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NEWS
- Guy Maddin’s next film, Rumours, recently wrapped production in Hungary. The ensemble piece is led by Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, who play world leaders who end up stranded in a forest during the annual G7 summit. Maddin has shared a breathless, spoof press release (below) announcing the film, describing the project as “an elevated dramedy and erotico-political threnody cum sylvan moodbank.”
- Paul Thomas Anderson is also at work on something new. So far, all we know is that his project is set in the present day and will star Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Regina Hall. Production begins in California later this year.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- One of the most exciting rediscoveries of the 2023 Il Cinema Ritrovato festival was the restoration of David Schickele’s Bushman (1971), which now has a trailer from Kino Lorber (below). Following the shaggy-dog story of a Nigerian immigrant's arrival to San Francisco in the 1960s, the film explores the racial politics of the era with wit and panache, morphing from a fiction to documentary mode mid-film. In the synopsis for the Ritrovato screening, programmer Cecilia Cenciarelli wrote that “with irony, poetry and a delicate touch,” Bushman “leads us into the darkness of the beginnings of an odyssey.” For days, she writes, “you are unable to think of anything else.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Mahjong (Edward Yang, 1996).
- “Yang portrays mid-1990s Taipei as an unfettered new frontier where people’s wayward desires and newly deep pockets are ripe for exploitation.” Following the recent retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center in New York, Vikram Murthi writes evocatively about Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang for the Nation.
- “It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television.” In the London Review of Books, James Meek reviews Peter Biskind’s Pandora's Box: The Greed, Lust, and Lies That Broke Television, a book by the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls which spans the era that“some perhaps premature nostalgists are already calling the golden age of television, from the debuts of Oz, Sex and the City and The Sopranos in the 1990s to the recently finished Succession.”
- “For all its experiments in form and structure, the film does have a shape: memory.” For the Nation, Kelli Weston writes about Raven Jackson’s “mosaic of Southern Black domesticity,” All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023).
- “Kaurismäki has perfected drab, short, beautiful, and lacks nothing across forty-plus years of bittersweet and luminous cinema,” writes Dan Fox in an essay on his Substack that takes Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (2023) as its starting point and expands to encompass thoughts on Ian Curtis, Alasdair Gray, sheep shearing, family, and more.
- Going in-depth for the New Left Review’s Sidecar vertical, Anton Jäger & Gerard-Jan Claes examine Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning Anatomy of a Fall (2023), a film they describe as “a two-hour-long exercise in haute vulgarisation, in which art-house tropes and trappings are combined with those more familiar from the made-for-TV movie.”
- “Whether in narratives or documentaries, her long, static, precisely composed takes—of potatoes being peeled in Jeanne Dielman (1975), of a tree buffeted by harsh desert winds in No Home Movie (2015)—redefined what it means to watch, to pay attention.” For 4Columns, Melissa Anderson writes broadly about Chantal Akerman’s cinematic style, before then focusing on her newly restored, rarely shown film Toute une nuit (1982), which screens twice soon in To Save and Project, MoMA's festival of restorations.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Arrowsmith (John Ford, 1931).
- New York, ongoing through February 4: We spotlighted two of the highlights from the program earlier in the feature (Bushman and Toute une nuit), but there are plenty more to be found within a packed 20th-anniversary edition of To Save and Project, MoMA’s festival for restored and preserved films, which includes more than 80 newly preserved features and shorts from 18 countries. Other gems include Albert Parker’s The Black Pirate (1926), introduced by Alexander Payne; a program of films by Lorenza Mazzetti that were made in 1950s London; and a screening of the original theatrical release of John Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931).
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Ghost (Takashi Ito, 1996).
- Purge are releasing Takashi Inagaki’s original score for a Japanese-language stage version of Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love, and its “parallel video installation,” The Dead Dance, both created by the experimental filmmaker Takashi Ito (Spacy [1981], Ghost [1984]). The release, which is limited to 200 copies, includes the soundtrack on vinyl, plus a booklet with images from the stage performance and installation, plus a new essay by Japanese scholar Akihito Yasumi. Genet’s final literary work, Prisoner of Love, recounts the two years he spent in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Kubi (Takashi Kitano, 2023).
- In a career-spanning interview, the revered director Takeshi Kitano tells Leonardo Goi about the production of his newest film, the 16th-century samurai epic Kubi (2023). He also talks about shedding his initial celebrity image as a comedian, as well as his distinctive narrative style, which thrives on the friction between bloodshed, comedy, and tragedy.
- “[Otar] Iosseliani inhabited exile more like a fairy tale than a sentence.” Celluloid Liberation Front pens a remembrance of the Georgian director, who died in December; his liberating, humanist films questioned the status quo, imagining a fantastic world devoid of many divisions.
EXTRAS
- Sabzian have shared their regular roundup of new and forthcoming film books. Among the many exciting publications included this time are Knights of Cinema, an account of the creation of the Palestine Film Unit by the filmmaker, researcher, and women’s and human rights activist Khadijeh Habashneh, and Screen Tests/A Diary, a long out-of-print 1967 book that pairs Andy Warhol's portraits with poetry by Gerard Malanga.