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NEWS
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REMEMBERING
The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969).
- This weekend brought devastating news that Dariush Mehrjui, the landmark Iranian filmmaker, and his wife and screenwriting partner Vahideh Mohammadifar were found murdered in their home. A lifelong enemy of state censorship, Mehrjui helped kick off the Iranian New Wave with his second feature, The Cow (1969), which was denied an export permit when it was originally completed. “Despite the fact that the film was funded by the Ministry of Culture and Arts, the Pahlavi regime preferred not to have the film’s portrayal of rural Iranian village life color the nation’s desired image of modernity on the world stage,” Lawrence Garcia wrote of the film for Notebook in January 2020. “Nonetheless, in 1971 The Cow was smuggled out of Iran and played at both the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and the Venice Film Festival.” Both The Cow and Mehrjui’s 1974 film The Cycle will screen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the coming weeks, as part of their series “Iranian Cinema Before the Revolution.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1973).
- The Palestine Film Institute has shared online a program of films “celebrating the beauty of Gaza, its people, its struggle and its survival.” Among them are Basma Alsharif’s stunning feature Ouroboros (2017), as well as Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza (1973), a short film made by Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit. Elsewhere, the Void Project are hosting restored versions of films about Palestine made throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. One inclusion is The Road to Palestine (1983), an animated short by Layaly Badr in which a seven-year-old girl who lives in a Palestinian refugee camp attempts to describe a home she has never visited.
- On Argos Arts, Steve Reinke’s A Boy Needs A Friend (2015) is available to stream until November 2. The video essay, which muses abstractly on solitude, is part of Reinke’s Final Thoughts project, an ongoing series on the subject of friendship and intimacy that he has been working on since 2004 and intends to continue adding to until his death.
- Frederick Wiseman’s production company Zipporah Films have posted a trailer for the nonagenarian filmmaker's latest documentary, Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros (2023), a scrumptious portrait of a Michelin Guide three-starred family-run restaurant in Roanne, France.
RECOMMENDED READING
Nowhere Near (Miko Revereza, 2023).
- “Throughout my film career I found a way to find my voice, eventually. With this film, I feel confident that I’ve put my voice out there, literally—it’s my own voice and I wrote it.” In Filmmaker magazine, Miko Revereza tells Dylan Foley the story behind his new feature, Nowhere Near.
- “Ninón Sevilla—the queen of the rumberas in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema—grew up wanting to be a nun.” For 4Columns, Beatrice Loayza writes about the “sultry reputation” of Ninón Sevilla and her star-turn in Emilio Fernández’s Victims of Sin (1951).
- “The world of television is strange. You shoot something, you cut it together. Do you have any idea how many comments we get from these people? They pass it around for network notes. Everybody has notes.” John Carpenter talks to Jen Yamato for the L.A. Times, telling her about what it was like to remote-direct an episode of the television series John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams, as well as offering his thoughts on artificial intelligence, music-making, and his love of women’s basketball.
- “Still photography is an instant and you expand out from that one moment, but film takes place in time in the same way as painting does—a good painting might have twenty minutes that it gives you.” Singer/songwriter Will Epstein interviews Nathaniel Dorsky for the Believer after watching two new works from the experimental filmmaker in his San Francisco home.
- “Were they art, or publicity? Can we settle on ‘magic’?” David Thomson writes for the London Review of Books about Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair, a “well-researched dual biography” by William J. Mann about the short-lived marriage of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Declarative Mode (Paul Sharits, 1977).
- Alfred, NY, November 3 through 5: Light Matter, a festival for experimental film that takes place in the picturesque town of Alfred, New York, returns for its third edition. The festival will screen Joost Rekveld’s science-fiction feature Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena: #59 (2022), in which all of the images were produced by analog electronic signals, as well as dedicating a special four-and-a-half-hour-long shorts program to marking the 30th anniversary of the passing of Paul Sharits.
- London, November 17 through 30: London Palestine Film Festival returns for its 24th edition, running at various venues in the city. One highlight is Mohanad Yaqubi’s R21 aka Restoring Solidarity (2022), a feature film that acts as a restoration of, and response to, a collection of twenty 16mm films that were preserved by the Japanese solidarity movement with Palestine in Tokyo.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Previously unavailable on streaming services, some of the many scores that Tindersticks have composed for the films of Claire Denis are now available on Spotify, including previously unreleased scores for Let the Sunshine In (2017) and Both Sides of the Blade (2022). Scores for The Intruder (2004), 35 Shots of Rum (2008), and White Material (2009) are also available, all of which were included in a 5-CD box set (above) released in 2011.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2023).
- “I am interested in cinema, I believe in it, I am making it, so I am making it for everybody; I want to share it with everybody.” Radu Jude speaks with Dora Leu and Öykü Sofuoğlu about the unexpected humanism of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), his caustic and ever-shifting “infernal panorama” of late capitalism.
- “Instagram likes are a fickle thing,” Adrian Curry observes in the preamble to his latest Movie Poster of the Week column: a biannual survey of the poster designs that have resonated the most with the column’s Instagram followers. Among the highlights are Vasilis Marmatakis’s teaser poster for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023), as well as an unused Akiko Stehrenberger design for the Sinéad O’Connor documentary Nothing Compares (2022).
EXTRAS
Amazon: Longest River in the World (Silvino Santos, 1918).
- A long-lost Brazilian silent film shot in the Amazon rainforest has been rediscovered nearly a century after it went missing. Amazon: Longest River in the World was stolen from its director, Silvino Santos, shortly after it was made in 1918, and had seemingly vanished altogether by 1931. The film resurfaced earlier this year after a negative copy of a nitrate print was found, mislabeled, in Prague’s Czech Film Archive.