Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Above: Son of the White Mare (1981)
- Pioneering Hungarian filmmaker Marcell Jankovics has died. Known for his fantastical and folkloric animations, Jankovics' films like Johnny Corncob (1973) and Son of the White Mare (1981) helped place Hungarian animation on the map. Last year, Jankovics discussed his recently re-released Son of the White Mare with Christopher L. Inoa.
- Amazon has bought MGM for $8.45 billion. Mike Hopkins, senior VP of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, has announced plans to reimagine MGM's "treasure trove of [intellectual property]," which includes 12 Angry Men, Basic Instinct, and Raging Bull.
- Cristian Mungiu will be the Jury President for this year's International Critics' Week at Cannes. The festival's lineup is set to be announced on June 7.
- Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection) has started production on his next film, supported by the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund. Entitled The Chattering Of Teeth, Mosese's film will focus on "the theme of siege and fear after being grounded in his adopted home city of Berlin by the Covid-19 pandemic."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Sadie Cole HQ presents The View from There, a program of 27 films and videos consisting of both a physical exhibit at 169–173 Regent Street, London and an online screening platform, where one film will play for 24 hours each day. Featured filmmakers include Mati Diop, Ja'Tovia Gary, Isaki Lacuesta, and Ho Tzu Nyen.
- Le Cinéma Club has invited Screen Slate Jon Dieringer to guest curate, and his pick is Swedish filmmaker Staffan Hildebrand's 1987 Stockholmsnatt. The film, Dieringer writes, started out as a "docudrama financed by Sweden’s state-owned telephone company to discourage payphone sabotage," only made the trend more popular among Sweden's youth.
- The newest twisted tale by M. Night Shyamalan is Old, starring the power pairing of Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps. Based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, Old follows a group of vacationing families who discover that the creepy beach where they're vacationing is causing them to age rapidly, reducing their lifespan into a single day.
RECOMMENDED READING
- Jon Dieringer of Screen Slate interviews John Klacsmann, an archivist at Anthology Film Archives, regarding Kodak's discontinuation of color internegative stock (along with several other questionable business decisions) and the consequences of this decision for avant-garde filmmakers, archivists, and curators.
- Luc Moullet’s autobiography, Mémoires d'une savonnette indocile, will be released in France on June 17 by independent publisher Capricci.
- "The excitement of being back, however tinged by free-floating nervousness, can’t be downplayed." For The New York Times, Joshua Rothkopf has written an essay on New Yorkers' uneasy but welcome return to multiplex moviegoing.
- Issue #9 of NANG Magazine, the English-language magazine on cinema and cinema cultures in the Asian world, is now available to order. Entitled Archival Imaginaries and guest edited by Bono Olgado and Rufus de Rham, the issue focuses on "the powers and limits of both archives and archiving."
- University of Chicago scholars have launched the Guerrilla Television Network, an archival project dedicated to preserving decades of videos from the "guerilla television" movement of the 1960s and 70s, which sought to democratize video filmmaking through the use of low-cost cameras.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Sparks have released the first song from their forthcoming soundtrack to Leos Carax's musical Annette, performed with Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, Simon Helberg, and more.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- In the latest "Moviegoing Memories," director Kelly Reichardt shares her favorite, formative movie theaters (including Boston's Brattle Theatre and Portland's Hollywood Theatre) and her hunt to rediscover Alain Cavalier's 1967 Pillaged.
- Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, is showing on MUBI in the US in the series Performers We Love. In celebration of Léaud's starring role, Jonathan Rosenbaum takes a look at how one shot in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 Made in U.S.A. encapsulates Léaud's prodigious range.
- For "The Current Debate," Leonardo Goi examines the recasting of slavery in Barry Jenkins' new series The Underground Railroad.
- Nadine Smith selects one shot from Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth that encapsulates the auteur's memory-infused return. The film is showing on MUBI in the UK through June 13 as part of the series Reignite Cinema: Francis Ford Coppola's Outliers.
- Caroline Golum shares their impressions of experimental documentary festival Prismatic Ground, at which their film Sixteen Showings premiered in April.
- Carolyn Funk writes on the creative partnership of husband and wife Walerian Borowczyk and Ligia Branice. Films by Borowczyk are showing on MUBI in many countries in the series The Many Sins of Walerian Borowczyk.