Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Above: the latest issue of Interiors features an examination of the space and political dimensions of the Palazzo de Congessi in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist.
- The Cannes Film Festival has announced their Short Film Competition lineup as well as the 2013 Cinéfondation Selection. Jane Campion will preside over the jury that will award the Short Film Palme d'Or.
- A.A. Dowd has been hired as the new Film Editor for The AV Club merely a week after leaving Time Out Chicago.
Finds.
- Above: one of Martín Sichetti's many incredible film still drawings (I'm sure you can guess where this image is from).
- Writing for Transit, Adrian Martin looks at Justin Bieber as auteur—and expresses his preference for the "Beauty and a Beat" music video over Leviathan:
"The camera darts under water, resurfaces. Harsh wind sounds and loud distortion assault the digital camera’s in-built microphone. Drops on the lens blur and streak the image, rendering it abstract. Sudden, unmotivated movements up, down, left, right. A film assembled like it is scraps, ruins from the working floor. It’s that (over)acclaimed documentary of ‘immersive sensory ethnography’, Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel, 2012), right? No, it is the emergence of singer Justin Bieber as his own auteur, 18 years old at the time, in the clip for Beauty and a Beat (2012) – four minutes and fifty-two seconds of pure cinema."
- Above: via This Must Be the Place, amazing photographs taken of Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard and John Milius meeting Akira Kurosawa at the New York Plaza Hotel in 1982. From Teruyo Nogami's Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa:
"We had heard that Milius was a Kurosawa fan, and Kurosawa also had good things to say about his The Wind and the Lion. Milius asked Kurosawa to teach him the martial art of kendo, or Japanese fencing, and did Mifune impersonations, but Godard only sat looking on, smiling, and never spoke to Kurosawa.
Another unusual visitor was the German director Werner Herzog, whose name was then unfamiliar to Kurosawa. There was a book he wanted to give Kurosawa, said Herzog, but he hadn’t been able to find it in the book store and he had a plane to catch, so he had just dropped by to pay his respects. Then the next day, I think it was, he made a special trip to hand-deliver the book—having gone to the trouble of altering his flight reservations to do so. I believe it was a book of drawings. In any case, Kurosawa found this gesture deeply moving."
- Above: three of several new character posters from Bong Joon-ho's forthcoming Snowpiercer.
- Terrence Malick's To The Wonder, now available On Demand, continues to divide viewers, but Richard Brody's take on the film is devout:
"Malick has directed another love story that deserves to endure as an artistic landmark, a love story that, in an age of radical cinema, redefines the very idea of a love story, while remaining faithful to the high line of movie tradition...As he brings his love story to the screen, he also brings out serious ideas about the trials of the artistic life, about the conflict between the Catholic heritage and the Protestant one, about the tense mutual influence of Europe and America—and, most amazingly, he does it with images and sounds, not with speeches and drama. Malick here turns the very act of cinematic vision, of filming, philosophical."
- Above: The Edit Room Floor has a selection of previously unseen photographs from the production of Taxi Driver.
From the archives.
- Above: this week we dip into our very own forum archives for this amazing diagram (click to enlarge!) from Lucas, one of our users, of his visual impressions of various auteurs.