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NEWS
Undine (Christian Petzold, 2021).
- Christian Petzold has begun filming The Red Sky, which will star Paula Beer of Transit and Undine. Set on the Baltic Sea, the film follows four young people sharing a vacation home surrounded by uncontrollable forest fires, navigating desire in the midst of environmental disaster.
- Production has also commenced on a new feature from Marco Bellocchio. The Conversion is inspired by the life of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy who was kidnapped by the Catholic Church in 1858. Steven Spielberg was previously attached to the project.
- Verso Books has acquired the debut novel from Love Witch director Anna Biller. Set to publish in September 2023, Bluebeard's Castle is a "contemporary gothic suspense novel" about a young mystery writer who falls in love with a dashing baron—only for their marriage to crumble disastrously in a remote castle.
- Open City Documentary Festival is now accepting applications for their second annual Critics Workshop, in collaboration with the feminist film journal Another Gaze. The five-day program—which will be held in London from September 7 through 13—is designed to "discuss the methodologies and practice of a politically engaged film criticism."
- On Sunday, two major figures of Hong Kong cinema passed away: the prolific novelist and wuxia screenwriter Ni Kuang and Echoes of the Rainbow filmmaker Alex Law, known for collaborating on the Migration Trilogy with his partner Mabel Cheung.
- Lastly, Creative Review takes a look inside the pages of Issue 1 of Notebook magazine. The print magazine arrives in select stores soon; more information will shortly be available here.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Ornette: Made in America (Shirley Clarke, 1985).
- Le Cinéma Club kicked off their Summer Music Festival with Ornette: Made in America, Shirley Clarke's 1985 documentary about the jazz icon, now available to watch globally. Each week in July, the series will highlight a film that "celebrates the energy of live music."
- The Cinema of Ideas, in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute of London, presents Feast from the East: a free program combining virtual cooking workshops with screenings of Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates, Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth, and Mykola Shpykovskyi's long-censored masterpiece Bread. The program streams online from June 27 through July 11, and donations in support of Ukraine are encouraged.
RECOMMENDED READING
- The new issue of Cinema Scope has arrived, with a bounty of excellent Cannes coverage and longform interviews. Among the highlights is Shelly Kraicer's interview with Qiu Jiongjiong about A New Old Play, a "mythicized" reimagining of the life of his grandfather, a Sichuan opera star.
- Reverse Shot hosted the latest installment of Body Talk, Willow Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner's ongoing series of conversations about trans cinema. This supersized edition focuses on Crimes of the Future: Maclay and Gardner share a roundtable with critics Sam Bodrojan and Mackenzie Lukenbill about "Cronenberg, his body horror, and his cinema in relation to the trans film image."
- Elisa Gonzalez writes about Marilyn Monroe's poetry for The Paris Review, observing that "her writings suggest an attunement to poetry that goes beyond instinct—that can only be learned by listening, so to speak."
- "Perhaps Nicolas Cage is not even an actor. Perhaps he is Kierkegaard’s knight of faith: an ennobled apprentice who renounces the world in search of infinite resignation to an absurdity only he can facilitate." From Baffler fiction editor J.W. McCormack, an extraordinary exegesis of Cage's screen roles.
We (Alice Diop, 2021).
- "The film is my point of view on French society—and other societies as well—as sedimentation, this layering of different stories and memories." Alice Diop speaks with Forrest Cardamenis of Filmmaker Magazine about "the plurality of approaches" in We, her new documentary exploring identity in France's immigrant community, now streaming on MUBI.
- For the New Left Review, Julia Hërtag digs deep into the post-Berlin School cinema of the 2010s and 2020s. She suggests that filmmakers like Christian Petzold, Valeska Grisebach, Maren Ade, and Ulrich Köhler comprise "a new counter-cinema which attempts, with varying degrees of success, to resist the prerogatives of Germany’s film bureaucracy, even as the directors parlay and negotiate within it."
- To coincide with the 25th anniversary of Robert Zemeckis' Contact, Vulture's Rachel Handler assembles key cast and crew for a riveting oral history of the film: "a lightning-in-a-bottle project, the kind of thing big movie studios barely made before and would probably never make again."
- Lastly, GQ's Jason Diamond assesses the newfound popularity of movie merch, specifically items that look "like [they] could have been handed out at a 1996 Planet Hollywood premiere party."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The MUBI Podcast launched its second season, "Only in Theaters," which is devoted to surprising stories of individual cinemas that had huge impacts on film history—and in some cases, history in general. In the first episode, host Rico Gagliano delves into the wild history of the Cinémathèque Française and its legendary founder, Henri Langlois. (Gagliano continues the conversation in an extended interview with Barbet Schroeder about his remarkable career.)
- A new episode of the New Books Network's film podcast features A.S. Hamrah, film critic for The Baffler. Hamrah joins host Annie Berke—Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books—for a conversation about his algorithm-spurning philosophy on writing and "the challenges and shortcomings of film criticism today."
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- Vienna: The Viennale unveiled a preview of their 60th-anniversary edition, running from October 20 to November 1. Among the early highlights are Elaine May and Med Hondo retrospectives, spotlights on Austrian documentaries and Argentine film noir, and new publications on Darezhan Omirbayev and Alain Guiraudie.
- Dublin: July 7 is the opening night of Xenogenesis, an exhibition at IMMA that explores the "post-cinematic practice" of the Otolith Group. That evening, the museum will convene a panel between artists Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar and IMMA Director Annie Fletcher.
- New York: An exhibition of photographs, paintings, and films by William Klein—William Klein: YES—recently opened at the International Center of Photography. The show, on view through September 12, centers the artist's "distinct graphic energy and deep affection for humanity’s struggles through the chaos of modern life."
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Will-o'-the-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrígues, 2022).
- "For me, every film demands you to look for its own language." João Pedro Rodrígues speaks to Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal about his gleefully freewheeling Directors' Fortnight standout, Will-o'-the-Wisp.
- Christopher Small reports on the Jeonju Cinema Project, the ambitious film-funding initiative that powers the South Korean city's film festival. For Small, this year's edition was "marked by little dogma and a lot of adventurous mix-and-matching."
- In a new video essay, Manuela Lazic and Alessandro Luchetti craft a guided tour through Paul Verhoeven's cinema of excess, which uses "the artifice of big-budget filmmaking to reveal the truth hidden behind the fantasy."
- Filmmaker Isabel Sandoval shares her Moviegoing Memories and reflections on acting for the latest installment of our interview series.
EXTRAS
- Spike Lee marked the 33rd anniversary of Do the Right Thing with a brief video, a tribute to its cast members who have since passed away: