Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Jesús "Jess" Franco has passed away at the age of 82.
- Cléo, "a journal of film and feminism" founded by Kiva Reardon, has just unveiled its debut issue online. For your reading pleasure: pieces on Holy Motors, Haywire, Harmony Korine and more.
- A new issue from desistfilm is now online, including a Q&A with David Gatten conducted by Notebook regular David Phelps.
- Above: an interview with Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt) from the newly released 12th issue of The Seventh Art.
- As part of the Bard SummerScape Festival held at Bard College, a Russian emigré cinema series will be running this July and August, featuring films by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Epstein and others.
Finds.
- Above: via Indiewire, a gorgeous exclusive new poster for Spring Breakers (featuring an image from what just may be the film's best scene).
- Chinese cinema expert Shelly Kraicer has a new piece up on Cinema Scope Online wherein he makes some observations about Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster:
"The first wave of English-language reviews coming out of the Chinese and Berlin premieres—whose different versions contained many minor and some significant variations (I write about the China version here)—complained about the film’s “ill-behaved” narrative speed and structure. This may be a deliberate strategy on Wong’s part; it may betray an as yet unresolved tension in the film between its loyalty to genre and its historical ambitions. The Grandmaster both fulfills and frustrates the requirements of the period action-movie biopic, Wong continually puncturing the fabric of his generically templated narrative with his radical telescoping of events and chronological leaps. Not just conventionally mapping narrative onto (a) real life, in The Grandmaster Wong is mapping cinema onto history—or, if you will, imbricating history into cinema."
- Above: a three-part ad for Prada directed by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola and starring Léa Seydoux.
- Until April 9th, Vdrome will be streaming two short films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Vampire/Sud Vikal and M Hotel. Andrea Lissoni interviewed the director on the occasion of this online run:
"Andrea Lissoni: On one hand they deal with two crucial visual obsessions of you, respectively artificial light and windows, on the other one, there is that permanent interest – I would not call it an obsession – for animals and men. What do you think?
Apichatpong Weerasethakul: I like the settings where the lights and desire cross path. The desire to communicate with the invisible in the darkness, or in memory, or in the future. It's always related to cinema and we as insects that are drawn to lights."
- Above: posted on Monday as an April Fool's joke, a promo for Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen's This Is the End posing as a fake trailer for Pineapple Express 2.
From the archives.
- Over at UbuWeb we can now listen to some of Michael Snow's work as a musician online (thanks to Kiva Reardon for the link):
"Apart form being one of the greatest experimental film makers of all time, Canadian Michael Snow (b Toronto 1929) has also extensively played piano, trumpet, synth and percussion on numerous records and live performances. His recorded output includes many jazz and improvisation records, with the Canadian Creative Music Collective (CCMC) amongst others. Snow issued several legendary experimental albums on his own as well, like 1975’s Musics For Piano, Whistling, Microphone And Tape Recorder [excerpt here] or The Last LP in 1987 (full album here]. Two Radio Solos was recorded in between those 2 masterpieces and offers lenghty improvisations played on a Nordmende radio receiver (pictured above). Here as well, Snow is dealing with long durations, like in his films Wavelength (1966-67) and La Région Centrale (1971). The tracks are vast collages of foreign radio broadcasts, static bursts and abstract electronic sounds, all ‘played’ with the radio surfing the shortwave frequencies (2 to 30 MHz). "