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NEWS
Michael Ballhaus (second from right) on the set of Martin Scorsese's The Departed
- Michael Ballhaus, the great German cinematographer whose innovative work connects Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Martin Scorsese, has died at the age of 81.
- Goodness, could it be true, The Lost City of Z director James Gray and Brad Pitt finally teaming up? And for a sci-fi? Indeed: the film, titled Ad Astra, will be shooting this summer.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Kathryn Bigelow has been attached to several projects following the success and controversy of Zero Dark Thirty, and now we have a first look at her next feature, Detroit, set during 1967 riots in the city. It will be in cinemas this summer.
- The teaser trailer for Joachim Trier's Thelma, possibly headed to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. We spoke to Trier about his English language debut, Louder Than Bombs, at the festival in 2015.
- If there's one thing you may know about us at the Notebook, it's that we're huge fans of Brit auteur Tony Scott—see, for instance, our huge two-part dossier exploring his filmography. The BFI has found his first full length feature film, an adaptation of Henry James's The Author of Beltraffio, and Tony's brother Ridley has lent the above introduction. We can't wait to see it!
- An appropriately dark and scintillating trailer for Mexican director Amat Escalante's ambitious film The Untamed.
RECOMMENDED READING
Frederick Wiseman
- Is Frederick Wiseman the greatest working American director? We'd contend so. As we await his new documentary, Ex Libris — New York Public Library, a retrospective of the master's sprawling career has started touring. In its honor, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis at The New York Times have traded writing back and forth on Wiseman. Dargis, speaking of 1967's Titicut Follies, remarks, "Now, 50 years later, the film can be seen for what it was: a work of political art and moral outrage"—a statement no doubt true of much of the filmmaker's work.
- "Whatever Happened to Virginia Van Upp?" asks Christina Newland at Hazlitt. Our question is also: Who is Virginia Van Upp? And Newland has the answer:
At forty three, she had been employed in a litany of industry roles. In her previous decade-long tenure as a writer at Paramount, she had long wished for more control over her finished screenplays, but no one could accuse her of lacking experience. At the start of 1945, Van Upp would become one of the only female executives in Hollywood. It was a position that no other woman would occupy for more than thirty years. Soon, she would begin work on her friend Rita Hayworth’s career-defining film noir: Gilda.
Kevin Jerome Everson's Three Quarters (2015)
- Despite being a highly productive American independent filmmaker whose films are fixtures both in galleries and at international film festivals, Kevin Jerome Everson seems forever on the cusp of wider recognition. With new films at Rotterdam, in the Whitney Biennial and at Knoxville's Big Ears festival, 2017 is a big year for the filmmaker, who sat down with Jordan Cronk for BOMB to discuss his work:
"I come to film from the arts—from photography, sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Especially with photography, you have to make a body of work, you know? And I feel that in film, too. I can't just make one. I have to make these other components to see if my formal qualities are working or being exercised to the fullest. And if not, then I can adjust next time. I was recently reading Darby English's book, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, about these black abstract painters in the late '60s and early '70s, and I realized I approach film like abstract art in some weird way—like maybe they don't need an audience? Like, I'm just making things. (laughter) They're just so self-referential. One strategy is that I've been trying to have the people on screen be smarter than the audience—in the sense that the subjects don't need them. A lot of my professors in undergraduate school came out of the University of Iowa's art program in the early '70s. And because of that, I feel my work has to present itself as material, process, and procedure. So the act of making—the camera, film stock, even time or whatever else goes into it—is all part of the film's content."
EXTRAS
- A caricature of Orson Welles working on The Magnificent Ambersons. (Via.)