Edited by Adam Cook
- Monday was International Women's Days, and to mark the occasion, Sight & Sound complied a list of "vital female voice(s) in film criticism":
"Cinema would be a very different place without seminal figures like Iris Barry, Pauline Kael, Laura Mulvey and Susan Sontag. This collection is a reminder of their importance but it also looks beyond them too. Asking 25 writers and curators to each nominate a female critic and choose a piece of their writing has amassed a surprising array of different voices: from 1920s teenage gossip columnist Nerina Shute to the first regular broadsheet female film reviewer C.A. Lejeune, Sight & Sound’s august editor of 34 years Penelope Houston, zombie-loving trade reviewer Marjorie Bilbow and the feminist activist and author bell hooks, as well as unlikely cinema analysts like novelist Hilary Mantel."
- Also of note, the April issue of Sight & Sound is out now.
- The selection team that will join Marco Mueller and the Beijing International Film Festival has been announced.
- Applications for Locarno Film Festival's Summer Academy are now open—this includes the Filmmakers Academy, the Critics Academy, and the Industry Academy. You can find the information on Locarno's site.
- Above: the trailer for New Directors/New Films 2015.
- For his blog, David Bordwell writes on voice-over sound in "1932: MGM invents the future (Part 1)":
"Perhaps it took radio to teach filmmakers the dramatic power of the inner monologue. It was certainly suited to many genres, from crime and suspense stories to melodrama and even comedies. Since it crystallized in the 1940s, the technique, while rare, has never really gone away. Ingenious filmmakers, from Resnais to Wong Kar-wai, have revived and revised it."
- In the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs, Peter Labuza talks to film scholar and archivist Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak.
- Above: a TIFF Cinematheque panel discussion on Jean-Luc Godard featuring Jonathan Rosenbaum, Nicole Brenez, and Murray Pomerance.
- Nathan Lee writes on Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent for Film Comment:
"Saint Laurent is a memory movie with a splendidly idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and pace. Scenes variously play out with abrupt shifts or deliberative longueurs; the bold title cards that mark each change of year structure the narrative without delimiting neat, summarizable chapters. A split-screen montage that sequences a run of YSL collections against the political crises of the late Sixties might have come off as glib were it not so elegantly framed (and commented on) as a fantasia that unfolds in the interval of a single gyration of Betty’s hips, dancing the night away."
- In Brad Stevens' column for Sight & Sound, he writes on "images of women in trousers."
- Above: an elaborate promo for Cineteca di Bologna.
- In Movie Morlocks, R. Emmet Sweeney writes on Robert Montgomery's Ride the Pink Horse and Don Siegel's The Hanged Man.
- No matter what you think of the book or film, Interview Magazine has published a fascinating conversation between Jane Campion and Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson:
"CAMPION: I find that sex scenes are a real pain to shoot, because there's just so much tension and so much vulnerability. It's not the least bit enjoyable.
TAYLOR-JOHNSON: One of my favorite film moments is in [Campion's film] The Piano, when Harvey Keitel's character puts his finger into the hole of Holly Hunter's tights. It's one of the most memorable, powerful moments in film that inspired me as I'm thinking about how to create sexual tension and power through something as simple and beautiful and elegant as that, without having to explicitly show dick and fanny.
CAMPION: Yeah, it's just my old theory of tension and focus. You put on a very tiny sort of hole, over other holes. [laughs]"