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NEWS
David Warner in The Wars of the Roses (Robin Midgley and Michael Hayes, 1965).
- David Warner, who died earlier this week, is warmly paid tribute to by artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean in the Guardian. In the piece, Dean talks about her admiration for the actor's performance in Alain Resnais' Providence and how she convinced him to star in her own film of the same name.
- Mary Alice also passed away this week, aged 85. A Tony- and Emmy-winning actor, Alice was known for her roles in Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger, Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Penny Marshall's Awakenings, among many other performances on both stage and screen.
- As part of a series of events investigating "the new languages of the contemporary," the Locarno Film Festival will host a 24-hour-long talk titled "The Future of Attention," curated by researcher Rafael Dernbach. During the event—held in-person, but also broadcast live on Twitch—a new speaker or panelist will join the conversation every hour, staying for as long as they wish.
- Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio will reunite for a new feature, The Wager. Based on a forthcoming nonfiction book by David Grann, the film follows a British naval crew as they "descend into anarchy" after a shipwreck. (Scorsese is finalizing another Grann adaptation, Killers of the Flower Moon.)
- Roland Emmerich's next project will be a television series. Those About To Die, based on Daniel Mannix's 1958 nonfiction book of the same name, will be a gladiator epic set during the ancient Roman empire.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Hong Sang-soo's newest film Walk Up will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month. The festival's brief synopsis gives absolutely nothing away about the film, but a short trailer sheds a little more light on the production.
- Following a well-received debut at the Sundance Film Festival, Joe Hunting's We Met in Virtual Reality is now available to watch on HBO Max. The documentary, which is set entirely within the world of VRChat, now has a trailer too.
- Moonage Daydream, the kaleidoscopic new film about David Bowie from Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Jane) is coming soon to theaters around the world. Neon shared an official trailer ahead of its September 16 U.S. release.
- Following the teaser that appeared some weeks back, Blonde—Andrew Dominik's long-anticipated film about Marilyn Monroe—has a full-length trailer.
- "A great short film, like a great short story, conjures worlds with clarity and economy." Available on the Irish Film Archive's website is a new collection of Irish Academy Award–nominated short films dating from 1951 to 2018, all of which are free to view worldwide.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, 1963).
- "People often ask me what it was like to see underground films in the early ’60s, and I always say that, most of the time, there weren’t many people in the audience, but I almost always saw something that excited me and changed what I thought a movie could be." In Artforum, Amy Taubin writes about “New York, 1962–1964: Underground and Experimental Cinema,” a program that is currently underway at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center.
- At the Fantasia Film Festival, where the director recently received a Career Achievement Award, Katie Rife talks to John Woo for Letterboxd's Journal. "I never learned kung fu, and I have never fired a real gun in my life. But I love dancing. When I create an action sequence, I feel like I’m shooting a dancing scene, like for a musical."
- "Of Jean-Louis Comolli it can truly be said that he was a man of cinema." For Sabzian, Daniel Fairfax, who recently wrote a book on the history of Cahiers du cinéma, remembers Jean-Louis Comolli, an editor of the magazine between 1965 to 1973 who later became a prolific filmmaker too.
- In a piece by Chris Lee for Vulture, an anonymous VFX artist describes the trials and tribulations of working on visual effects for Marvel Studios. "I’ve had co-workers sit next to me, break down, and start crying. I’ve had people having anxiety attacks on the phone."
A Woman Escapes (Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, 2022).
- In Film Comment, Simran Hans shares highlights from FIDMarseille, devoting most space in her report to A Woman Escapes, a new multi-format film by Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams from the French festival's international competition.
- Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino's other great passion is interior design. During Milan Design Week last month, he shared his first exhibition: a two-room installation featuring "wooden paneling, geometric stone tables, and a multicolored fireplace." In 032c, Carlo Antonelli speaks with Guadagnino about how this design work relates to his filmmaking practice.
- "'Film,' he continued, “is only at its beginning, you know.'" Writing for Spike, Rob Madole reports on his third pilgrimage to the Temenos, an event taking place in the mountains of Greece every four years that serves to enact "the grand vision and final artistic statement of Gregory Markopoulos."
