Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- The Aurora tragedy, in which a man took the lives of 14 people, and injured many others, in a horrific shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, has devastated everyone. David Hudson rounds up some of the responses critics have offered in the wake of this unthinkable event.
- Issue 63 of Senses of Cinema is now available online for your perusal. Among the offerings are pieces on Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Ferrara's Go Go Tales and an assortment of festival reports.
- Above: Jerry Lewis sure knows how to keep busy. The 86 year-old is hard at work on directing his first play, a stage adaptation of The Nutty Professor. Dave Itzkoff, who visited Lewis during rehearsals, has a piece on the subject in The New York Times.
- Claire Denis is set to begin shooting The Bastards, her next feature. We've yet to get any plot details, but we know the film will star Vincent Lindon and Chiara Mastroianni.
- After a brief scare and a stay at the hospital, 103 year-old Manoel de Oliveira, the true "Man of Steel", has been discharged and is reportedly recovering from a respiratory infection. Oliveira is quoted as saying he's "anxious to get back to work" and that there's "too much to do".
Finds.
- Above: via The New York Times, a first look at James Gray's forthcoming film, Lowlife.
- Above: A conversation conducted by Notebook contributor Ryland Walker Knight with Harmony Korine, Val Kilmer and Eddy Moretti, who worked together on a short for the omnibus film The Fourth Dimension.
- Filmmaker Magazine offers a list of "25 New Faces of Independent Film"
- In Moving Image Source, Jordan Mintzer writes on "the legacy and continuing relevance of the French critic Serge Daney":
"...It’s safe to say that Daney remains the critical voice to reckon with in France—a voice so expansive and unbeatable that several young critics at the Cinémathèque conference mentioned how daunting it was to write après Daney—the same cannot be said for the English-speaking world, where thus far only one of his books has been published (Grant’s excellent Persévérance translation), along with a few articles that have popped up in film magazines (Film Comment and Sight & Sound) or on websites."
- Writing for Cinema Scope Online, Michael Sicinski offers what may yet be the best piece on Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises.
- For your viewing pleasure, the trailer for Peter Strickland's intriguing Berberian Sound Studio, which will be at the Locarno Film Festival in August, is below:
- In the Chicago Reader, Ben Sachs expounds on his growing admiration for the cinema of Philippe Garrel:
"[Garrel]'s is a forbidding sort of mastery, in which everything within the shot—lighting, shadow, sound, actors' faces—carries some deliberate, personal meaning. Even the spontaneous behavior seems part of a precise plan. Yet his films can be hypnotic once you get on their wavelength: Garrel's distinctive, drawn-out pacing and his level fascination with both minute and large-scale detail can dissolve whatever's happening around you and distend your sense of time."
- Above: via Mr. Madlangbayan, Raya Martin's Tumblr, a still from Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth.
From the archives.
- Taking a cue from a suggested link in Ben Sach's piece on Philippe Garrel, here's a piece by Maximillian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema in which he labels Garrel the "world’s greatest working filmmaker".