Rushes: Bob Rafelson Remembered, Steven Spielberg's "The Fabelmans," Antonioni and Vitti's Pebble House

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NEWS

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968).

• "A man for all seasons" is how Bruce Dern once described Bob Rafelson, who passed away this week at age 89. Josh Karp's 2019 Esquire profile captures the New Hollywood iconoclast at his intense best. This week, we're also remembering William Richert, writer/director of Winter Kills and A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, and the legendary actor Paul Sorvino, an unforgettable presence across five decades of film roles (especially Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, Warren Beatty’s Reds, and Oliver Stone’s Nixon).
• Steven Spielberg's next film, The Fabelmans, will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. A semi-autobiography based on Spielberg's own childhood growing up in postwar Arizona, the film will star Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, plus Gabriel LaBelle as Spielberg's stand-in. 
• Nicolas Winding Refn has made a new six-part TV series. Copenhagen Cowboy will be the first production the filmmaker has shot in his home country of Denmark in fifteen years. The series has been commissioned by Netflix, and Refn reportedly reflected that a "new term has been born: Netflix Winding Refn.”
• Applications for Berlinale Talents Press—a program offering eight emerging film critics the chance to cover the February festival—are now open until September 1.
• Aspiring film programmers may want to read ICO's guide to programming, an open-access document offering advice and practical know-how on various aspects of contemporary film programming.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• A cool new spot for Loewe's FW22 men's collection shows "Beat" Takeshi Kitano playing mahjong.
• Christopher Nolan's next film, Oppenheimer, will hit theaters on July 21, 2023. Starring Cillian Murphy and featuring cinematography from Nope DP Hoyte van Hoytema, the project's teaser trailer has been shared.
• TÁR will be the first feature in fifteen years from Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children). Variety shared the first trailer for the film, which premieres at the Venice Film Festival ahead of a US theatrical release on October 7.
• L’été (1968), the first film from Marcel Hanoun's quadriptych, Les Saisons, is is available to watch on Xcèntric until August 31.
• "New Directions" is a selection of feature films made by young German filmmakers over the last twenty years, all available to stream via the Goethe Institut's free on-demand platform. The collection includes films by Ulrich Köhler, Maren Ade, and Valeska Grisebach.

RECOMMENDED READING

Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni's Sardinian home in La Cupola (Volker Sattel, 2016).

• "Odd Obsession has returned to Chicago," reports Noah Berlatsky for the Chicago Reader, albeit in a different form. A "haven for budding cinephiles and weird culture obsessives," Odd Obsession closed in 2020, but an entrepreneurial genre aficionado known as Ryan Graveface has now acquired its contents, planning to incorporate the collection into a museum found within his own shop.
• "The pleasure in looking is often entangled with terror." In an excellent essay co-commissioned by BlackStar's Seen journal and Zurich-based publication FilmBulletin, Kelli Weston unpacks the work of Jordan Peele upon the release of his third feature Nope. Elsewhere, for Vulture, Alison Willmore spoke to Steven Yeun, one of Nope's stars, about, among other things, his fascination with UFOs.
• "The films of David Cronenberg have always plumbed a common dilemma: the panic and pleasure that ensue when the body is unleashed from its normative trappings, typically through a type of fornication with technology or scientific intervention—those defining forces of modern life." It is Beatrice Loayza's turn to tackle David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future, writing on the film for the Nation with typical aplomb.
• “Build me a house that smells like this pebble” is what Michelangelo Antonioni told his architect ahead of the construction of his and Monica Vitti's ill-fated Sardinian vacation home. For Cultured, Hayley Jean Clark looks into the history of the strange-looking 1960s building, which has since fallen into disrepair.

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010).

• "Just as the camera pans up to the dorm, a deep, dark synth note resounds, glaring out at you with yellow eyes. At this precise moment, the credits reveal the composers’ names: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross." This week's stellar Pitchfork Sunday Review sees Jayson Greene appraising the score of The Social Network, Reznor and Ross's first original soundtrack.
• "After all, one of the many things art can do is to help us navigate the pitfalls of life, and there’s no deeper pitfall than the final one." The writers of Slate rank the 50 greatest fictional deaths, covering more than 2500 years of death scenes in films, TV, books, theater, video games, and other mediums.
• In a reported piece in Rolling Stone, Tatiana Siegel examines the unusual "toxic social media movement" campaigning for the release of Zack Snyder's director's cut of Justice League, finding that posts were "created by both real and fake authors." The article wonders what it might mean "that a fandom amplified by fake accounts helped shake down a major studio—at an ultimate cost to Warner Bros. of more than $100 million—to re-release a movie that had already bombed years earlier."

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

We're Alive (Video Workshop of the California Institution for Women and the Women's Film Workshop of the University of California, Los Angeles; 1974), a selection of "No Master Territories."

• Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, co-curators of "No Master Territories," an intersectional exhibition of "underappreciated encounters between feminism and the moving image," speak with artist-filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán in a podcast put out by the exhibition's venue, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
• The MUBI Podcast continues apace: episode four charts a course to 1980s London to explore how "a romantically dilapidated London movie palace called The Scala beckoned to England's subcultures." Mary Harron and Peter Strickland are on hand alongside host Rico Gagliano.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Fuses (Carolee Schneeman, 1964-67).

• London: A five-part film series of works by Carolee Schneemann will accompany a major exhibition about the artist starting in September at the Barbican Centre. It will involve screenings of her films, including a newly restored print of Fuses (1964-67), and documentaries on the artist, plus a program of media art and performances from artists inspired by Schneemann.
• Venice: The program for the 2022 Venice Film Festival has been unveiled, and it includes new films from Paul Schrader, Joanna Hogg, Noah Baumbach, Darren Aronofsky, and more.
• Prizren: The full program is up for the well-regarded Dokufest, taking place from August 5 through 13 in Kosovo.

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

Detail for Caspar Newbolt's poster for The Act of Coming Out (Alexandra Stergiou, 2021).

• In his newest Movie Poster of the Week column, Adrian Curry interviews poster designer Caspar Newbolt about his pointillist-inspired design for Alexandra Stergiou's hybrid-doc short, The Act of Coming Out. Curry calls the poster "a gorgeous piece of near-abstract art that nevertheless functions as an effective piece of graphic design, communicating something ineffable that might otherwise be impossible to encapsulate in an image."
• "With Both Sides of the Blade, Denis brings the question into the domestic realm: at what cost do suppressed feelings emerge? To whose benefit, and to whose fault?" Rafaela Bassili details the delicate tensions and "mess of life" of Claire Denis' newest film.
• Maximilien Luc Proctor speaks with Gaëlle Rouard about her newest work, the luminous diptych Darkness, Darkness Burning Bright, and her atmospheric approach to photochemical film processing. "I consider myself a plastician, a painter," she offers. "It’s a palette."
• The Deuce Notebook returns with their newest column: genre-film authority Chris Poggiali talks with Paul Kyriazi, whose Weapons of Death and Death Machines were the first martial-arts films produced in the United States.

EXTRAS

Restoration work on Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927).

• The restoration of a seven-hour version of Abel Gance's Napoleon is reportedly still underway, with news that an all-new orchestral soundtrack is being recorded for the silent film this week.
• The results of Sight & Sound's Greatest Films poll will be released at the end of the year, and Sight & Sound has compiled a stunning range of typed and handwritten ballots from 1962. Zipping forward to the future, we enjoyed this pleasingly peculiar piece of speculative fiction from 2012, projecting the results of the poll in...2212.
• A bumper new box set by UK home entertainment label Indicator Films collects works by "sorely neglected" British filmmaker Michael J. Murphy. Across ten discs, the set will explore the "weird and wonderful worlds" of a filmmaker who, despite having completed more than thirty films over a half-century, remains "rarely seen and little championed."
• Finally, in Béla Tarr news...