Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Above: veteran character actress Eileen Brennan, known best for her roles in The Last Picture Show, has passed away at the age of 80.
- Above: The great French actress Bernadette Lafont (1938 - 2013), who we know so well from her contributions to the French New Wave, has left us. Ginette Vincendeau at Sight & Sound remarks how Lafont "occupied a specific niche in the New Wave female galaxy" and after a career dip "re-emerged triumphantly at the end of the 1960s."
- This Sunday, August 4 marks the end of your chance to enter the Tribeca Film Festival's Imagination Series: Film Competition, a contest where pitching your conceptual interpretation of a script by Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher not only gives you a shot at getting your idea produced, but if you win your film will be shown at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival. Sounds to us like a fast track for ambitious young filmmakers. Gentlemen and ladies, start your pitching!
- More of TIFF's 2013 lineup has been revealed. We'll be keeping this page updated, so keep checking back as the festival nears.
- "HOME", the second issue of "film and feminism" journal Cléo, has arrived online, and features pieces on Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, Todd Haynes' Safe, and an excellent interview by Kiva Reardon with Notebook heroine Athina Rachel Tsangari.
Finds.
- Above: Lars von Trier's second teaser clip for his upcoming two-parter, Nymphomaniac.
- Speaking of Bernadette Lafont, Richard Brody revisits (one of my favorite) films, Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore:
"The grandeur of the small-scale action emerges from two conflicting elements. One is loam: Eustache is fascinated by the private mythology of everyday people. (He captured it at the source, from his grandmother, in the documentary portrait “Numéro Zéro,” from 1970.) For the director, the post-1968 malaise didn’t arise from the cavalier disinhibitions of rock-and-roll Maoists but from working people (and even nonworking ones such as Alexandre) whose daily lives are built on the unprocessed, unexamined sediment of wartime burdens and compromises, and the unresolved tensions of the thirties. It’s as if the Trente Glorieuses—the thirty years of economic progress and technological modernization that France enjoyed after the end of the Second World War—as well as the generational shifts of May, 1968, were only so much gossip, publicity, and hearsay compared to the inherited weight of the world of the elders. "
- More from Brody on "the living directors who most changed, for the better, my way of perceiving."
- Douglas Dixon-Barker posted a rather stunning short film on his Tumblr; take a look.
- Above: via fuckyeahdirectors, Paul Thomas Anderson shooting Inherent Vice.
- Speaking of PTA, he recently reunited with Fiona Apple to direct the music video for Hot Knife:
From the archives.
- Lets go for a hat trick, here's Anderson's 1998 video for Fiona Apple's Across the Universe cover (make sure to watch this one in HD, otherwise the quality is a little rough):