Rushes: Losing Great Filmmakers, Home Movies at the MoMA, Reading Derek Jarman

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NEWS

Above: Nobuhiko Obayashi in his "humble workspace." (Photograph by Aiko Masubichi for MUBI.)

• We're devastated by the loss of three great titans within the last week, each totally singular and significant to the history of movies: Bruce Baillie, avant-garde filmmaker and founder of Canyon Cinema and the San Francisco Cinematheque, the prolific pacifist and green-screen master Nobuhiko Obayashi (whose penultimate film Hanagatami was featured on MUBI in January of 2019), and Pan-African cinema pioneer Sarah Maldoror, known for her portraits of women's role in African liberation struggles.
• The Cannes Film Festival, which earlier announced plans to postpone the festival until the end of June to early July, has confirmed that this will no longer be possible, and that the festivities can no longer take place in their "original form."

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• This Long Century, a digital collection of "an ever-evolving collection of personal insights from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and cultural icons," has announced a two program series entitled OUTSIDE and INSIDE that consists of 30 films. The programs include films by Carlos Reygadas, Laida Lertxundi, Jodie Mack, and Sky Hopinka.
• From the late Bruce Baillie's personal YouTube account, five collected films by Baillie—Tung, Mass, Valentin de las Sierras, Castro Street, and All My Life—in their digital restorations.

• The American Cinematheque has made available The Little Story of Gwen from French Brittany, a 2008 short by Agnès Varda. The film follows the growing friendship between Varda and the Cinematheque's Gwen Deglise, from Gwen's arrival in Los Angeles and meetings with Varda at the theatre.

RECOMMENDED READING

Above: Home movies by the Jarret family, 1958-1967. (Courtesy of MoMA)

• MoMA's exhibit "Private Lives Public Spaces" features thousands of reels of home videos from 1907 to 1997. Watch nine films from the collection here, which may inspire you to create your own, and read American Cinematographer's informative summary of the exhibit's restoration process.
• From last year's New York Film Festival, a conversation between curator Dan Sullivan and Pietro Marcello, who discusses Herbert Spencer, political activism, and Martin Eden as an anti-hero.
• SXSW's partnership with Amazon has placed filmmakers between a rock and a hard place, according to an overview of the deal by Hollywood Reporter that details the financial risk posed by one of many festivals' digital initiatives.

• "I do not use images from my dreams… but I do very much try to watch my mind, especially upon waking or dozing off, to see how the mind constructs image progressions from moment to moment." A new interview with the ever-insightful Nathaniel Dorsky, published by Ultra Dogme.
• Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker writes on the strange consolation found in reading Derek Jarman's dispatches in the midst of the AIDS epidemic during the recent Covid-19 crisis.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

• James Slaymaker reviews Isiah Medina's Inventing the Future, which he deems "a towering film: a radical piece of intellectual montage, a utopian political tract, and an exploration of the ontology of digital image-making."
• From Jett Allen: Four sensorial experiences of today's film-goer, captured in cartoons.
• An overview of Ken Jacobs's mid-January, career-spanning screening event at the MoMA, an event that showcased "a creative ingenuity that’s persisted for well over six decades," by Paul Attard.
• "What’s at stake in the crises the world’s most distinguished film magazines are suffering?" Leonardo Goi looks into the tribulations that film magazines now face in our current global health crisis.

EXTRAS

• Nobuhiko Obayashi's wife and producer, Kyoko Obayashi, has released a moving statement regarding her late husband's last words, his legacy, and their 63 years of "literature, music, and movies."

“‘Thank You Everyone’ Filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Last Words as Told in Producer Kyoko Obayashi's Statement”https://t.co/12lsguCTZ8 pic.twitter.com/DhbRq8Gji2

— Japan Society Film (@js_film_nyc) April 14, 2020

• And here we have Nicolas Winding Refn and his daughter on TikTok, signaling what will likely be an influx of filmmakers joining their families for dance challenges while staying at home.

nicolas winding refn doing a tiktok dance pic.twitter.com/1jN59Oic96

— joker robert franco (@responsiblerob) April 12, 2020

• A throwback to the 1975 Alternative Miss World pageant, where Derek Jarman won as his lovely alter-ego Miss Crepe Suzette. (Photographed by Marc Balet.)