- "Cinemas and studios don’t like summer," proposes Sukhdev Sandhu in Prospect. "It’s the season when their audiences fall away." While the hot season may be bad for theater's box office numbers, Sandhu argues, it is "hugely rich in dramatic potential" as a subject for films.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Episode 5 of the MUBI Podcast's second season surrounds the Nitrate Picture Show, held annually at The George Eastman Museum's Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York. Host Rico Gagliano speaks with individuals involved with the festival and staff at the British Film Institute's nitrate holding vaults, looking to understand why this rarefied film format generates such intense excitement among devotees.
- In parallel to the aforementioned "New York, 1962–1964: Underground and Experimental Cinema," Film Comment brought "avant-garde filmmaking legends" Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler onto their podcast, putting them in conversation with series co-curators Thomas Beard and Dan Sullivan.
- In what is being billed as her first ever podcast appearance, Elaine May speaks to Phil Rosenthal and David Wild on the Naked Lunch podcast, chatting about her work, her life, and her "first-ever sampling" of a pastrami sandwich at the famed LA delicatessen Langer's.
- A new MUBI soundtrack mix from Florence Scott-Anderton brings together music and audio by Throbbing Gristle, Coil, and Simon Fisher Turner in order to offer an ode to "filmmaker, set designer, gardener, writer, and activist" Derek Jarman.
- After performing in the city for the first time earlier this year, Eiko Ishibashi, composer of the score for Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car, will return to London to take part in the London Jazz Festival in November. (Those not able to see her live can listen to her bi-monthly radio show on NTS, where she shares music from across the spectrum of experimental composition.)
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978).
- New York: "Messaging the Monstrous" is a horror film series currently underway at the Museum of Modern Art. Fangoria spoke to Ron Magliozzi, Curator of Film at MoMA, and guest curator Caryn Coleman, about the massive series.
- Berlin: The Deutsche Kinemathek will host an exhibition showcasing the works of Werner Herzog, opening on August 22. The aim of the exhibition will be to "introduce his multilayered oeuvre to a broad public while critically reassessing it."
- Toronto: This year's lineup for the Toronto International Film Festival is slowly beginning to be unveiled. Announced so far are the gala and special presentations, which include films by Steven Spielberg, Sarah Polley, Alice Winocour, Joanna Hogg, and more.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Artwork by Ivana Miloš.
- A new "Full Bloom" column from Patrick Holzapfel and Ivana Miloš is about the poppy, the blood-red symbol at the center of Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze's 1976 masterpiece The Wishing Tree.
- Leonardo Goi's latest "The Current Debate" column focuses on Jordan Peele's Nope, "a UFO story where characters aren’t concerned with killing an alien so much as capturing it on camera."
- "Tarkovsky’s work affirms the totemic power of images when the world seems to have rendered them disposable, even meaningless." Amreen Moideen re-examines the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, touching on The Mirror, Andrei Rublev, and Stalker, and finding Tarkovsky's "embrace of slowness" to be a balm in a fast-paced world.
- Reporting from Il Cinema Ritrovato, Fedor Tot writes about a retrospective of "politically radical and timeless" work from the "Black Wave" of the former Yugoslavia, a movement emerging in the 1960s that led to "films that captured a unique historical moment and yet—60 years on—have lost none of their anger and impetus."
- Tomisin Adepeju contributes to the One Shot Notebook column with a snappy text on Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, talking about a shot that the author deems "emblematic of Ozu’s oeuvre, one characterized by the exploration of intergenerational relationships and the broader mythos of childhood and old age."
EXTRAS
- Outskirts, an exciting new print magazine assembled by various Notebook contributors, has been announced and is now on sale. In an explanatory editorial authored by co-editor Christopher Small, the magazine is described as being "consumed by the particulars of marginalia." Within the margins of the first issue, articles on Kazuo Hara, Judd Apatow, and Nikita Lavretski can be found, plus a large dossier on Soviet filmmaker Boris Barnet. A launch event will take place next week at the Locarno Film Festival.
- In GQ Japan, Tetsuro Irie held forth with legendary film critic and scholar Shigehiko Hasumi about his recently published book The Theory of John Ford. Non-Japanese readers can glean the conversation's essence using Google Translate.