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NEWS
Peter Pan (Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, and Wilfred Jackson, 1953).
- Disney will no longer include content warnings before classic films that feature racial stereotypes on its streaming service Disney+ as part of a shift in DEI strategy following President Trump’s second inauguration. In 2020, the company began appending an introductory text to movies like Dumbo (1941) and Peter Pan (1953) cautioning viewers of “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures,” insisting that “these stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.” Now, a disclaimer stating that a film “may contain stereotypes or negative depictions” will be buried in its “details section.”
- Shiori Ito has pledged to reedit sections of her film, Black Box Diaries (2024), which chronicles her own sexual assault case, to remove unauthorized content. Ito admitted to using security camera footage of Noriyuki Yamaguchi, her alleged assailant, dragging her into a hotel as well as unapproved recordings of phone calls and conversations.
- After failing to find new investors, the long-beleaguered Technicolor is preparing to shutter. CEO Caroline Parot announced that the Paris-headquartered company has “filed for Court ‘recovery procedure’ before the French Court of Justice,” which would reportedly give the company a chance to “find solutions” to solvency issues. Technicolor encompasses MPC, the Mill, Mikros Animation, and other major VFX houses, meaning thousands of workers across multiple countries could be affected.
- Regional legislators in Lazio are considering a bill that would allow Roman cinemas to be refashioned into any other type of business, including shopping centers and supermarkets. This comes after the recent acquisition of nine Roman cinemas (some still operational) in a bankruptcy auction by Colliers Global Investors and WRM Capital. An open letter in opposition to the bill, drafted by the architect Renzo Piano, has been endorsed by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuarón, Joanna Hogg, and many others. “Such a transformation would represent an irrevocable loss,” Scorsese added: “a profound sacrilege not only to the city’s rich history but also to the cultural legacy for the future generations.”
DEVELOPING
- Martin Scorsese is set to direct a crime drama about a real-life mid-century Hawaiian mafia leader battling for control of the underworld on the islands. The film would be written by Nick Bilton and star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Emily Blunt.
- Claire Denis is in talks to direct a remake of Mauro Bolognini’s Black Journal (1977), a cult film starring Shelley Winters as a serial killer who cooks her victims into soap and cakes.
- Samuel L. Jackson and Daveed Diggs will star in a hitman thriller directed by Ernest Dickerson, his first feature since Double Play (2017). Jackson previously costarred in Dickerson’s first directorial effort, Juice (1992).
REMEMBERING
Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987).
- Souleymane Cissé has died at 84. Considered “the father of African cinema,” the Malian director is known for his film Yeelen (1987), which was the first African film to win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and later won Best International Film at the Independent Spirit Awards. Seeing the film inspired Martin Scorsese to found the World Cinema Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and restoring neglected films around the globe. Cissé’s other films include his feature-length debut The Young Girl (1975), about a mute girl who faces social alienation after becoming pregnant through rape, the infidelity drama Tell Me Who You Are (2009), and his most recent film, Our House (2015), a documentary about his family’s expulsion from their home in Bamako. In 2023, Cissé received the Carrosse d’Or, an award given to filmmakers at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight by the Society of French Directors. “For me, cinema is a weapon,” Cissé told our own Yasmina Price. “An effective weapon. A weapon that can in reality unify, a weapon that can offer a new spirit to people, and that is its strength. Cinema is the thing best positioned to awaken us all into a fuller way of being and living. This is why it’s so important for us.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024).
- “The assertion that film festivals should remain apolitical naïvely ignores the political underpinnings of their ecosystems, which depend on diverse commercial and diplomatic sponsors. Besides, politics—whether we like it or not—are expressed in what we choose to say or not say, and in the very act of curation itself.” For the New York Times, Beatrice Loayza unpacks the experience of watching Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) at this year’s Berlinale in the context of the enduring controversy surrounding the festival’s anti-Palestinian bias.
- “If one of the key features of the Starmerite tendency is their belief that only conservative values are truly legitimate, their embrace of AI and its aesthetics may be part of this.” For New Socialist, Gareth Watkins contextualizes AI art as a key element of fascist aesthetics amidst the cultural rise of the far right.
- “I discover a coterie of artists who acknowledge and then disrupt the pastoral genre; seeking a better artistic language through which to talk about nature, they ask how does rurality lose and gain dimensions?” For ArtReview, Rose Higham-Stainton writes about the “hyper-pastoral,” a new approach to rural aesthetics and how it disrupts the conservative fetishization of its implied racial, gendered, and class stereotypes.
- “If this was a regular movie, Pansy, after the Mother’s Day lunch, would have transformed into this loving, pleasant, mild character. When in life does that ever happen? This movie is for adults.” For Interview Magazine, Ben Barna interviews actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste about her starring role in Mike Leigh's Hard Truths (2024).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Eight Postcards from Utopia (Radu Jude, 2024).
- Los Angeles, February 26: 2220 Arts + Archives and JOAN present “An evening with François Pain: Experiments in film and psychiatric clinics,” a selection of short films by the experimental video artist as part of “Psychiatry Is What Psychiatrists Do,” his first solo institutional exhibition in the United States. The program will be followed by a conversation between Pain, writer Hedi El Kholti, and exhibition curator Perwana Nazif.
- Seoul, through April 12: Alternative Space LOOP presents “Eagles, Army Headquarters, and Football Films,” a solo exhibition from Serbian artist Bojan Fajfrić, which takes the form of a three-channel video installation that traces the transformation of three key sites in his hometown. The exhibition addresses “urban identity shifts driven by foreign speculative capital, the deliberate erasure and destruction of historical legacy, and political attempts to manipulate collective memory.”
- New York, through March 7: The Museum of Modern Art presents the 24th annual Doc Fortnight Festival, which features new nonfiction cinema from around the world, including work by Errol Morris, Radu Jude, and, as a duo, Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens.
- Bristol, through May 11: Spike Island presents “Danielle Dean: This could all be yours!” a multidisciplinary exhibition that “interrogates how individuals are shaped by commercial narratives.” The exhibition centers around Dean’s new film, Hemel, part personal essay and part portrait of her hometown.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- John Wilson directed the music video for Bon Iver’s newest single, “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” from his upcoming record Sable, Fable.
- Cinetic has released a trailer for Radu Jude’s Kontinental '25 (2025), a social satire partly inspired by Roberto Rossellini's Europe '51 (1951), which recently premiered at the Berlinale.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999).
- “We responded negatively to Hollywood, because they distorted who we were as people. We wanted to correct that.” Carlos Valladares interviews Charles Burnett as his The Annihilation of Fish (1999) finally gets a theatrical release.
- “Seeing everything doesn’t necessarily mean understanding anything.” Juan Camilo Velásquez takes Bill Morrison’s Oscar-nominated Incident (2024) as a case study in the possibilities and practicalities of surveillance cinema.
- “Eisenstein jeered that wider-screen formats signified ‘laziness’—lying, in form and in spirit.” Carolyn Funk studies the spatial dimensions of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017).
- “Is the camera present because things are bound to happen, or are things bound to happen because the camera is present?” Lawrence Garcia gives a brief history of the point-of-view camera as he queries its theoretical implications.
WISH LIST
- Abel Ferrara’s memoir, Scene, which purports to be “a manifesto on what it means to be a true artist,” is now available to pre-order from Simon & Schuster.
- Michael Koresky’s Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness is now available to pre-order from Bloomsbury.