Rushes | Lost Ford Found, AI Goes to Hollywood, Dressing for the Liberal Democratic Order

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NEWS

The Scarlet Drop (John Ford, 1918).

• John Ford’s The Scarlet Drop (1918), presumed to be lost for over 100 years, has been found in a warehouse in Santiago, Chile, that was slated to be demolished. “I think there are some films that decide to live,” says Jaime Cordova, who rescued and digitized the film, which stars Harry Carey as a defector from the Union Army who joins a gang of marauders.
• The Berlin government’s decision to slash its cultural funding budget by 13 percent (€130 million) has prompted widespread backlash from the city’s arts community. Roughly 450 institutions rely upon state subsidies and Berlin cultural workers predict closures and mass layoffs will be the inevitable result of this budget reduction. Sinema Transtopia is distributing an open letter in protest of the cuts.
• The festival rules for the upcoming Berlinale, which has again been targeted by a boycott movement for its complicity in silencing dissent of Israel’s war on Gaza, include a stipulation that visitors wearing clothing containing “expressions incompatible with the liberal democratic order” may be ejected.
• According to an investigation conducted by The Atlantic, Hollywood dialogue culled from OpenSubtitles has been used to train AI systems used by companies like Apple and Anthropic.

REMEMBERING

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962).

• Silvia Panal has died at 93. The Mexican actress was a pioneering performer during Mexico’s Golden Age of cinema who achieved international acclaim by starring in three films by Luis Buñuel: Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962), and Simon of the Desert (1965). Over a 60-year career, she collaborated with Mexican luminaries such as actor and singer Pedro Infante and comic Germán “Tin Tan” Valdés. Her widespread celebrity in Mexico led to being cast in multiple European and American films, including Samuel Fuller’s action picture Shark! (1969) alongside Burt Reynolds. For many years, she held municipal and national political offices in Mexico.
• Marshall Brickman has died at 85. The American screenwriter and director is best known for cowriting four Woody Allen films: Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1994). Brickman began his career in 1960s television writing for shows like Candid Camera (1948–2014) and The Dick Cavett Show (1968–86) and was briefly the head writer for Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show (1962–92). He also directed three films: Simon (1980), Lovesick (1983), and The Manhattan Project (1986).

RECOMMENDED READING

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024).

• “​​For the villagers, harboring such an escapee entailed more risk, which meant more pay. When it was time for Rasoulof to depart, they refused to release him.” For the New York Times, Amir Ahmadi Arian profiles director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024), premiered shortly after fleeing an eight-year prison sentence in his home country of Iran.
• “This is the depressing ideal of contemporary hedonism, what the (castrated) sons who can have anything without limits really desire: a mannequin and a console.” For e-flux, Aaron Schuster unpacks the ending of Anora (2024) and compares the film to two blockbusters, the Soviet drama Interdevochka (1989) and the American romantic comedy Pretty Woman (1990).
• “Any performer who claims to not feel a shred of horror or shame while bearing their soul to an audience is simply lying. All artistic expression is a “humiliation ritual,” and the more embarrassment one feels over what they’ve done, the higher the chances that they’ve actually knocked it out of the park.” For Metrograph’s Journal, filmmaker Michael M. Bilandic explores the story behind Trent Harris’s cult film The Beaver Trilogy (2000) in the context of ethical film production and artistic ego.
• “Most films which are being made today are stuck in the past. It is very rare to witness something new, something that constitutes an ‘event’, not to mention the creation of new trends, movements, schools of filmmaking or real breakthroughs in the cinema language.” For Sabzian, Astrid Jansen interviews Sergei Loznitsa ahead of his “State of Cinema” address in Brussels.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922).

• Chicago, December 4: The Music Box Theatre presents a screening of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) accompanied by an original live score performed by Dutch composer and lutenist Jozef van Wissem. Van Wissem is best known for composing the score for Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
• New York, December 5 and 10: The Anthology Film Archives presents “A Medium Is Born: A Short History of Early Colombian Video Art.” Programmed by Juan Camilo Velásequz, the program compiles work by four pioneering artists working during a tumultuous period in the country’s history.
• New York, December 7 and 8: Wendy’s Subway presents “Access, Media Literacy, and the Imaginable,” the latest workshop in their online After Hours Film School series, which invites moving-image makers to engage in a seminar-style discussion around new currents in cinematic practice. Filmmakers Jordan Lord and Tiffany Sia will conduct a two-day discussion about how to “reframe questions of media literacy…in the face of propaganda, censorship, disinformation, and the livestreaming of genocide.”
• London, through June 1, 2025: The Tate Modern presents “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet,” an exhibition dedicated to the development of technological art in the 20th century, featuring works by Steina and Woody Vasulka, Lillian Schwartz, Nam June Paik, and many more.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Le Cinema Club presents the online premiere of Robert Frank’s Rolling Stones Super 8 Footage (1972), a silent short film that features the band moving through Los Angeles via rapid-fire imagery.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

C'est Vrai! (One Hour) (Robert Frank, 1990).

• “Whether writing directly on his images, or turning them into scrapbook collages, Frank transforms the photographs into personal artifacts; he makes us aware of the process of their creation.” David Schwartz considers Frank’s little-known moving-image work on the occasion of a major retrospective.
• “There was something so bold but also naïve about the way titles were used in these films; there was no winking, no tongues in cheeks. And I love that.” In our latest Related Images column, Elizabeth Sankey presents the visual research into title cards she conducted while making Witches (2024).
• “Faith, or skepticism toward it, is more than a matter of content for these films—it informs their cinematic sensibilities.” Madeleine Wulfahrt writes about the spiritual and physical senses of Jewish belonging in A Real Pain and Between the Temples (both 2024).

WISH LIST

Read Frame Type Film (MUBI Editions, 2025).

• MUBI has announced the launch of a new publishing arm, MUBI Editions, which will publish cinema-related books across multiple formats and genres. Their first entry, Read Frame Type Film, about the relationship between cinema and typography in experimental and artists’ film, is available to pre-order now.
• Light Cone Editions’ When The Eye Trembles, an anthology of texts by Jean-Michel Bouhours on the work of Italian experimental filmmaker Paolo Gioli, is available to pre-order through December 10. In conjunction with the book’s release, Light Cone presents a screening of Gioli's films introduced by Bouhours on December 10 in Paris.

EXTRAS

• The BBC’s sound effects library has over 33,000 samples and is now completely free to access. Some notable samples include close-up grunts from a female reindeer and an evening with gurgling colobus monkeys. We are finding them pretty chill to relax/study to.