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NEWS
Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023).
- The lineup for the 76th Locarno Film Festival is now online, and it includes new films from Radu Jude, Eduardo Williams, Bertrand Mandico (a feature and two shorts), Leonor Teles, Lav Diaz, and Denis Côté, plus many more. The festival runs from August 2 through 12.
- Following Barbie, which releases later this month, Greta Gerwig will next direct two Chronicles of Narnia adaptations for Netflix. This news comes as a side detail in a wide-reaching New Yorker piece on Mattel Films by Alex Barasch, which details the toy company’s plans to develop more than 45 films using its properties, including a Hot Wheels film by J.J. Abrams and a Daniel Kaluuya-led, "surrealistic" reboot of the children's show Barney.
REMEMBERING
- The great comic actor Alan Arkin died last week at age 89. For the New York Times, Jason Bailey pens a tribute to his performance in Glengarry, Glen Ross (1992): "His raw performance is the beating heart of what could have been a cold, bloodless movie, and a reminder of the life and force he brought to so many roles in his long, varied career." We'd also recommend a rewatch of The In-Laws (1979) or his directorial outing Little Murders (1971).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The MUBI Podcast Cannes series continues in full force, with a range of new video conversations with filmmakers. Rico Gagliano talks separately to BalojI (Omen) and Joanna Arnow (The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed), then also to Weston Razooli (Riddle of Fire), and Elene Naveriani (Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry). The chat with Arnow is embedded below.
- Following its Berlinale premiere earlier this year, Christian Petzold’s latest, Afire, now has a trailer. (The song it features can be listened to in full here.)
- A program of Rhayne Vermette’s short films can be viewed worldwide during July via Equinox. Per the website, Vermette’s films are “opulent collages of fiction, animation, documentary, reenactments and divine interruption.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Safe (Garrett Bradley, 2022).
- “The polymorphic work of American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley challenges notions of linearity to reveal the circularity in her subject’s lives, and the way the past continues to play out in the present.” Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou interviews Garrett Bradley about her ongoing trilogy of short films, on the occasion of the presentation of the second part in the series, SAFE (2022), at the Lisson Gallery in London.
- “Caravaggio invented an entire world to place in front of his studio’s easel,” writes Pier Paolo Pasolini in a newly translated short essay—unpublished in his lifetime, but “likely penned in 1974”—about the painter Caravaggio, shared by the Paris Review.
- “In general, the U.S. A-list film festival circuit, where independent voices used to be able to thrive in more ragtag and aesthetically diverse ways, is now mostly a self-reflexive bourgeois echo chamber of sanctimonious gatekeepers serving corporate interests and neoliberal logics. Something has to change.” In a newly digitized piece from the most recent print issue of Filmmaker, Sophia Haid and Keisha N Knight discuss the state of the U.S. film festival circuit and the future of film distribution.
- “Capitalism is too small a word for the problem that human beings have with human beings. These issues of power and status and a feeling that life is a zero-sum game, all of that stuff existed before anyone came up with the idea of money and creating value through trade and all that.” Brett Lang speaks with Steven Soderbergh for Variety, starting from how he made Full Circle, his new six-part TV series about a botched kidnapping, but touching on much more besides.
- “Superbly photographed by William Lubtchansky (the cinematographer for multiple Rivette films over three decades), Neige, capturing dynamic street life, doubles as urban verité, a funky city symphony.” For 4Columns, Melissa Anderson praises Neige (1981), the directorial debut of French New Wave actress Juliet Berto.
- “In this era of tote-bag solidarities, there is an immense force in the education one can glean from The Black and the Green, as an archive of the necessary messiness of organizing, and as an unflinching depiction of a debate that still plagues those devoted to transformative change.” For the Nation, Yasmina Price writes about St. Clair Bourne’s The Black and the Green (1983), which has been recently restored.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
I Thought the World of You (Kurt Walker, 2022).
- Vancouver, July 6: The Cinematheque is screening all three of Kurt Walker’s films in one evening, including his most recent film I Thought the World of You (2022). The filmmaker is present for a Q&A afterward.
- New York, July 9 through 23: Presented in collaboration with Chicago Film Archives, Metrograph’s series “Tom Palazzolo’s America” offers a “long-overdue New York showcase for the work of a Midwestern original, a slyly comic Studs Terkel of the 16mm underground.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Abandon Normal Devices, an arts organization in the north of England, have shared a recording of “Yearning for new ways to make and circulate: towards an infrastructure of being longing,” a keynote talk given by artist and researcher Jemma Desai at the New Cinema Days conference in April 2023.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022).
- "As [Mia] Hansen-Løve puts her personal life in open discussion with her films, there’s a profound valence to her observations about locations as receptacles of memory,” writes A.E. Hunt of Hansen-Løve’s latest, One Fine Morning. To coincide with the film’s streaming release on MUBI, Hunt considers the key role of on-location shoots and production design in Hansen-Løve’s work.
- “Here is a world, presented not without conflict, but without centering the process of struggle in the building of a better community”: Corey Atad uses Cyril Schäublin’s historical drama Unrest, a tale of anarchist watchmakers in a bucolic Alpine town, as a springboard to consider depictions of radicalism in cinema.
- “Everything edits itself from the moment the sequences gather meaning and emotion. From meaning and emotion we understand whatever we want, and we laugh, and it works.” From Cannes, Caitlin Quinlan interviews Catherine Breillat about the workings of power and intimacy in her intense new film, Last Summer.
- In a new essay, Jennifer Lynde Barker highlights a variety of animated films that express, unravel, and face (or deface) anxieties. As she writes, "Anxiety has a purchase on the imagination, creating fantasies that both inhabit and inhibit us."
EXTRAS
- Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature has an exhibition of manuscripts, photographs, and rare artifacts belonging to Yasujiro Ozu, including the signature white cap he always wore on set and his collection of beer coasters. The Harvard Film Archive’s Haden Guest shared some photos on Instagram.
- Bloodvine, a new website specializing in incisive horror and genre-film criticism, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to scale up their efforts. Read more about their mission here.
- Bombay Sapphire, Blu Tack, and Yves Saint Laurent’s $1450 City Backpack. These are a few of Baz Luhrmann’s favorite things.