.org/programme/yours/">“yours,”</a> wherein five short films combine to form a single work responding to Chantal Akerman’s <i>News From Home</i> (1976).</li><li>Los Angeles, through February 28: <a href="https://www.vistatheaterhollywood.com/ib-tech-fest">Vista Theater presents an all-35mm IB Technicolor festival</a>, including many double-feature programs.</li></ul><div><b>RECOMMENDED LISTENING</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38590/images-w1400.jpeg?1707915862"></div><ul><li>Created as part of <a href="https://www.52walker.com/exhibitions/the-wanda-coleman-songbook">the exhibition of the same name currently on view at 52 Walker in New York,</a><i>THE WANDA COLEMAN SONGBOOK </i>EP is a record produced by Cauleen Smith with commissioned contributions by musicians including Kelsey Lu, Moor Mother, and Alice Smith. The record can be heard in a <a href="https://4columns.org/d-souza-aruna/cauleen-smith">“dim, warm, and inviting”</a> listening room in the exhibition space, or <a href="https://www.52walker.com/shop/products/the-wanda-coleman-songbook-ep">ordered directly from 52 Walker’s store.</a></li><li>Newly released on vinyl on Smalltown Supersound’s “Le Jazz-Non” series is <a href="https://boomkat.com/products/imprint-69fba3c6-b1b2-4a19-b923-92a49331558d">a set of recordings by composer Koichi Shimizu, who has been Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s longtime sound designer—creator of the “bang” sound in </a><i><a href="https://boomkat.com/products/imprint-69fba3c6-b1b2-4a19-b923-92a49331558d">Memoria </a></i><a href="https://boomkat.com/products/imprint-69fba3c6-b1b2-4a19-b923-92a49331558d">(2021)</a>. </li></ul><div><b>RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38595/images-w1400.jpg?1707926227"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>Amisk </i>(Alanis Obomsawin, 1977).</span></div><ul><li>On the <i>nice</i> film: <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/sorrow-is-not-my-name-bas-devos-discusses-here">Laura Staab speaks with Bas Devos about <i>Here </i>(2023)</a>, indebted to naturalist poetics, utopian realism, and having made too much soup.</li><li>The viewer must engage with what the camera will not show: <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/the-atrocity-is-present-jonathan-glazer-s-the-zone-of-interest">Ed Luker considers the anti-narrative tendency in Jonathan Glazer’s <i>The Zone of Interest</i> (2023)</a>.</li><li>“I'm very lucky to live so long and see the difference”: <a href="https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/prove-them-wrong-in-conversation-with-alanis-obomsawin">Brandon Kaufman sits down with Alanis Obomsawin</a>, the prolific documentarian of Canadian First Nations people, on the occasion of a new retrospective of her work.</li></ul><div><b>EXTRAS</b></div><div><img src="https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/38592/images-w1400.jpeg?1707916016"></div><div><span class="caption caption-caption"><i>GIFT</i> (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023).</span></div><ul><li>First presented at Film Fest Gent last year, <i>GIFT</i> (2023) is a collaboration between Ryusuke Hamaguchi and experimental musician and composer Eiko Ishibashi that presents a <a href="https://www.filmlinc.org/films/gift-a-film-by-ryusuke-hamaguchi-x-live-score-by-eiko-ishibashi/">“concentrated, wordless flipside” of material shot for Hamaguchi's </a><i><a href="https://www.filmlinc.org/films/gift-a-film-by-ryusuke-hamaguchi-x-live-score-by-eiko-ishibashi/">Evil Does Not Exist</a></i><a href="https://www.filmlinc.org/films/gift-a-film-by-ryusuke-hamaguchi-x-live-score-by-eiko-ishibashi/"> (2023) accompanied by Ishibashi’s live score.</a> Ishibashi will be in New York on May 1 and 2 to perform the work twice, and will also <a href="https://dice.fm/event/vxbqd-eiko-ishibashi-4th-may-le-poisson-rouge-new-york-tickets">play her score from </a><i><a href="https://dice.fm/event/vxbqd-eiko-ishibashi-4th-may-le-poisson-rouge-new-york-tickets">Drive My Car</a></i><a href="https://dice.fm/event/vxbqd-eiko-ishibashi-4th-may-le-poisson-rouge-new-york-tickets"> (2021) at Le Poisson Rouge on May 4.</a></li></ul>Notebook/en/notebook/posts/author/44