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NEWS
No Bears (Jafar Panahi, 2022).
- Jafar Panahi was released on bail last Friday, two days after starting a hunger strike to protest his seven-month imprisonment. “His next fight is to have the cancellation of his sentence officially recognized,” said Michèle Halberstadt, his French distributor. “He’s outside, he’s free, and this is already great.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Personal Problems (Bill Gunn, 1980).
- Maya Cade of the Black Film Archive has chosen 28 films for the 28 days of Black History Month in the US and compiled online streaming links for each. The lineup includes films by Saundra Sharp, Bill Gunn, and many others.
- Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (We're All Going to the World's Fair)'s A Self-Induced Hallucination, their archival documentary about the Slenderman, is available for free on Vimeo. For more on the project, read Schonebrun's artist statement in Filmmaker.
RECOMMENDED READING
Night Tide (Curtis Harrington, 1961).
- “It had spent three years languishing in the can when distributor Roger Corman smuggled the unlikely masterwork into public consciousness, another of his now legendary mitzvahs to art.” On The Chiseler, Daniel Riccuito analyzes Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (1961), which gave Dennis Hopper his first starring role.
- “‘I’m getting, ‘Did anybody murder your sister, and do you want to make a film about that?’” In an extended reported feature looking at nonfiction production for Vulture, Reeves Wiedeman deconstructs the documentary boom, exposing all of the costs and complications that have resulted for filmmakers forced to make films at “the speed and scale demanded by streamers.”
- “These are just my fears, dude.” Adam Nayman profiles M. Night Shyamalan for the New Yorker, covering his new film Knock at the Cabin (2023), in which “a couple vacationing in rural Pennsylvania with their adopted daughter realize that they are not alone.”
- “One Fine Morning envisions Sandra’s life as a current, flowing in and out of moods with the momentum of a Métro ride and its myriad pauses, its sudden malfunctions.” For 4Columns, Beatrice Loayza reviews Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning (2022), focusing particularly on Lea Seydoux’s performance as Sandra, the film’s lead.
- "I was also going to Hollywood movies, and I was very aware of why we go to such movies: to lose ourselves in the fabrications and conventions of narrative film." In Metrograph's Journal, find Lynne Tillman in conversation with her friend and "colleague/comrade in arms" Yvonne Rainer, published alongside the venue's retrospective of the choreographer, filmmaker, and multi-hyphenate artist.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
lovertits (Ayanna Dozier, 2022).
- New York: In what has to be the best event title in a long while, Ayanna Dozier’s first solo exhibition is titled “This Country Makes It Hard to Fuck.” The show, which runs from February 2 to March 11 at Microscope Gallery, features new and recent works in celluloid film and film photography by Dozier exploring “the way the media, culture, politics, and religion work to exert control over bodies and stifle sexuality.”
- New York: MoMA’s Doc Fortnight returns from February 22 to March 7. As well as nonfiction films from recent festivals like Sundance and Berlinale Forum, the program includes the world premiere of an enticing new feature by James N. Kienitz Wilkins.
- Iowa City: Organized by artist filmmaker Christopher Harris with scholars Janaína Oliveira and Cristiane Lira, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora is a symposium examining “the emerging wave of young Afro-Brazilian filmmakers, curators, programmers,” using Brazil’s new Black cinema as a starting point. It will involve keynote talks, panel discussions, and screenings, and will take place from March 30 to April 1 at the Stanley Museum of Art and Iowa City FilmScene.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Todd Field talks TÁR on the latest special episode of the MUBI Podcast—specifically, why the world of classical music was an apt setting for his tale of privilege gone awry.
- For their final podcast recorded at Sundance Film Festival, Film Comment’s Devika Girish talked with Deborah Stratman, Mary Helena Clark, and Mike Gibisser, all of whom had films screening in the festival’s New Frontier section.
- Filmmaker Joyce Chopra (Smooth Talk) was a recent guest on Thom Powers’s Pure Nonfiction podcast, where she discussed her new memoir Lady Director, an autobiographical book that traces the changing role of female directors in Hollywood.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Babylon (Damien Chazelle, 2022).
- Imogen Sara Smith spelunks into Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, finding a “marathon of excess” that tries to pass itself off as Felliniesque, but fails to say anything provocative or insightful about Hollywood. “The film might hold together as an epic, nasty joke at the expense of anyone who has ever rhapsodized about cinema,” she writes, “but its muddled grandiosity seems all too sincere.”
- Issue 2 of Notebook magazine is beginning to arrive at subscribers’ doorsteps and select stores around the world. To coincide, Savina Petkova interviews one of the artists featured in the issue: Boryana Ilieva, also known as Floor Plan Croissant, “a Bulgarian architect with a penchant for moving image picture magic.”
- This month’s Movie Poster of the Week column marks a three-week MoMA retrospective focused on the legendary Italian actress Claudia Cardinale. “The start of her career, in the late ’50s, coincided with the last great decade or so of movie poster illustration,” writes Adrian Curry alongside a collection of Cardinale posters from the ’60s and ’70s.
EXTRAS
The Palace of Pleasure (John Hofsess, 1967).
- Started by filmmaker Stephen Broomer and writer Cameron Moneo, Black Zero is a new home entertainment label focused on releasing Canadian experimental cinema. One of their initial releases is John Hofsess’s The Palace of Pleasure (1967), described by Gene Youngblood as “a Joyce-Burroughs assemblage of bold, poetic surreal visions of physical love in every conceivable form.”
- “I couldn’t help but wonder whether we are entering a new era where films may still have frames (per second), but they no longer necessarily have a frame.” Danny Baldwin reports on the Samsung Onyx, a new form of cinema presentation which he calls “TV in public” that uses no projector but instead a network of wall-mounted “microscopic LEDs.”