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REMEMBRANCE
Island in the Sun (Robert Rossen, 1957).
- The singer, actor, and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte has died, aged 96. Christina Newland wrote a piece on Belafonte for Notebook in 2020, praising his politics, his style, his music, and his work ss stage and screen. "His impact on American mid-century life has been so significant that it’s difficult to define him as any single thing, or to see him occupying only one role."
NEWS
No Bears (Jafar Panahi, 2022).
- Jafar Panahi has left Iran for the first time in fourteen years, it is being reported. Posting from an airport, his wife Tahereh Saeedi tweeted that, “after 14 years, Jafar’s ban was cancelled" and, that finally, the pair are "going to travel together for a few days…”
- The Cannes Film Festival have added a number of films to their lineup, completing the Official Selection. We’ve updated our Notebook post with the additions, which includes films by Lisandro Alonso, Catherine Corsini, and Amat Escalante. Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi will chair the jury for the Short Film Palme d’Or and the 3 La Cinef prizes for student films at Cannes. She is joined on the jury by Ana Lily Amirpour, Charlotte Le Bon, Karidja Touré, and Shlomi Elkabetz.
- Lastly in Cannes-related news, though his latest film is not yet ready, Quentin Tarantino will be at the festival this year, presenting a “secret screening” of a film as well as discussing his recent book Cinema Speculation as part of the Directors’ Fortnight section.
- The BFI has announced the full lineup for its new Film on Film Festival, which includes a broad range of screenings on 16mm, 35mm, 70mm, and Super 8, as well as several rare nitrate prints and screenings of vintage dual-strip 3D. The festival takes place from June 8 through 11 at the BFI Southbank.
RECOMMENDED READING
Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023).
- “Like the director’s previous two features—Hereditary (2018) and its successful follow-up, Midsommar (2019)—Beau is a horror movie of the “elevated” variety, but one that instrumentalizes a terror of humanity rather than the supernatural or the occult.” On 4Columns, Leo Goldsmith reviews Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid (2023), assessing how the film fits into “the A24 vibe.”
- In the New Yorker, Matt Alt remembers Leiji Matsumoto, a Japanese anime director whose “œuvre ran the gamut from teen romances and erotic comedies to the iconic space-opera series Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Queen Millennia, and Galaxy Express999,” but who was best known outside of Japan for his Daft Punk music video series Interstella 5555 and his “long-running epic Space Battleship Yamato,” tiled Star Blazers in the United States.
- “I find that it’s always a case of starting somewhere with a set of questions, and in the process of trying to answer those questions either larger questions appear or a shape of an answer appears.” For Hyperallergic, Dan Schindel speaks with John Akomfrah, talking about his six screen installation work Purple (2017), currently on long-term view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.
- “Throughout the 1970s, one of the decade’s most perverse imagemakers conjured a blonde from the void.” Inaugurating a new Metrograph column looking at fashion in film, Colleen Kelsey examines the style of Catherine Deneuve.
- “The plot is surely familiar to any Eastwood admirer. A desperado rolls into a town suffering under the thumb of a notorious outlaw, where anyone can buy a badge and call themselves verified.” For Defector, John Semley investigates the “wave of online Eastwood ephemera,” trying to weed out the real Clint Eastwood social media accounts from the pretenders.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Drylongso (Cauleen Smith, 1998).
- London: Launching “Screen Practices,” a new series at the ICA focused on film collectives is “Archive Fever,” a weekend of new restorations programmed by Shasha Movies. Highlights of the series—which runs from April 28 through 30—include Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso (1998), Antonio Carlos da Fontoura’s The Devil Queen (1974), and The Guard from Underground (1992), a rarely seen early film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse).
- New York: As part of the museum’s run of guest-curated series, film critic Amy Taubin has been given carte blanche at MoMA. As well as a presentation of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), in which she appears, Taubin’s selections include films by Fronza Woods, Ken Jacobs, Andy Warhol, Kathryn Bigelow, Spike Lee, and more. Screenings take place from April 27 through 30, with repeat showings throughout May.
- New York: An upcoming program at Anthology Film Archives surveys analog film cultures in Spain, looking at three generations of filmmakers who make work in Super 8 and 16mm. Curators Francisco Algarín Navarro and Carlos Saldaña have compiled the work into two screenings, taking place May 13 and 14.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- This week’s episode of the MUBI Podcast is a break from the season’s movie music theme, instead featuring a special interview with Lukas Dhont about his film Close (2022), now streaming on MUBI in select territories. Among other topics, they discuss what Close has in common with James Cameron's Titanic (1997).
- Keanu Reeves was the guest on a recent episode of actor and martial artist Scott Adkins’s podcast “The Art of Action.” The pair discuss their work in the action genre, touching on some of their favorite sequences from their respective careers.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Women Talking (Sarah Polley, 2022).
- “It seems as though with time, Polley has come to rely on storytelling crutches: before Women Talking starts in earnest, a title card appears to frame the story.” Rafaela Bassili considers the filmography of Sarah Polley, working her way through Polley's features and culminating with an examination of her latest, Women Talking (2022).
- Using the filmmaker’s memoir Lady Director—“a brisk but lively read, spanning a long life and prodigious career”—as a starting point for a wider conversation about her work across film, television, and theater, Kat Sachs overviews the life and work of Joyce Chopra.
EXTRAS
- Long out of print, a 144 page pre-production scrapbook made by Pedro Costa for his film Casa de Lava (1994) is now back in stock, courtesy of publisher Pierre Von Kleist.
- An eBook for Andreas Malm’s non-fiction text How to Blow Up a Pipeline, recently adapted into a feature film, can be downloaded for free until April 27 via the website of publisher Verso.