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NEWS
Above: The Temenos screening in Lyssarea, Greece.
- Registration for Temenos 2022, which will premiere a new section of avant-garde master Gregory Markopoulos's epic Eniaios, is now open. This very special event, which usually takes place every four years, will be taking place June 9-19 in Lyssarea, Greece. For more information on the Temenos screenings and the ongoing restoration of Eniaios ("the ultimate, reworking of [Markopoulos's] entire earlier film output"), visit here.
- Hou Hsiao-hsien has announced two new projects: the long-gestating, Shu Qi-led film Shulan River, an adaptation of the Hsieh Hai-meng novel about a river goddess; and a yet unnamed project starring Chang Chen about "an elderly father and his son."
- Filmmaker, painter, writer, Nick Zedd has died. In addition to his darkly funny no-budget films like They Eat Scum (1979) and his zine Underground Film Bulletin, Zedd is coining the term "Cinema of Transgression" to describe the vision shared by himself and fellow New York-based underground filmmakers like Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch. In his Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, he called for filmmakers to break the rules of academic filmmaking with a sense of humor, as well as "blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- An erotic tale of urban alienation in Taipei, Tsai Ming-liang's sophomore feature Vive L'amour (1994) is being rereleased by Film Movement in a gorgeous 2K restoration.
- Cinema Guild's trailer for Fern Silva's debut feature Rock Bottom Riser, a Hawaii-set exploration of post-colonialism and pop culture, ethnography and astronomy.
- Friends and Strangers filmmaker James Vaughan's 2013 short You Like It, I Love It is now showing on Le Cinéma Club. The absurdist comedy follows an encounter between two brothers and their odd neighbor, who has an idea for an EDM festival.
- The trailer for Kino Lorber's rerelease of Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema's 1987 film I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, a whimsical Toronto-set character study about a photographer, a curator, and a painter.
- Hong Kong filmmaker and Johnnie To collaborator Wa Kai-fai returns with Cold Detective, or Detective vs Sleuths, about a special task force in Hong Kong assigned to investigate a series of murders.
- Paul Thomas Anderson has directed the video for HAIM's new song "Lost Track," marking his sixth music video for the band. The song was first premiered during screenings of Anderson's Licorice Pizza, which starred Alana Haim.
- The Cinémathèque française has kicked off a new series of 1960s Taiwanese films, streaming for free on their HENRI platform. The first film in the series is Chang Ying's The Fantasy of the Deer Warrior (1961), which you can now watch on HENRI with English subtitles.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. (1924)
- Farran Smith Nehme compares two new books on Buster Keaton—James Curtis' Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life and Dana Stevens' Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century—which try "to rescue Keaton’s image from the mawkish narrative of the silent-movie genius undone by drinking and an inability to move with the times."
- In an essay for Screen Slate, sound designer David Hurley (who served as the supervising sound editor and music supervisor on David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return) praises unrestored 35mm release print scans as a means of experiencing "how [films] originally looked and were experienced by their initial audiences."
- Payal Kapadia discusses the making of her documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, her artistic upbringing, and her experience attending the Film and Television Institute of India (where most of the film is set) with Film Comment.
- For his Substack newsletter, critic Nick Pinkerton writes on the Paris-based, communally programmed cinema La Clef Revival, and his reasons for supporting its fight against eviction.
- Filmmaker Magazine has published Vadim Rizov's annual list of the year's films shot on 35mm. This year's films range from M. Night Shyamalan's Old to Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II.
- Bob Fosse's Cabaret turns 50 this year, and in his reappraisal of the film, Adam Nayman discusses how the film "remains astonishing both in its craftsmanship and its contradictions."
- Critic Karen Han has announced the upcoming publication of her book, Bong Joon-ho: Dissident Cinema. The book, which will be published in November, is available for pre-order.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Above: Kinuyo Tanaka's The Wandering Princess (1960)
- Film Society has announced a historic retrospective honoring the life and career of the iconic actress Kinuyo Tanaka, who was also Japan's second woman filmmaker and (as Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández points out at the Women Film Pioneers Project) "the only female director active during the post-war Golden Age of Japanese cinema in the late 1950s." The series takes place March 18-27, and includes restored versions of Tanaka's six directorial efforts, as well as a selection of her favorite films by collaborators like Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse.
- Squirrel to the Nuts, the long-lost Peter Bogdonavich film that was refashioned by studios into the romantic comedy She's Funny That Way (2014), is playing at the Museum of Modern Art March 28-April 5, as part of its Bogdonavich retrospective. Read the saga of the film's rescue by writer James Kenney here.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- "...above all I wanted to create a deeply cinematic work..." Peter Tscherkassky introduces his film Train Again, which is showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries in the series Brief Encounters.
- Valdimar Jóhannsson, whose film Lamb is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries in the series Debuts, shares his five inspirations for the film.
- Danielle Burgos writes on Ghanaian-American filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu's explorations of Black hair culture in her "hair trilogy." The three films are showing on MUBI in the series Akosua Adoma Owusu: The Hair Trilogy.
- Florence Scott-Anderton's latest Soundtrack Mix celebrates the film music of one of Hollywood's greatest soundtrack composers, Hans Zimmer.
- In an interview with Lawrence Garcia, Canadian filmmaker Ashley McKenzie discusses her second film Queens of the Qing Dynasty, an empathetic portrait of friendship and struggle within government institutions.
- In his dispatch from the Berlinale, Jordan Cronk reviews new films by Claire Denis, James Benning, and Hong Sang-soo, which were among the stand-outs at the festival.
- For his Action Scene column, Jonah Jeng unpacks the action centerpiece of director Fernando di Leo’s 1972 film The Italian Connection.
EXTRAS
- From Jørgen Johannessen on YouTube, a video of Joachim Trier from his champion skateboarder days in 1992. Elsewhere on Johannessen's channel is Movie This (1991), a 45-minute skate video by Trier that might be considered his very first film. In an interview with Under the Radar, Trier describes his old videos as "a great way to show each other, you know, the remains of a summer. This is what we did this summer. Nothing commercial about it, but just the pure wish to do something that looked cool."