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NEWS
Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine, 2023).
- NYFF have announced a few new lineups, including their adventurous-looking Spotlight section, with new work by Harmony Korine (as pictured, shot entirely in infrared), Hayao Miyazaki, Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie, and more. They've also shared the experimental program for Currents, which opens with Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3 and features James Benning, Deborah Stratman, and Pham Thien An. And finally, their Revivals section includes restorations of Jean Renoir’s “almost ghostly last film in Hollywood,” The Woman on the Beach (1947); Niki de Saint Phalle's first solo feature Un rêve plus long que la nuit (1976); and a 4K restoration of Horace Ové’s Pressure (1976), world-premiering in conjunction with the London Film Festival.
- Following news last week that Leila’s Brothers (2022) filmmakers Saeed Roustayi and Javad Noruzbegi have been sentenced to six months in prison, suspended over five years, Deadline is reporting that Iranian documentary filmmaker and female rights activist Mojgan Ilanlou was also detained this weekend, only to be freed 24 hours later.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Trapline (Ellie Epp, 1976).
- Until September 1, five films by the Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Ellie Epp can be watched for free worldwide on the Ultra Dogme website. “From the dispersive ripples on water to the surging currents of the ocean, Ellie Epp’s is a cinema of fluid forms,” writes Sophia Satchell-Baeza in a new text about her work, which “moves between things seen and not-seen.”
- Ahead of an upcoming screening in the festival’s Main Slate, NYFF have shared a trailer for Lisandro Alonso’s latest, Eureka (2023), a three-part, multi-country story about colonialism and violence starring Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni, which had its premiere at Cannes earlier this year.
RECOMMENDED READING
Film About a Woman Who... (Yvonne Rainer, 1974).
- “I was never interested in being famous. In fact, someone described me as the most famous unknown choreographer around. And that suits me.” Parallel to an ICA London retrospective of new restorations of her films, Adrian Horton profiles filmmaker, artist, and choreographer Yvonne Rainer for the Guardian.
- “‘We should explain what blinx are,’ Korine says. ‘Blinx is something that we’re using to describe what everything is now. Instead of films or games, a lot of these things—we’re just calling them blinx.’” Ahead of Aggro Dr1ft's premiere, Harmony Korine tells GQ’s Zach Baron about how his new “design collective” and “creative factory” EDGLRD, and how they will be making “movies that are not really movies.”
- “Glowing in the center of the screen is its visual double, a bright spot of light and motion circumscribed within a darkened frame. But what at first looks like a screen turns out to be the window of a train hurtling through a mountainous landscape.” In the New York Review of Books, Katie Kirkland unravels Come Here (2021), the newest feature from Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong.
- “‘You always come back saying ‘how come I didn’t see you in more of this or that and this?’ You ask the question but you know the answer to your own question. That’s what racism will do.” For IndieWire, Robert Daniels talks with Charles Burnett about the compromised vision of My Brother’s Wedding, re-cut by the producers for the 1983 premiere then shelved until Milestone Films bought the rights in 2007, at which point the filmmaker was able to recreate something closer to his preferred version.
- “I am truly interested in everything and I consider all moving images to be part of 'the cinema kingdom,' from amateur porn to Ingmar Bergman, from trash TV to Shoah, from TikTok videos to Barbie and Oppenheimer.” Writing for the Film Comment Letter’s Guilty Pleasures column, wherein “filmmakers list 10 movies they enjoy in spite of themselves,” Radu Jude bypasses the brief, talking instead about film and media culture and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
- “Maybe what I most marvel at in the film is how it joins a kind of ruthless narrative economy with what feels like boundless patience.” Author Garth Greenwell uses his latest newsletter to enthuse about Ira Sachs’s Passages (2023), noting “how full every moment feels, how much work each scene does, how beautifully and sure-footedly Sachs moves through time.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Last Things (Deborah Stratman, 2023).
- San Francisco, September 8 through 10: CROSSROADS 2023 is the fourteenth “manifestation” of the San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual festival for film, video, and performance. The ten thematic programs include films by Rose Lowder Bruno Varela, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Deborah Stratman, and Cauleen Smith.
- New York, now through November 16: “In 1953, seventy years ago, 3-D conquered Hollywood.” Film Forum celebrates “Hollywood’s first 3-D Wave, 1953-1954” with a selection of 3D features by André Toth, Edward Dein & Carlos Véjar hijo, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Adults (Dustin Guy Defa, 2023).
- Jordan Cronk chats to Dustin Guy Defa and Hannah Gross about their latest collaboration The Adults (2023). Defa’s third feature, Cronk writes, “both extends and expands on these themes in ways that open up Defa’s previously cloistered world of neurotic New Yorkers, eccentric artist types, and emotionally unavailable twentysomethings.”
- “Title treatments can range from the simple to the spectacular, from mere type to elaborate works of art,” writes Adrian Curry, introducing his latest column, which surveys the art of the film poster title treatment, examining how the size, styling, and placement of a film’s title carries meaning or sets a tone.
- “Unlike the regular commercially successful hot-blooded action films or postmodern and nostalgic arthouse films, Ah Ying is at the other end of the spectrum of Hong Kong cinema, quietly documenting facets of histories we very often omit to make space for more memorable, grand narratives of Hong Kong.” In a personal essay, Koel Chu looks at what Allen Fong's Ah Ying (1983) reveals and reflects about the city of Hong Kong.
EXTRAS
- John Carpenter has shared a new version of “Chariot of Pumpkins,” a theme that originally featured in Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1987). The song is included on Anthology II: Movie Themes 1976-1988, out later this year on Sacred Bones records.