Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
I ran from it and was still in it (Darol Olu Kae, 2020).
- The Filmmaker Magazine editorial staff shared their annual roster of 25 New Faces of Independent Film, including Antonio Marziale, Darol Olu Kae, Lucy Kerr, and more.
- John Waters will return to directing with Liarmouth, an adaptation of his own novel of the same name. It will be his first film since 2004’s A Dirty Shame.
- The Edinburgh International Film Festival has been shut down after the charity that runs it, the Centre for the Moving Image (CMI), announced it has called in administrators and made 102 out of the 107 current staff redundant. Mark Cousins wrote about the closure of the “feminist, unbridled, Nonconformist Scottish and passionately international” festival in the Guardian.
- The legendary actress Angela Lansbury died this week at age 96. "She moved so easily between film, television, and stage that it was simple to imagine her always gliding through the culture, twinkling mischievously," writes Helen Shaw in a remembrance for Vulture.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Adapted from Lizzy Goodman’s bestselling book, Meet Me in the Bathroom is an archival film about the early 2000s New York music scene. The documentary now has a trailer following festival screenings over the past two years.
- The second Claire Denis feature released this year, Stars at Noon, a romantic thriller based on Denis Johnson's 1986 novel, now has a trailer via A24.
- Each week in October, Canyon Cinema is hosting new curated programs of artists’ moving image, free to watch worldwide. This week’s program, “Prime Time Reverie,” was curated by Aaditya Aggarwal; it explores the “formally diverse genre” of “television catered to feminized viewers,” and features films by Dana Birnbaum, Barbara Hammer, Lynne Sachs, Cauleen Smith, and more.
RECOMMENDED READING
Happening (Audrey Diwan, 2021).
- “It’s possible to believe that aesthetics should not take a back seat to politics and still, when things are dire, feel the pull of artists who choose urgency over nuance.” Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature this week. Writing for Dissent, Charles Taylor discusses Audrey Diwan’s Happening (2021), an adaptation of one of her memoirs, within a context of other abortion-related films and literature.
- "Even if Bollywood possesses [a] liberal fibre, the rightward swing in Indian politics has gnawed away at it." In an in-depth report for the New Yorker, Samanth Subramanian examines the Hindu right's impact on contemporary Bollywood.
- Writing about films “based on literary fiction, a young adult novel, 19th-century journals, and even a Russian fable,” Elissa Suh reports for Lithub on the “literary films” at this year’s New York Film Festival.
- For Seattle Screen Scene, Sean Gilman reviews The King of Wuxia, a new documentary about King Hu, “the man behind many of the most accomplished and influential action films of all-time.”
- “Almost 40 years after it was first made, the Sankofa collective’s The Passion of Remembrance remains salient,” writes Xavier Alexandre Pillai for Sight & Sound on this “landmark film” and its 4K restoration.
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 2022).
- In Artforum, Erika Balsom writes about Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep, “an eight-part miniseries reprising his 1996 film of the same name” in which “Olivier Assayas dives headlong into the sorry state of twenty-first-century cinema: superheroes, endorsement deals, the menace of 'quality' television.”
- Ed Halter returns to 4Columns to review Bros, “the big-screen effort from internet-and-television funnyman Billy Eichner.” He considers the “surrounding ballyhoo” of “the oft-repeated claim by Universal’s public-relations machine that it would be the first gay rom-com produced and released by a major Hollywood studio.”
- “Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the hope is not just that Ukrainian cinema will survive, but that it will continue to flourish, given how healthy the country’s recent auteur cinema has been.” Jonathan Romney overviews Ukrainian cinema—past, present, and future—for Sight & Sound.
- For Filmmaker Magazine, Steve Dollar files a dispatch from Camden International Film Festival, where a “sharp sense of the global, in a sheer geographical/cartological sense, also permeated a raft of selections.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Drowning by Numbers (Peter Greenaway, 1988).
- London: Running from October to November at the BFI Southbank, “Frames of Mind” is a retrospective of the films of Peter Greenaway, highlighting his “unique visual language...[and] penchant for list- and puzzle-making.”
- Cincinnati: The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra are pairing short films from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie, and Josephine Decker with live music composed by their orchestra. Their program “Sun Dogs,” which runs from October 10-16, “seeks to understand the natural world that can’t be touched or measured.”
- New York: From October 7-27, Film Forum are screening films starring Isabelle Huppert, someone who has “taken on an astonishment of roles over her career, moving effortlessly from tears to shrieks, from the straightest stories to the most gloriously unhinged.”
- London: Broken Spectre, an immersive video installation by Irish artist Richard Mosse, is on view at 180 The Strand until December 4.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Om (John Smith, 1986).
- Sophia Satchell-Baeza interviews John Smith, whose works contain a “distinct marriage of formal dexterity and a clever, questioning, wily wit.”
- Leonardo Goi’s latest The Current Debate column looks at responses to Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022), an “elliptical (and, as director and novelist have long maintained, fictional) chronicle” of the life of Marilyn Monroe that unfolds “as an endless slideshow of humiliations and traumas.”
- Elisha Tawe profiles “Ajabu Ajabu, the Tanzania-based collective of arts professionals pushing for visibility and increased access for the country's experimental film scene.”
- Keva York speaks with Todd Haynes about the Locarno Film Festival’s recent spotlight on Douglas Sirk, “a director whose tradition of social critique gave shape to Far from Heaven, of course, but beyond that, to [Haynes’s] outlook as an artist.”
- “The whole town is under a spell, and to walk into it is to enter a fantasy world where all sorts of things can happen.”Leonardo Goi chats with Laura Citarella about her genre-bending epic Trenque Lauquen, which plays the New York Film Festival this week.
- “When I was a teenager I remember going with my parents to see North by Northwest and I’d never seen anything like it in my life.” Stephen Frears shares his Moviegoing Memories.
- “The racism, the injustice, the trauma, the heroism, the idealism, the burden, the pain, the regret. The heaviness. This story needed a release.”Julie Ha and Eugene Yi introduce their film Free Chol Soo Lee (2022).
EXTRAS
- Shuna’s Journey is a one-volume, watercolor-illustrated graphic novel written and illustrated by Hayao Miyazaki that was first published in Japan in 1983. An English-language translation from Alex Dudok de Wit is due out in November, but has already been spotted in London’s Gosh Comics.
- “'Rejoice because there’s nothing left on a morrow-less day.” Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (2005)—a fictionalized account of the last days of Kurt Cobain—has been adapted into an opera starring Titane’s Agathe Rousselle, and just wrapped up a weeklong run at the Royal Opera House in London.
- Meanwhile, it seems that Al Pacino may be writing a memoir for Penguin Random House, which reminds us of his starring role in Author! Author! (1982, below).
