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NEWS
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023).
- The first round of Cannes-centric announcements has arrived (full selections linked): on Thursday, the festival unveiled the Competition, Un Certain Regard, and Special Screenings lineups. The Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week slates followed on Monday and Tuesday.
- Applications are now open for this year’s edition of the Locarno Critics Academy. Participating critics will be able to cover the festival and attend workshops with critics, programmers, and filmmakers. Some Notebook samples by a few of last year's critics: Dini Adanurani covered Locarno's experimental 24-hour panel, and Laura Staab contributed interviews with Helena Wittmann and Kelly Reichardt (the latter cowritten with Christopher Small).
- Jim Jarmusch is planning to shoot his next film in the autumn—characteristically, it will be “quiet, funny, and sad”; somewhat uncharacteristically, it may not have music.
- A trailer has arrived for Park Chan-wook’s The Sympathizer, an adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, starring Hoa Xuande (of Netflix’s live-action Cowboy Bebop) and Robert Downey Jr. The series will premiere on “Max,” the artist formerly known as HBO Max, in 2024.
- Busy news week: Netflix has announced that they are discontinuing their DVD service, the foundation of their original model, on September 29, 2023.
- The Writers Guild of America have voted to authorize a strike if no deal for a fair contract is reached by May 1. Deadline compiles the WGA’s goals for their new agreement; of particular concern is fair compensation in a landscape reshaped by streaming.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Cards on the Table (Jessica McGoff, 2023).
- In partnership with Arbelos, we’re premiering a new video essay on Nina Menkes by Jessica McGoff this week: Cards on the Table, a tarot-guided journey through the filmmaker’s cinema. Menkes’s work has been restored by Arbelos recently, and a number of her films are available to watch on MUBI in certain regions via our retrospective, Phantom Cinema: The Films of Nina Menkes.
- On their online screening room, e-flux have shared two works by Mexican political filmmaking collective Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, The Sun Quartet (2017) and Tierra en Trance (2022). Per e-flux’s description, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’s “radical experimentations in documentary and cinematography produce visual and auditory impressions that are political possibilities in their own right.” The films can be viewed worldwide until the end of April.
- Up this week on Le Cinėma Club is Making Do the Right Thing (1989), a documentary filmed by St. Clair Bourne over eight hot summer weeks on the set of Spike Lee’s film. Bourne documents the film’s creation and interviews Bed-Stuy’s residents about what the film means to their community.
RECOMMENDED READING
Late Spring (Yasujirō Ozu, 1949).
- “In film, the act of translation is often erotic.” In the newest edition of her Orion column, Moeko Fujii writes beautifully about language, translation, and (mis)understanding in Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (2022) and Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring (1949).
- A creative piece by the filmmaker Andrew Norman Wilson anchors this week at the Baffler. It takes the form of a letter addressed to the CEO of Buffalo Wild Wings and the ghost who allegedly haunts the venue for Wilson’s next art show in Berlin. To say more would betray the surprises of this thoughtful, expansive, and quite funny read about contemporary artmaking.
- “Lying at the heart of these erotic thrillers is the belief that sex is dangerous, an idea that’s been around since the beginning of Hollywood time.” For the Criterion Current, Beatrice Loayza writes about the erotic thriller—“the love child of porno chic and film noir”—touching on films as varied as Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984), Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987), and Katt Shea’s Poison Ivy (1992).
- “True to its title, Dry Ground Burning depicts a place on the verge of bursting into flames.” Leo Goldsmith reviews Brazilian filmmakers Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta’s film for the Film Comment Letter, looking at both the histories and contexts from which the film emerges and the specific conditions of its collaborative production.
- For the New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg interviews Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel about the practical and ethical considerations that went into De Humani Corporis Fabrica, their “scalpel-level view” of the workings of French hospitals.
- In a newly translated text published by Lucky Star, filmmaker Axelle Ropert searches, via a variety of French films, for an answer to the question: “What is an existential film?”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Nazarbazi (Maryam Tafakory, 2022).
- London: “I want to tell you what I can’t” is Iranian artist and filmmaker Maryam Tafakory’s first UK exhibition. The show, which runs from April 27 through June 17 at LUX, includes her films Nazarbazi (2022) and Irani Bag (2020) alongside “fragments of more recent work.”
- New York: The mighty Prismatic Ground has announced the lineup for this year's festival, featuring an exciting slate of local premieres, restorations, live events (featuring Gaëlle Rouard), ample celluloid screenings, tributes to Michael Snow and Takahiko Iimura, and more. The festival runs May 3 through May 7 across several local venues.
- New York: More proximately in the city, this coming weekend Light Industry presents a special focus on Fan Ho. “Revered as a Hong Kong street photographer and stigmatized as a commercially successful director of softcore Category III films,” Ho directed more than 30 films between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, and this series centers on his experimental titles. Each screening is followed by a conversation between artist Tiffany Sia and event curator Timmy Chih-Ting Chen.
- Athens: Also running over the weekend, “Live Cinema / The Working Class / Sirens” is a wide-ranging series of screenings taking place in a specially created pop-up cinema on Pagalou Street in Athens. In a cinema marathon that includes films by everyone from Helena Wittmann to Ruggero Deodato, “3,480 minutes of true real-time cinematic and new-media adrenaline await viewers who can fall asleep during one movie and wake up during another.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The third season of the MUBI podcast, dedicated to the unifying power of movie music, continues with an episode looking at the reggae-infused needle drops in Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1972). Guests in conversation with host Rico Gagliano include Henzell's daughter Justine, UK music writer Lloyd Bradley, and Paul Douglas—drummer and bandleader of reggae legends The Maytals.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022).
- Rachel Pronger shines a light on the art—and indeed, cinema—of Nan Goldin, the subject of Laura Poitras’s recent documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Looking back to the thriving queer art and activist scene in ’80s New York, Pronger elucidates how “Goldin follows her characters across the years, constructing in the process a sweeping portrait of a time, place, and community.”
- "These characters represent a cross-section of the American climate movement and how they can come together without dysfunction." In a new interview, Daniel Goldhaber tells Saffron Maeve about the hopeful provocation of his new film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
- Meg Remy—the experimental pop musician better known as U.S. Girls—shared five cinematic inspirations on her new album Bless This Mess.
EXTRAS
- Via Ecstatic Static, some snapshots of Helena Wittmann’s production journals from the filming of Human Flowers of Flesh, now in limited release in the US.
- Why I Make Documentaries. On Observational Filmmaking by Kazuhiro Soda has been published for the first time in English by Viaindustriae—it is available to order here, and is newly “enriched with a brand new iconographic apparatus [...] and a new updated introduction by the author himself.” (In 2019, K.F. Watanabe spoke with Soda for Notebook about his approach to observational filmmaking.)
- As the NBA finals get underway, we’d like to revisit a matchup between two titans of their respective fields. In 1988, a 25-year-old Michael Jordan faced off on the court with then-50-year-old Elliott Gould, playing HORSE to raise money for charity. Part one is embedded below, and part two is linked here, though any footage of Gould playing seems to be omitted. If you know where that footage might be found, please—please!—email editor@mubi.com.