Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Anne Heche in Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998).
- Anne Heche has died at the age of 53, one week after sustaining critical injuries in a car accident. At Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz offers a tribute to her "elastic," unclassifiable talent over 35 years of screen roles.
- Best known for Half of a Yellow Sun, an adaptation of the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel, Nigerian director and novelist Biyi Bandele died aged 54 last week. His second feature, Elesin Oba, The King’s Horseman, is set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.
- In New York, the Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV) will open a documentary cinema in lower Manhattan's Chinatown district, screening first-run debuts and curated programs starting on September 22.
- Mid-century Italian screen icon Gina Lollobrigida has said she will run for the Sovereign and Popular Italy party (ISP) in Italy's general elections next month, citing Mahatma Gandhi as her inspiration.
Half of a Yellow Sun (Biyi Bandele, 2013).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A prizewinner at Sundance earlier this year, Dos Estaciones is the first fiction film by Juan Pablo González. It follows an aging businessman struggling to keep her tequila factory afloat. Cinema Guild, the film's US distributor, have shared a trailer.
- Directed by Congolese director Jean Luc Herbulot, Saloum was a big hit at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, where Kelley Dong reported on the film for Notebook. Shudder are now bringing the film to their streaming platform, and have shared a new trailer for the film ahead of its September 8 premiere.
- As part of their "staff picks" series, e-flux is streaming two films by Hanoi-based artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi for the rest of August: Fifth Cinema (2018) and I Died for Beauty (2012).
RECOMMENDED READING
Mary Alice in Sty of the Blind Pig (Ivan Dixon, 1974).
- "How do you calculate the tally on a life and talent that looms this large?" asks Maya Cade about actor Mary Alice, who died last week. Cade shared a moving tribute in the Black Film Archive newsletter. (Several Mary Alice films are available to stream via the BFA's website.)
- "Narrative films dominate the spotlight regardless of whether they’re gold, silver, bronze, tin, or porcelain grade." Reviving his "Make It Real" column at Reverse Shot, Eric Hynes makes a plea for major film festivals to take a more serious approach to non-fiction film. He contrasts the Cannes Film Festival's attitudes toward the selection of documentaries with his experience attending Docs Against Gravity, a dedicated documentary film festival in Poland.
- "Whoever ultimately paid for the production of these four films, it seems they do not wish to be found." Writing for China Media Project, Kevin Schoenmakers investigates Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again, one of several "documentaries that espouse Communist Party narratives" that have appeared on the international circuit recently but whose makers and funders are hard to identify.
- "I didn’t learn much from Newton-John about sex. Only that its existence was there to be implied and winked at." Writing in the New York Times, Wesley Morris looks at how, with her star-making turn in Grease, Olivia Newton-John transferred herself from popstar to "vestal vamp."
Rich Kids (Robert M. Young, 1979).
- On the occasion of a retrospective of films by American producers Robert and Irwin Young—whose father founded the DuArt film processing lab in New York—Metrograph's Journal shares an oral history by Nicolas Rapold, combining newly conducted interviews with archival material.
- For Sight & Sound's "Endings" column, Violet Lucca reassesses the conclusion of Hiroshi's Teshigahara's "haunting 1964 fable" Woman in the Dunes, failing to find the same note of optimism in its ending that critics writing on its release saw.
- Writing for Screen Slate, Aaron Hunt interviews artist-researcher Merv Espina and artist-filmmaker Shireen Seno, co-curators of the traveling program “The Kalampag Tracking Agency: 30 Years of Experimental Film & Video from the Philippines,” presented most recently at New York's Metrograph.
- "The zombie is minstrelsy incarnate." In an essay accompanying "White Zombies: Nightmares of Empire," the series she has curated for New York's Museum of the Moving Image, Kelli Weston writes about the racialized origins of the zombie myth.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 2022).
- On the latest episode of the Film Comment Podcast, guests Adam Nayman and Beatrice Loazya compared two series, Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal and Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep, finding many similarities in their slippery approaches to "the ethics of making movies about oneself, other people, and movie-making itself."
- The Locarno Film Festival has launched its own podcast. Titled "Futurespectives," the show is hosted by Gabby Sanderson and will feature guests like Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Juliette Binoche, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Lucius Barre. The first five episodes are available now.
- The second season of the MUBI Podcast wraps up with a dispatch from Zanzibar: host Rico Gagliano and guest Nick Broomfield revisit the "wild glory days" of its most famous cinema, the Majestic.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The War Is Over (Alain Resnais. 1966).
- New York: On now at Film Forum, "Alain Resnais 100" is a 21-film retrospective commemorating the filmmaker's centennial which concludes with a new 4K restoration of his 1966 film The War Is Over.
- Montreal: RIDM, one of the most significant documentary film festivals in Canada, will celebrate its 25th edition this November. They've announced the first six films in their selection.
- London: Now open at the Goldsmiths CCA, "From Signal to Decay: Volume 1" is a new exhibition of work by Trevor Mathison, a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective. It features an "ambitious sound installation, drawings, archival material, sculpture, video, and live performance." To coincide, purge.xxx are releasing Mathison's first vinyl LP.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Inu-Oh (2021, Masaaki Yuasa).
- "Something strange happens when you watch a film by Masaaki Yuasa. Something strange in the film, and something strange in your mind." On the occasion of his latest film Inu-Oh, Jennifer Lynde Barker writes about the Japanese animation maestro in a lengthy, wide-ranging text that covers his equally wide-ranging career.
- Alongside the release of his new film Where Is Anne Frank, Ari Folman revisits some "Moviegoing Memories" for our column.
- Kat Sachs covers a new exhibition of Agnès Varda's installation work, recently on show in Berlin. There, she finds a late phase of the artist's work, which adds another dimension to our understanding of an artist more commonly associated with her film and photographic works.
- Christopher Small talks with Albert Serra about the creation of his new film Pacifiction, following a warm reception at Cannes.
- Lastly, a new entry in Patrick Holzapfel and Ivana Miloš' "Full Bloom" column looks at Govindan Aravindan’s Chidambaram, exploring the film's relationship with the bougainvillea, "a deceitful ornamental flower."
EXTRAS
Tina Charad's designs, as seen in stills from Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019).
- Writing for It's Nice That, Joey Levenson has surveyed the career and work of graphic designer Tina Charad, looking specifically at her beautiful designs for Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.
- UK home entertainment label Terracotta have assembled a new boxset featuring four 1980s films from legendary Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi (Hausu), whose work has seen a renewed global interest up to and after his death in 2020. It will be released on October 17.