Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- The Summer 2013 issue of Cineaste has hit shelves, and features interviews with Carlos Reygadas and Sarah Polley. Online you'll find the conclusion to "Film Criticism: The Next Generation" and other exclusives.
- The Human Rights Watch Film Festival begins tomorrow in New York. Co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the IFC center, the doc fest features acclaimed films such as The Act of Killing (pictured above) and Camp 14 – Total Control Zone (which I wrote on here).
- Takashi Miike is in talks to make The Outsider, his first English language film, with Tom Hardy set as the prospective lead. The film tells "an epic story set in post-World War II Japan, chronicling the life of a former American G.I. who becomes part of the Japanese yakuza."
Finds.
- Vulgar Auteurism is being hotly debated on Twitter, blogs and other publications. The term, which originated with Andrew Tracy and Cinema Scope, has gone through a process of re-appropriation that has occurred primarily in our community over the past couple of years. Keep your eyes on the Notebook in the coming weeks for our two cents.
- Occasioned by MoMA's retrospective, Richard Brody writes on "The Films of Allan Dwan":
"Dwan weaves taut webs of connections only to tear them apart with violence, and there’s a strange, removed side to the brutality that bursts out in his Westerns and his films noirs (such as “The River’s Edge” and “Slightly Scarlet”). The astonishing speed with which violence emerges and leaves bodies behind arises from a psychological density that matches the density of society: for Dwan, a gunfight is a complex football play with life at stake, occurring in mere seconds, and his images seem to diagram the decisive machine-like calculations that spin through the gunfighter’s head, instantaneously determining the action."
- Over at Toronto Film Review, David Davidson has a transcribed translation of "The Modernity of Howard Hawks", an article by Henri Langois originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma.
- Above: a new poster for Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess, via The Film Stage.
- In The Bleader, Ben Sachs questions the substance behind Noah Baumbach's Nouvelle vague inspired aesthetic in Frances Ha.
- For Film Comment, Max Nelson interviews Marco Bellocchio about "his relationship with the Church, his changing attitudes towards matricide, and his position (or lack thereof) on what it means to be free."
From the archives.
- In keeping with the spirit of Vulgar Auteurism, here's Kent Jones' 1999 piece from Film Comment on John Carpenter, in which he defends the legacy of one of America's great filmmakers:
"Forget the frequently mono-tonal characters and acting. Allowances are constantly being made for enshrined directors like Aldrich, Karlson, and Fuller, whose inconsistencies and weaknesses are forever being papered over and reconstituted as “idiosyncrasies,” or strengths. Why not make the same kind of allowances for this modest filmmaker who carries the phantom and perhaps illusory- camaraderie and selfless devotion to the public of the Golden Age of Hollywood in his head? His devoted fans excepted, Carpenter is indeed a bum in America, on the one hand damned for being modest and on the other damned for not being modest enough. But if auteurism taught us any lessons at all, it’s that modesty and ambition, prose and poetry, the concrete and the abstract, can walk hand in hand in the least likely places. A paradox. This relic, so self-contained, so respectful of the rules that his elders were obliged to play by, makes films that are often more acutely intelligent than anything his less constrained contemporaries can manage."