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NEWS
May December (Todd Haynes, 2023).
- The first flurries of fall festival news have arrived. The New York Film Festival opens on September 29 with the North American premiere of Todd Haynes's May December—read Lawrence Garcia's take on the "immediately invigorating" film here, toward the conclusion of his Cannes dispatch. The San Sebastián Film Festival (September 22 through 30) has announced its first group of competition titles: among them, Cristi Puiu’s MMXX, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Martín Rejtman’s La prática, and Robin Campillo’s Red Island. Finally, the Venice Film Festival will open on August 30 with the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers.
- Lucile Hadžihalilović has announced her follow-up to Earwig (2021), the 1970s-set La Tour de Glace. Based on a brief plot synopsis, it will star Marion Cotillard as an actress who takes a teenage girl “under her wing” after she escapes from an orphanage, “exerting a dangerous and overpowering influence over the young girl she sees herself in.” It’s scheduled to begin shooting early next year in France, but in the meantime, you can acquaint yourself with Hadžihalilović’s earlier work via Saffron Maeve’s Notebook Primer.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The two final episodes in the special Cannes mini season of the MUBI Podcast are now online. In these video conversations, embedded below, host Rico Gagliani speaks with filmmakers Filipa Reis and Ildiko Enyedi.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973).
- “Autodidact, barfly, and rive gauche flaneur, Jean Eustache was still a railway electrician when he first arrived in Paris, in 1958.” Beatrice Loayza covers the work of Jean Eustache, one of France's “great modern filmmakers,” for Artforum. Eustache is currently the focus of a twelve-film retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, which will soon tour North America.
- “When I joke about not watching television I am also saving myself from admitting I have no foothold in the world of couples.” In an experimental essay for the White Review, Orit Gat writes about marriage as an institution in life, culture, and cinema, touching on Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie (2021), and other marital dramas.
- Alongside a current “revival and re-appreciation” of John Woo’s work, for Vulture, Bilge Ebiri speaks at length with a director who “reinvented the action movie [...] with his deliriously choreographed action scenes” and “unabashedly melodramatic tales of violent men who bonded with their adversaries.”
- On her Substack themed around movies on women and crime, Christina Newland writes about Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002), a film in which lead “actress Samantha Morton embodies a pallid slip of a twentysomething woman with a name as knowingly obfuscating as she is, and a fearsome urge to fill a certain hollowness that leads her to strange and exciting places.”
- Arguably, the power of cinema rests on one question – who is looking at who?” Rachel Pronger profiles Bette Gordon for Sight & Sound, speaking to the filmmaker on the occasion of the restoration of her film Variety (1983).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Dragon is the Frame (Mary Helena Clark, 2014).
- London, September 6 through 12: Ahead of a full reveal, Open City Documentary Festival have shared select program highlights from their thirteenth edition. As well as focuses on artist filmmakers Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Mary Helena Clark, there will be curated programs dedicated to feminist films made in India between 1985 and 1991, curated by Shai Heredia, and around the world between the 1970s and 1990s, curated by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg.
- New York, September 7 through 21: Including works by filmmakers such as Dušan Makavejev, Aleksandar Petrović, and Živojin Pavlović, the MoMA has a special, 15-film focus on the Yugoslav “Black Wave” coming up, curated by film historian Mina Radovic following a previous showcase at Il Cinema Ritrovato, covered for Notebook by Fedor Tot. “Yugoslav filmmakers of the 1960s—or certainly those who fell under the Black Wave banner—were, at their best, politically radical and timeless, creating films that captured a unique historical moment and yet—60 years on—have lost none of their anger and impetus.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Exotica (Atom Eogyan, 1994).
- A new episode of NTS Radio’s “Sounds on Screen” series, curated by Notebook contributor Florence Scott-Anderton, includes “sounds from the cinematic universe of Atom Egoyan, the Canadian director who emerged in the 1980s as a part of the loosely categorized ‘Toronto New Wave.’”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Return to Seoul (Davy Chou, 2022).
- "It became this cat and mouse game of trying to frame her and her trying to liberate herself from the frame of the camera." Davy Chou tells Elissa Suh about Return to Seoul, his shapeshifting portrait of adoptee identity, and his collaboration with the film’s breakout lead, Park Ji-Min. (Return to Seoul is now showing on MUBI in many countries.)
- “For [Terence] Nance, artmaking is an act of fortification,” observes Bedatri Choudhury as she takes us through the Random Acts of Flyness artist’s first solo exhibition, “Swarm,” recently on view at the ICA Philadelphia and presented by BlackStar Projects.
- “I became obsessed with this idea of creating, through film, a kind of social fabric.” Alongside a retrospective at FIDMarseille, Leonardo Goi spoke to Whit Stillman about his oeuvre: a body of films that, in Goi’s words, "seesaw between solitude and unbridled lust for life.”
- "Old and new myths, Emberá visual art, and electronic Guaracha music combine in a contemporary transcultural utopia”: Natalia Escobar and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau introduce their film Aribada, now showing on MUBI, with a sweeping text and selection of behind-the-scenes photos.
EXTRAS
- Moving Pictures Painted, a new art book published by Patrick Fry, surveys “seven decades of illustrated Egyptian film posters.” The Guardian have shared a number of the nicest looking posters—eagle-eyed readers may recognize a few from Joseph Fahim’s article on Egyptian cinema in Issue 2 of Notebook—in an article introducing the book.
- In literary news, NYRB Classics will publish English translations of Pier Paolo Pasolini's novels Boys Alive and Theorem in October, and Anthem Press have published On The Figure In General And The Body In Particular: Figurative Invention In Cinema, written by Nicole Brenez and translated by Ted Fendt.
- Last week, the independent distribution Sentient.Art.Film shared the first of two one-off email newsletters, guest-edited by Notebook contributor A.E. Hunt. Found in the first is a piece that has Miko Revereza (No Data Plan) “talking with old friends from the Echo Park Film Center,” among several other valuable interview-based articles.