Rushes | An Open Letter from NYFF Filmmakers, Everest Doc Peeves French Distributors

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NEWS

Kaizen (Basile Monnot, 2024).

• Kaizen (2024), a documentary about an influencer’s quest to scale Mount Everest, has attracted the ire of other French distributors after mk2 violated the terms of its “exceptional visa,” booking almost double its legal allowance of screenings before releasing the film on YouTube the next day. One industry professional compared the company to “guys in hoodies with machine guns robbing a bank.”
• Total Film, the British monthly, has ceased print publication after 356 issues and 27 years.
• The United Kingdom has passed into law an Independent Film Tax Credit, part of a large investment in the culture industry by the new Labour government.

FESTIVALS

Being John Smith (John Smith, 2024).

• In an open letter, filmmakers and workers call on the New York Film Festival to end its ties with Bloomberg Philanthropies, which they identify as “directly implicated in facilitating settlement infrastructure in the West Bank and denying Palestinians their basic rights.” Signatories with films in this year’s festival include Rhayne Vermette, Truong Minh Quy, John Smith, Mike Leigh, Guy Maddin, and Athina Rachel Tsangari.
• Anti-war demonstrators interrupted a Q&A after a NYFF screening of The Room Next Door (2024). Pedro Almodóvar offered them his microphone to speak against the partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies. Tilda Swinton reportedly called the interruption as “a dignifying thing for this festival.”
• Holding a banner reading “No Film on a Dead Planet,” climate activists from Extinction Rebellion disrupted two NYFF screenings, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds (both 2024), while the films were still playing.

DEVELOPING

• Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning, adapted from Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket (1965), will star Riley Keough, Callum Turner, Elle Fanning, and Pamela Anderson.
• Keough will also star in Claire Denis’s The Cry of the Guards alongside Matt Dillon and Isaach de Bankolé.
• Daniel Day-Lewis will come out of early retirement to star in his son Ronan’s Anemone, which he cowrote.
• Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters will star Keke Palmer, Demi Moore, LaKeith Stanfield, and Naomi Ackie.
• Xavier Dolan, having last year announced his retirement from filmmaking, now announces his next film will be a period piece with aspects of comedy and horror, set in 1895, “in the world of the elite, the Parisian literary world, and in the countryside, too.”
• Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation will star Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, respectively.

REMEMBERING

California Suite (Herbert Ross, 1978).

• Maggie Smith has died at 89. The British actress was prolific on stage and screen for over 70 years, appearing in Othello (1965), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), Travels with my Aunt (1972), California Suite (1978), A Room with a View (1985), Gosford Park (2001), and so many others.
• Kris Kristofferson has died at 88. The American musician and actor began as a songwriter before discovering the caprices of Hollywood, where he was lauded for performances in Blume in Love (1973), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), and A Star Is Born (1976), then pilloried for Convoy (1978) and Heaven’s Gate (1980). “Me and Bobby McGee,” perhaps the first among Kristofferson’s many lyrical accomplishments, was inspired by Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954).

Pixillation (Lillian Schwartz, 1970).

• Lillian Schwartz has died at 97. The American artist, as a resident at Bell Labs, created some of the first films with computer-generated imagery, including Pixillation (1970), Olympiad, and UFOs (both 1971).
• Pierre-William Glenn has died at 80. The French cinematographer and director lensed some 70 films in the course of six decades, including Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 (1970), Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege (1972), François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), and Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1980). He is fondly remembered by the motorcycling community for The Iron Horse (1975), his first feature directorial effort, which documented the 1974 “Continental Circus” world championship races.

RECOMMENDED READING

The Doom Generation (Gregg Araki, 1995).

• “Araki had rankled sensibilities since his earliest days cobbling together provocations for $5,000 apiece, but he’d never had so much firepower at his disposal.” For InsideHook, Charles Bramesco profiles Gregg Araki on the occasion of the restoration and re-release of The Doom Generation (1995).
• “She streaks through films like a meteor in the sky.” In an excerpt from Ingrid Caven: I Am a Fiction, published by Fireflies Press, Erika Balsom surveys the fleeting appearances and lasting impressions of an underappreciated player of New German Cinema.
• “As always with archival collections…one should ask what isn’t there, and why might that be.” For Afterall, Julian Ross studies the Tokyo Reels, a collection of twenty 16mm films produced by the international militant filmmaking effort around Palestinian liberation between the 1960s and ’80s.
• “I don’t think New Yorkers are into standing for that long.”  For Interview, Jeremy O. Harris speaks with key figures of the New York Film Festival, including artistic director Dennis Lim and filmmakers Mati Diop, Mike Leigh, and Paul Schrader.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Memories of Milk City (Ruchir Joshi, 1991).

• Chicago, through January 10, 2025: The Neubauer Collegium presents Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy, a new moving-image work by the Otolith Group that they call an “audiovisual investigation into the gestures, geometries, grammars, and geographies that compose the forms and forces of the films of Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty.”
• London, through December 12: The Barbican presents Rewriting the Rules: Pioneering Indian Cinema after 1970, encompassing not only the advent of Parallel Cinema but also the shifting sensibilities of the nation’s popular filmmaking.
• Cherbourg, October 6 through February 2: Jeu de Paume presents Jean Painlevé: Feet in the Water, an exhibition devoted to the scientific filmmaker’s pioneering underwater documentaries, “reveal[ing] a fascinating universe, in which realism touches on the fantastic.”
• New York, October 17 through November 19: The Museum of Modern Art presents The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema, charting “a wave of films that, under the weight of censorship, broke distinctions in how reality and fiction were framed onscreen.”

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Warner Bros. has released a trailer for Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 (2025), which finds Robert Pattinson dying repeatedly in space, set to Sinatra. The film is due out at the end of January.
• The mellifluous narration of IFC’s trailer for Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024) is like Proust’s madeleine for Christmases (and trailers) past. The film hits theaters on November 8.
• The limited-series revival of Every Frame a Painting continues with a video essay on Billy Wilder, the elegant ironist.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973).

• For NTS, Florence Scott-Anderton dedicates a “Sounds on Screen” mix to Pam Grier, “the queen of 1970s Blaxploitation films.”

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight (Beth B, 1984).

• “Is it a success? Will people like it? I love not having to think about this shit.” Rachel Pronger’s career-spanning interview with Beth B finds the filmmaker reflecting on the legacy of the No Wave scene in which she cut her teeth.
• “When a festival of rediscoveries runs out of masters to champion, does it need to create new ones?” Matthew Thrift reviews a retrospective of Anatole Litvak, wondering if his work might be “all the more interesting” for its “lack of coherence and cohesion.”
• “Gordon’s distaste for sensationalism seems to also reflect her recent disposition behind the camera, of observing people as they are, not as we think they ought to be.” Saffron Maeve profiles Bette Gordon, arguing for her inclusion in the pantheon of distinctly American independent auteurs.
• “Brooks tests the fourth wall, but it remains standing, although the space beyond it has become ambiguously indeterminate.” Alexander Greenhough reads into a deceptively dense office-corridor scene in Albert Brooks’s Lost in America (1985).

WISH LIST

Telephones (Christian Marclay, 1995).

• Ivorypress has published Christian Marclay’s Telephones, a print adaptation of the artist’s 1995 film of the same name in a two-folio, spiral-bound format.
• The FIDMarseilles has published the first issue of Fidback, a French-language “look back on the past year” of cinema, including contributions from Wang Bing, Laura Citarella, and our own Laura Staab.
• purge.xx has released a limited-edition cassette of Li Tavor’s original anthem of the left, “Polyphonie Anarchiste,” from Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest (2022).