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NEWS
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023).
- We are saddened to learn that Issue 97 will be Cinema Scope’s last in its current form. To “do something valuable in this field,” editor and publisher Mark Peranson writes, “one needs creative freedom.” This is exactly what, for twenty-five years and just under 100 issues, Cinema Scope was able to provide, offering a space that allowed, per Peranson, “a certain kind of filmmaker’s work to be treated with the intellect and respect they deserve.” The print issue is on its way to subscribers now, and its entire contents—including interviews with Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Rodrigo Moreno, and Alex Ross Perry—can also be read online.
- Sandra Milo has died at the age of 90. She starred in Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and in Roberto Rossellini’s General Della Rovere (1959) and Vanina Vanini (1959), among many other pictures. In 2021, she received a David di Donatello Award in recognition of her career achievements.
- The Annihilation of Fish (1999), Charles Burnett’s long-lost feature starring James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, and Margot Kidder, has been restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation, in collaboration with Milestone Films, and will finally receive a theatrical premiere this year, courtesy of Kino Lorber.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Described by Daniel Kasman as a “fatuous and ecstatic fusion of the seemingly opposed pleasures—and absurdities—of Terrence Malick and Grand Theft Auto,” Harmony Korine’s latest exercise in aggressive maximalism, AGGRO DR1FT (2023), has a trailer showcasing its infrared aesthetics and colorful cast of characters. The trailer was dropped to promote a pair of US screenings of the film that will be hosted at Crazy Girls, the self-described “#1 Topless Nightclub in LA.” These will be accompanied by DJ sets from Korine and producer AraabMuzik, who scored the film.
RECOMMENDED READING
Not a Pretty Picture (Martha Coolidge, 1975).
- “It is an autobiography stripped of narcissism, a gift from one woman to all.” In 4Columns, Erika Balsom writes about Martha Coolidge’s Not a Pretty Picture (1975), a hybrid film that “twists the tropes of the coming-of-age story to offer an unprecedented account of date rape and its aftermath from the perspective of a survivor.” We covered the recent 16mm restoration of the film at the Academy Film Archive in Issue 3 of Notebook.
- “The imperfections are too perfect; the primary ‘tell’ of the artificial is now a surplus of reality.” In the New York Review of Books, the poet and novelist Ben Lerner assesses Ed Atkins’s Pianowork 2 (2023), a “sixteen-minute computer animation that involves an uncannily realistic digital avatar of Atkins playing Jürg Frey’s minimalist piano composition ‘Klavierstück 2.’”
- “One from the Heart is a musical romance of a distinctive sort.” For The New Yorker, Richard Brody revisits Francis Ford Coppola’s newly re-cut One From the Heart (1982), a film that “plays almost like Coppola’s reaction against his previous decade of acclaimed movies—the two Godfather films, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now.”
- “In her own marginality as well as that of her maternal forebears, Akerman located the raw materials she needed to spark a radical reinvention of cinema. She staged one, miraculously, within a few years of picking up her first camera.” In an essay republished from the booklet of Criterion’s new box set, Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978, Beatrice Loayza writes about the early films of Chantal Akerman.
- “The Senegalese filmmaker, novelist, and militant trade unionist Ousmane Sembène saw cinema as a ‘night school’ for the people.” Matene Toure examines the work of Ousmane Sembène on Verso’s blog, focusing on one of his late films, Camp de Thiaroye (1988).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Popeye the Sailor Man Meets Sindbad the Sailor Man (Dave Fleischer, 1936).
- New York, March 7 through 13: MoMA presents an extensive survey of the innovative classic cartoons of the Fleischer Brothers, many in new 4K restorations. Among the selections are the Betty Boop cartoon Minnie the Moocher (1932), featuring a rotoscoped performance from Cab Calloway; and Popeye the Sailor Man Meets Sindbad the Sailor Man (1936), which features the Fleischer’s "Stereoptical Process,” wherein modeled sets are used to create 3D backgrounds.
- London, February 7: Tate Britain will host a rare screening of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), an avant-garde classic taking up the ideas of Mulvey’s hugely influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she developed the concept of “the male gaze.” A discussion between Mulvey and scholar Griselda Pollock will follow the film.
- Berkeley, through February 29: BAMPFA is the latest stop for “Skip Norman: Here and There,” a tribute to the American filmmaker, who also served as cinematographer and assistant director for DFFB film school peers including Harun Farocki and Helke Sander.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Bushman (David Schickele, 1971).
- Filmmaker Rob Nillson, activist Gail Schickele, and film archivist Jon Shibata discuss David Schickele’s recently restored Bushman (1971) on KPFA.
- Flushing-born James Gray was a recent guest on WNYC’s All Of It with Alison Stewart, where he talked about films, his career, and his relationship with New York City.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975).
- Serge Daney explores Pasolini's Sadean final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), in an excerpt from Footlights, a new English translation of his first book.
- To mark Sergei Parajanov's centenary, columnist Adrian Curry collects striking posters for each film by the great Armenian director, a “cinematic stylist of the first order.”
- “The cultural space necessary for smaller films to thrive is still shrinking, but for all the algorithms and doomscrolling, the cinema of the past twelve months shows there’s still an audience eager for original, bold projects pushing the medium toward uncharted paths.” With franchises sputtering, 2023 made room for bolder, riskier projects. Leonardo Goi surveys the year’s best films and the debates around them.
- Season five of the MUBI Podcast, “Tailor Made,” dives deep into the worlds of film and fashion. In the season premiere, host Rico Gagliano decodes Jean Seberg's era-defining style in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960).
- “Most serious writing about Jean-Luc Godard tends to be both high-flown and forbidding, rather like the films it’s discussing,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum on caboose’s Reading with Jean-Luc Godard, a new essay collection that provides an innovative way of exploring the director's famously reference-rich films.
EXTRAS
- The release of a new artist book by Laida Lertxundi last year passed us by. Published in an edition of 100, Daytime Noir, published by Artspace Aotearoa, starts from Lertxundi’s recent films Autoficción (2020) and Inner Outer Space (2021), building from these works, through text and imagery, to explore “what it takes to run an artistic practice navigating the many facets of a full life: parenting, teaching, exhibiting, working.”
- Lastly, Reverse Shot has shared their annual Two Cents feature, in which dozens of contributors round up the trends and conventions of the year in cinema. The most acid-tongued section of years past, “11 Offenses,” does not appear, owing to the fact that they “don’t really have anything to offer our dear readers hungry for venom” this time around. What they have included, however, is plenty of fun, such as our own Chloe Lizotte’s granting of a “‘Stick to the Script’ Award” to Zachary Wigon’s psychological thriller Sanctuary (2022): “Screenwriting 101 plotting meets dialogue that sounds like iPhone autocomplete.”