Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003).
- It’s getting harder to go to the movies. IndieWire surveys the state of cinemagoing in the US region by region as multiplexes continue to shutter. From downtown Detroit, the closest first-run theater is now in Canada.
- More than 500 pro-Palestinian demonstrators staged a sit-in at MoMA on Saturday, protesting the museum trustees’ alleged investments in weapons used by the Israeli military in Gaza. The museum closed its doors to the public and rescheduled planned programming.
- After confirming that three sitting representatives of the far-right AfD party had been invited to tomorrow night’s Berlinale opening ceremony, amid public outcry, the festival has now disinvited them.
REMEMBERING
Rocky II (John G. Avildsen, 1976).
- The tributes to Carl Weathers continue to roll in after his death last week at the age of 76. Sylvester Stallone spoke about Weathers’s “bad mood” audition for the part of Apollo Creed in Rocky (1976). The AV Club reminds us that Weathers himself pitched the cheapskate angle for his Arrested Development character.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity (Chloë Sevigny, 2024).
- Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity, a new short film directed by Chloë Sevigny, can be streamed for free on The New Group Off Stage’s website until February 16. Featuring Lypsinka, the surrealist stage creation of John Epperson, the film combines Sevigny’s imagery with audio made by Epperson that remixes extracts from a 1965 Judy Garland recording and Joan Crawford’s 1971 memoir, My Way of Life.
RECOMMENDED READING
Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965).
- “Our imaginations forge our borders as surely as our borders forge us.” Launching a new column for Reverse Shot focused on architecture and film, Kelli Weston writes about Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), transplanted from the Upper East Side New York setting of the source novel to multiple locations across London.
- “I have a formula; filmmaking is like my voyage, but writing is home.” Werner Herzog agrees to speak with Janna Levin for Pioneer Works’s Broadcast publication, on the condition that their conversation is not an interview and that they do not talk about Herzog’s films.
- “Despite an ostensibly cinematic premise—a mysterious woman moves to a small town and inspires a messy, quiet girl to seek freedom—with a more timid Eileen, the film’s meaning becomes both glaringly obvious and infuriatingly opaque.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brianna Di Monda compares Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen to William Oldroyd’s 2023 film adaptation.
- “I wanted to make movies because of my family, and not because of the movies that I used to watch.” For BOMB, Elissa Suh interviews Rosine Mbakam about her narrative feature debut, Mambar Pierrette (2023).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Nervous Translation (Shireen Seno, 2017).
- New York, February 16 through 22: “A bombastic explosion of form offers new ways of seeing Philippine myths, pasts, presents, and futures.” Curated by A. E. Hunt for BAM, “When the Apocalypse Is Over” is a varied survey of recent independent films from the Philippines, featuring work by Shireen Seno, Whammy Alcazaren, and more.
- New York, February 22 through March 7: Doc Fortnight, MoMA’s festival for nonfiction cinema, returns, boasting an impressive selection. As well as new films by Zhou Tao, Aura Satz, Riar Rizaldi, Kaori Oda, and more, the lineup includes a program of shorts from the Caribbean curated by the Puerto Rico–based Sociedad del Tiempo Libre, a conversation between artist Tiffany Sia and scholar Pavle Levi, and a spotlight on the Iranian filmmaker Gelare Khoshgozaran.
- Berwick-upon-Tweed, March 7 through 10: Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has also shared a carefully curated selection which mixes retrospective titles, like Ghassan Salhab’s Phantom Beirut (1999), with new work, such as Nelson Yeo’s Locarno-winning Dreaming and Dying (2023). Alongside previously announced focuses on Basma Alsharif and Eduardo Williams, also exciting is “yours,” wherein five short films combine to form a single work responding to Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976).
- Los Angeles, through February 28: Vista Theater presents an all-35mm IB Technicolor festival, including many double-feature programs.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Created as part of the exhibition of the same name currently on view at 52 Walker in New York,THE WANDA COLEMAN SONGBOOK EP is a record produced by Cauleen Smith with commissioned contributions by musicians including Kelsey Lu, Moor Mother, and Alice Smith. The record can be heard in a “dim, warm, and inviting” listening room in the exhibition space, or ordered directly from 52 Walker’s store.
- Newly released on vinyl on Smalltown Supersound’s “Le Jazz-Non” series is a set of recordings by composer Koichi Shimizu, who has been Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s longtime sound designer—creator of the “bang” sound in Memoria (2021).
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Amisk (Alanis Obomsawin, 1977).
- On the nice film: Laura Staab speaks with Bas Devos about Here (2023), indebted to naturalist poetics, utopian realism, and having made too much soup.
- The viewer must engage with what the camera will not show: Ed Luker considers the anti-narrative tendency in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023).
- “I'm very lucky to live so long and see the difference”: Brandon Kaufman sits down with Alanis Obomsawin, the prolific documentarian of Canadian First Nations people, on the occasion of a new retrospective of her work.
EXTRAS
GIFT (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023).
- First presented at Film Fest Gent last year, GIFT (2023) is a collaboration between Ryusuke Hamaguchi and experimental musician and composer Eiko Ishibashi that presents a “concentrated, wordless flipside” of material shot for Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist (2023) accompanied by Ishibashi’s live score. Ishibashi will be in New York on May 1 and 2 to perform the work twice, and will also play her score from Drive My Car (2021) at Le Poisson Rouge on May 4.