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NEWS
Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, 2013).
- Production has begun on Alain Guiraudie’s next noir-esque feature, Miséricorde, with DP Claire Mathon—their third collaboration after Stranger by the Lake (2013) and Staying Vertical (2016). The plot centers on a 30-year-old man named Jérémie who returns to a village in southern France, his prior home, for an old friend’s funeral, only to find himself at the center of a police investigation.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Janus Films have shared a trailer for a new 4K restoration of Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964). A virtuosic, formally experimental work of militant cinema, it tells the story of Manoel, a cowherd who, after murdering a ranch owner, flees to join a religious cult headed by a self-proclaimed saint, only to find himself back among violence. A landmark of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement and an inspiration to many filmmakers, Rocha made Black God, White Devil when he was only 25 years old.
RECOMMENDED READING
Still Life (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974).
- “From internationally recognized films like Still Life (which won the Silver Bear at the 1974 Berlinale) to truly obscure flicks like the cheap, sensational genre movies surveyed in Khoshbakht’s essay collage filmfarsi (2019), the MoMA series demonstrates both the fragility and resilience of cinema.” In the Film Comment Letter, Imogen Sara Smith endorses “Cinema Before the Revolution, 1925-1979,” a series curated by filmmaker, curator, and Notebook board member Ehsan Khoshbakht. Farbod Honarpisheh examines several of the films in the series in MoMA's journal Post: Notes on Art in a Global Context, looking at how the Iranian New Wave was “besieged by ruins and ruination from the start.”
- “As a viewer, [if] I see the mechanics, I feel like I’m [being] manipulated. The form is as important as the story itself. The more personal it is, the better.” Document Journal paired filmmaker Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World) with actor Sandra Hüller, seen most recently in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, for a conversation on the theme of cinema and “anti-storytelling.”
- “Bresson is concerned with the fate of one man; Schrader looks at the soul of America.” For the Baffler, Robert Rubsam writes about Paul Schrader’s recent “Man in a Room” trilogy, looking at the role of faith, race, politics, and violence in these films, as well as how the continual influence of Robert Bresson factors into Schrader’s style.
- “Miyazaki is neither Karl Marx nor Ted Kaczynski. He has toyed with socialism and Maoism and now seems to have come around to an ecoterrorism led by nature itself.” For the New Left Review’s Sidecar, James Wham offers his analysis of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.
- “When a movie fails, I asked, does he question his instincts? ‘No,’ he grunted. ‘I blast the shit out of a tennis ball.’” In the New Yorker, Michael Schulman profiles Ridley Scott, now 86, whose latest film, Napoleon, will be his twenty-eighth as director.
- “It’s tempting to claim that his Gentile looks could have only flourished in the shadow of Reagan’s America, but Hurt’s classical appearance was always in productive tension with a sensitive, decidedly non-macho persona.” For Metrograph’s Journal, Vikram Murthi admires William Hurt’s “potent mix of carnality and soft compassion.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Eros + Massacre (Kijū Yoshida, 1969).
- New York, December 1 through 8: Running at Film at Lincoln Center, “The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida” is an all-celluloid retrospective of the films of “one of Japan’s greatest cinematic rebels.” Yoshida’s “messy, volatile, and provocative body of work” was “a consistent revelation” for Jordan Cronk when he wrote about the director at a 2022 Viennale retrospective.
- Knoxville, November 9 through 12: Organized by Notebook contributor Darren Hughes, FILM FEST KNOX is a new film festival for Knoxville, Tennessee. The program includes a mix of international festival films, locally made work, and the American Regional Film Competition, “a showcase of the diversity of personal and ambitious filmmaking happening outside of the traditional industry capitals of Los Angeles and New York City.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The American musician Marnie Stern—known for her dextrous, finger-tapping guitar technique—just released her first album in ten years, The Comeback Kid. On it, she covers the underrated Ennio Morricone tune, "Il Girotondo Della Note," from Aldo Lado's 1972 giallo Who Saw Her Die? Listen to Stern shred on Bandcamp.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960).
- “‘You need to stay ahead of your audience’: that’s what he always said to Scorsese and me. ‘Don’t ever talk down to them. They’re always ahead of you, so you’ve got to try to get ahead of them.’” Matthew Thrift sits down with legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker to discuss key scenes from the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, occasioned by a three-month BFI retrospective. This is a subject near and dear to Schoonmaker: she and Powell were married from 1984 until 1990, and she’s currently working with Martin Scorsese on a documentary about the duo’s eclectic oeuvre.
- Is Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy (1968) an experimental film? An art exhibition? Film criticism? Or all of the above? In a new essay, Frank Falisi opens this one-of-a-kind “cinematic junk drawer,” a vibrational ode to orgiastic bad taste that strips B-movies for parts.
- "I have been looking at movie posters obsessively for almost twenty years and it was mind-blowing to come across so many beautiful posters that I had never seen before and which have probably never been digitized." In the latest edition of Movie Poster of the Week, Adrian Curry discusses the process of selecting one rare poster from an awe-inspiring collection of 5,000 for inclusion in a new Berlin exhibition, Grosses Kino.
- "I started to think about the future not as this other temporal state, but as more of a question of what our relationship to time itself is." Arta Barzanji speaks to Locarno's innovative events programmer Kevin B. Lee about cinema’s past, present, and potential futures, which inspire his unique programming ethos.
EXTRAS
- Hong Sang-soo's In Water screens at US theaters starting December 1. Cinema Guild have shared a suitably impressionistic poster for the film, plus a new trailer revealing the film’s out-of-focus stylings.
- Light in the Attic are releasing a box set of the soundtracks for eleven of Wong Kar Wai’s movies, each pressed on snazzy-colored vinyl with original artwork. It’s available for pre-order now, and will be produced on a very limited run of just 400 copies.
- Also new is another publication from Fireflies Press, titled Collected Stories. For the book, filmmaker Ben Rivers invited fourteen authors, including Nathalie Léger, Vanessa Onwuemezi, and Xiaolu Guo, to watch one of his films and respond in writing. Parallel to this, a selection of Rivers’s short films are also gathered in a new Blu-ray by UK home entertainment label Second Run.
