Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Above: The Cinerama Dome in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).
- Decurion has announced that it won't be reopening its Arclight Cinemas and Pacific Theatres locations. The theater chain's most famous location is its Hollywood Arclight multiplex on Sunset Boulevard, home to the Cinerama Dome.
- ARTE France Cinéma will be co-producing three new features: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's Les amandiers (starring Louis Garrel), Arnaud Desplechin's Brother and Sister (which stars Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud), and Pietro Marcello's L'envol (the filmmaker's first feature in France).
- The Workers of the Cinemateca Brasileira have released a manifesto calling attention to the many risks facing the Cinemateca's unattended collection, equipment, and facilities due to its "current state of abandonment" by the Ministry of Tourism.
- Backed by TCM, documentarian Josh Grossberg and his team of researchers have announced plans to travel to Brazil in September to track down lost reels of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. If all goes well, TCM aims to premiere the documentary covering the search in 2022, along with a longer cut of Ambersons for the film's 80th anniversary.
- Published by Cineteca di Bologna, David Robinson's book on Charlie Chaplin's unfinished film The Freak is now available in Italian on the Cineteca’s online shop. The book brings together the film's complete script and an abundance of concepts and plans for its ambitious visual effects.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The inaugural edition of online film festival Prismatic Ground, hosted in partnership with Screen Slate and Maysles Documentary Center, has finally begun! The programs include a retrospective dedicated to Lynne Sachs, and four "waves" of thoughtfully curated shorts featuring work by Bill Morrison, Fox Maxy, Caroline Golum, and Ufuoma Essi.
- From May 20 to June 5, MoMA will be hosting a Carte Blanche series of films on its Virtual Cinema, selected by author Samuel Delany. The films include Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, and Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante.
- The French Cinematheque has made a number of restored classic films from the Thai Film Archive on their Henri platform, including some subtitled in English. Also included is Arnaud Desplechin's 2007 documentary L'Aimee, about the filmmaker's grandmother and inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
- Continuing Saint Laurent's series of collaborations with major filmmakers including Gaspar Noé and Abel Ferrara, Anthony Vaccarello chose Jim Jarmusch to direct a new short movie, French Water. It stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julianne Moore, and Chloë Sevigny.
- Following the release of Zack Snyder's Justice League, Snyder has moved on from HBOMax to Netflix with his latest, the Las Vegas-set zombie flick Army of the Dead. The film follows a group sent to a zombie-infested casino to retrieve $200 million.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Lee Chang-dong's Burning.
- Korean Screen has polled 158 critics around the world to create a list of the 100 greatest Korean films ever. Two recent heavy-hitters, Lee Chang-dong's Burning and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, have claimed the top two spots.
- Blog Media Funhouse has published an essay on Jean-Luc Godard's recent set of "pandemic interviews," his contrarian impulses and declarations of retirement, and his iPhone.
- Critic and programmer Abby Sun's conversation with curator Greg de Cuir Jr. (known for his curation of “Radical Acts of Care") is an all-encompassing investigation into desktop cinema and YouTube, blockchain, and online film festivals.
- Cassie Da Costa's assessment of four new films—Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes; Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie; Sky Hopinka’s Maɬni—Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore; and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection—investigates each respective method of challenging the dominant historical narrative and the lens of white patriarchy.
Above: Isabel Sandoval's Lingua Franca.
- For Issue #117 of e-flux, Isabel Sandoval reflects on "seeing as the other" in cinema, drawing connections between Jane Fonda in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971) and her performance as Olivia in Lingua Franca (2019).
- For The Baffler, A.S. Hamrah interviews John Gianvito, who discusses the research process behind Her Socialist Smile, the role of music in popular struggles, and the influence of Antonio Gramsci on the film's title.
- Virtual studio Kinet Media has published a collection of four talks by Isiah Medina given between 2019 and 2021, which include insights into Medina's editing process and montage theory, and the production of Inventing the Future.
- Vadim Rizov of Filmmaker Magazine continues his essential list of the "25 or so" features shot on 35mm of the past year, from Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman 1984 to Xavier Dolan's Matthias & Maxime.
- Reverse Shot's expansive Great Beyond symposium continues with Max Carpenter on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Matthew Porterfield introduces his film Cuatro paredes, which is exclusively showing on MUBI in the Brief Encounters series.
- Filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland presents the books she's written alongside her films, which together "[offer] a different way of seeing and touching, of being and preserving." The series Hands-On: Two Films by Jessica Sarah Rinland is now playing in many countries.
- The latest entry in Patrick Holzapfel's Full Bloom series is on the Mexican cypress in João César Monteiro's final film Vai~E~Vem.
- Kelli Weston interviews Khalik Allah, who discusses IWOW: I Walk on Water, which is exclusively playing on MUBI in the UK and Ireland starting April 12, 2021.
- For the Current Debate, Leonardo Goi assembles responses to the "Jewishness" of Emma Seligman's Shiva Baby.
EXTRAS
- From Kevin Ma, the official poster for Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Haruki Murakami adaptation Drive My Car.
- Thanks to the International Federation of Film Archives, you now have the opportunity to create a streaming series of your own, hand-picked from several free archives.
- A very rare, extremely NSFW photograph of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis went up for auction earlier this week. Unfortunately, it has been claimed at nearly $4,500.
- Lust, Caution action figures for the super-fans!