The Noteworthy: Panahi Strikes Again, Assayas on Assayas, VIFF & NYFF Underway

Panahi completes another "effort" under house-arrest, _Lincoln_ debuts at NYFF, Dennis Lim looks at the work of Ben Rivers & more...
Notebook

 News.


  • Steven Spielberg's long-anticipated Lincoln debuted on Monday at a secret screening at the New York Film Festival. Fandor has collected some of the first reactions.
  • Lynne Ramsay has secured financing with Scott Pictures for her follow-up to last year's We Need to Talk About Kevin. The film is Mobius and The Hollywood Reporter describes it as a "psychological action thriller set in deep space [in which] a captain consumed by revenge takes his crew on a death mission fueled by his own ego and will to control an enigmatic alien." So yes, it's Moby Dick in space. The Guardian has the full story.

Finds.

"The idealism of the ’70s became ideological, oppressive and just blew up. Then came punk-rock, a form of revolution, but it failed again, which in a way opened the door for the ’80s greed that has been around ever since. The materialism of the ’80s, the obsession with making money, benefiting from the present, milking it. Occupy Wall Street might not be succeeding too much recently, but at least they put their foot in the door, they’ve said something. It was an attempt to have an influence on politics, which is such an obvious, basic thing! It’s just absurd that it’s not the main concern of the politicians. It has to do with the terrifying revolution of the American politics. These guys [Occupy] were saying the most obvious things, and yet the whole thing got this super-revolutionary tag in the media. It shows how fucked-up the whole system is, with the extremism of the Republicans, and cowardice of Democrats."


"A DIY experimentalist who is often his own one-man crew, shooting with a windup 16-millimeter camera, he gravitates to people on the margins of civilization, living off the grid and out of time. For Mr. Rivers, who has produced more than 20 short and medium-length works in the past decade, moving between the cinema and the gallery, to make a film is by definition to create a world, perhaps to imagine another one — a drive that parallels the utopian aspirations of many of his subjects." 

  • Our own Adam Cook has been taking time off of editing this column to cover The 31st Vancouver International Film Festival. His first report for Filmmaker Magazine is online now. Also make sure to see what Sean Axmaker, David Bordwell, and Josh Timmermann have to say at the festival's mid-point.
  • Film Society of Lincoln Center has graciously uploaded a short rumination on the history of the New York Film Festival to their Vimeo, featuring the likes of Martin Scorsese, Noah Baumbach, J. Hoberman, and many more:

  • "We started to make this nature film, about animals in the neighborhood. We set out lights, and put out seed, and shot the bluejays on a branch in the tree. It was wonderful. Somehow, whatever film it was as a kid . . . it ignites you. Like how a person might be ignited by mathematics. The same thing happened with film." NYFF regular Nathaniel Dorsky talks to Ari Spool "about montage, humanism, and his childhood exploits in film" at Bomblog.
  • Meanwhile, Aaron Cutler and Mariana Shellard talk to Luther Price about a collection of his works showing in NYFF's Views from the Avant-Garde section.
  • "You don’t get it. He ruined my career, but he didn’t ruin my life. That time of my life was over. I still admire the man for who he was." Tippi Hedren talks about her infamous relationship with Hitchcock in a searing interview with Andrew Goldman.

From the archives.

Serge Daney in 1968 at the Odeon theatre via sergedaney.blogspot.ca.

  • "In the world of English-language film criticism, Daney is most readily associated with Jonathan Rosenbaum, who regularly brings up his old French friend. It’s unfortunate that his only translated book, Postcards from the Cinema, is out-of-print. But to make up for the lack of official translations of his work, the internet has spoken: a few film-blogs – some of the best ones out there, in my opinion – have picked up the slack and their writers have taken up the role as unofficial Daney translators: these websites are Serge Daney in EnglishSteve Erickson’s websiteKino Slang and My Gleanings. Here is my attempt to contribute to this conversation: the following are my translations of Daney’s first three contributions to Cahiers, which I think are insightful to better understand the spirit of Cahiers and his legacy which lives on in the world of film-criticism." Read David Davidson's translations here.

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