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NEWS
Landscape Suicide (James Benning, 1987), included on Benning's Sight & Sound ballot.
- Sight & Sound has made individual ballots available for their Greatest Films of All Time poll. You can browse the full, alphabetical list of critics and filmmakers here, along with voters’ comments and accompanying essays. Some favorites of ours so far: James Benning on self-referentiality, Genevieve Yue on the wind.
- Eight years after The Intern, Nancy Meyers has a new romantic comedy in the works at Netflix, reportedly budgeted at $130 million. Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, Owen Wilson, and Michael Fassbender are all in early talks, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
- Author and curator Barbara Wurm has been appointed the new head of the Berlinale Forum program, succeeding Cristina Nord.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
If it's too bad to be true, it could be DISINFORMATION (Martha Rosler, 1985).
- “Signals: How Video Transformed the World,” a large new exhibition looking at the history of video art, has opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fortunately, a sizable selection of the 70 works—including pieces by Martha Rosler, Marlon Riggs, Rea Tajiri, and Ant Farm—are available to watch for free online on the museum’s special channel.
- Daniel Goldhaber’s climate-activism heist thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline, one of our TIFF 2022 highlights, now has a trailer from NEON. The film will be released in the US on April 7.
RECOMMENDED READING
Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, 1966).
- Slate have updated the Black Film Canon they first published in 2016, polling a range of critics, scholars, and filmmakers on their favorite films by Black filmmakers, accompanied by capsules and streaming links for the films.
- “If a movie theater can’t perform its most basic function and deliver a sharp, well-lit image with the right colors and contrast, then we might as well knock it down and put up a bank.” For Vulture, Lane Brown reports on the roots and causes of the dire state of projection in modern movie theaters.
- In Artforum, P. Adams Sitney remembers the “funny, good-humored, generous, gregarious, unusually sane, and self-assured” Michael Snow, who was “one of the last of the great generation of North American avant-garde filmmakers.”
- “Make your protagonist ‘relatable.’ Keep the conflicts going. Try for a twist.” David Bordwell looks into the history of the screenwriting manual, seeing what these books reveal about the craft of filmmaking, and the norms and conventions of the industry.
- “Donnie Yen has been punched, in the name of moviemaking, more times than he can count. Kicked. Burnt. Sliced open. Thrown from horses.” For GQ, Oliver Franklin-Wallis profiles Donnie Yen, “one of China’s biggest actors” and a leading man that “Hollywood has never quite known what to do with.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Nomad (Patrick Tam, 1982).
- Hong Kong: The 47th Hong Kong International Film Festival runs March 30 through April 10. This year’s edition features 4K restorations of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), Hsu Hsiao-ming’s Dust of Angels (1992), and Edward Yang’s A Confucian Confusion (1994), plus a new director’s cut of Patrick Tam’s Nomad (1982), which has been restored to 4K and reedited by Tam.
- London: The newly-reopened Raven Row is going from strength to strength with another great-looking exhibition, running April 15 through June 4. Using materials from the collection of the Guyanese-born, London-based curator, “PerAnkh: The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive” looks to “reveal histories and ideas in African and African diasporic film” via works by filmmakers including Safi Faye, Sarah Maldoror, Djibril Diop Mambéty, and Ousmane Sembène.
- San Francisco: Light Field, a festival dedicated to presenting moving-image art made on celluloid, is back from March 30 through April 2. The 2023 festival opens with a retrospective devoted to the memory of Amy Halpern and her “loving and attentive appreciations of people, animals, places, things, and experiences.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Jim Jarmusch and lutist Jozef Van Wissem have released another collaborative album, American Landscapes, featuring “long-form and hypnotic drone pieces [that] reflect the current state of America,” per their liner notes.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk, 2023).
- Hello Dankness—the latest work by the Australian duo Soda Jerk, and a recent Berlinale Panorama selection—is an “ultra-endurance meme sequence for these times.” Lauren Carroll Harris takes a closer look at what that means, and explores the history of appropriation in the process. “[Soda Jerk] has become notorious for a form of firebrand, amorphous leftist art made from ill-obtained parts,” Harris explains, “and for being spiky agents of chaos in perpetual media motion.”
- Our Berlinale wrap-up continues with Notebook editor-in-chief Daniel Kasman, who surveys the high notes of a muted slate, including new films by Claire Simon, Dustin Guy Defa, Christoph Höchausler, and Ayşe Polat. These films “speak for a vitality of the medium at a moment when it seems like its productivity and overall quality is at a winded, recuperating lull.”
- “To read Seeking Brakhage in the exact order that it’s presented is to also read a young critic who’s grappling with these cryptic works in real time,” writes Paul Attard about Fred Camper’s new, career-spanning volume of Brakhage essays. For Attard, Camper brings a spirit of adventure to Brakhage’s visual puzzles, proving “that a specialized knowledge of art history isn’t a prerequisite to loving any of these films.”