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NEWS
Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023).
- The 80th Venice Film Festival concluded last weekend. The jury, chaired by Damien Chazelle, awarded the Golden Lion to Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest, Poor Things; in his latest dispatch, Leonardo Goi calls it "joltingly alive, a film that crackles with the same restless curiosity and lust of its protagonist." See a summary of all the awards, plus a roundup of our coverage.
- San Sebastian Film Festival has announced who will serve on their festival juries for their 71st edition: Claire Denis will be the president for the Official Section, while Hayao Miyazaki will receive an honorary award for career achievement. His latest film, The Boy and The Heron, will open the festival.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- For their 50th anniversary, the Film Fest Gent have commissioned 25 new short films inspired by new musical compositions. There's a tantalizing range of pairings: Eiko Ishibashi x Laura Citarella, Evgueni Galperine x Bi Gan, Shigeru Umebayashi x Radu Jude, and Florencia di Concilia x Terence Davies...to name just a few without listing the entire slate. Browse the full selection here, most of which are available to watch online (Paul Schrader is a notable omission at this point).
RECOMMENDED READING
- Cinema Scope have been sharing their ever-indispensable and insightful TIFF coverage as we enter the final days of the festival. Along with it, they've begun previewing their autumn issue, including an editor's note from Mark Peranson about the status of the print publication.
- For Time, Stephanie Zacharek interviews Martin Scorsese, who, at 80, “seems eager to fit everything together: not just the movies he’s seen or made, but the books he’s read over a lifetime, the seemingly random encounters he’s had at turning points in his life, the evolving, unfinished project of his own spirituality, shaped largely, but not only, by Catholicism.”
- “Ousmane Sembène the filmmaker was fashioned out of Ousmane Sembène the writer, formerly Ousmane Sembène the mechanic, carpenter, factory worker, longshoreman, and militant trade unionist.” In 4Columns, Yasmina Price widens our understanding of a filmmaker “often too efficiently packaged as the social-realist ‘Father of African Cinema.’”
- “I think connection is the keyword here. It is this kind of governing force in my films, partly also because I’m just very interested, frankly, in love and expressing love in its various forms.” In the Tone Glow newsletter, Colin Joyce speaks with Kurt Walker about screen worlds and virtual communities in his newest film, I Thought the World of You (2022); the short is now showing on MUBI in the US and Canada.
- “What can a country’s filmography say about the history of its own nation?” In The Brooklyn Rail, Jaime Grijalba writes about Chilean cinema before the coup of September 11, 1973, looking particularly at the work coming out of Chile Films, a government-funded production company in the country.
- “Once upon a time, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned the no-budget documentary Hoop Dreams into a phenomenon using only their thumbs. But critical power like that has been replaced by the collective voice of the masses.” For Vulture, Lane Brown explores how PR firms have been massaging aggregate ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, and reflects on what this means for the critical landscape.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- Los Angeles, September 15, 2023 through January 14, 2024: Harmony Korine’s debut solo exhibition starts soon at Hauser & Wirth. Titled ‘AGGRESSIVE DR1FTER,’ it features a new series of acid-hued paintings (above) tied to his film Aggro Dr1ft (2023).
- Chicago, September 21 through 24: A project of the Chicago Film Society and a demonstration of their “commitment to making analog motion picture film accessible to audiences through public exhibition,” the second edition of Celluloid Now, four days of screenings and workshops showcasing the work of analog filmmakers and artists, takes place at various venues in Chicago.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The record label Mana is releasing August in the Water: Music for Film 1995-2005, a collection of "sublime ethereal minimalism" that Hiroyuki Onogawa composed for films by Gakuryū Ishii (Sogo Ishii, known for the cyberpunk biker classic Crazy Thunder Road). "It’s notable that the compositions on this album straddle the millennium, and the mix of divine and uncertain themes in the music carry that currency," reads Mana's description. "New listeners might hear links to Mark Snow’s compositional work for the X-Files and Millennium, or other celebrated future-facing and future-fearing Japanese anime or cyberpunk."
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).
- Leonardo Goi has been reporting from the Venice FEstival. His first dispatch looks at some of the festival’s big biopics, including Michael Mann’s Ferrari and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. The second considers films like Bertrand Bonello's The Beast, Harmony Korine's Aggro Dr1ft, and Richard Linklater's Hit Man, which “treat genre as something malleable: a means to interrogate the scope and limits of the medium, and push it toward new, exciting paths.”
- Across the Atlantic, Michael Sicinski surveys a strong year for the Toronto International Film Festival's experimental section, Wavelengths. In this vibrant selection—ten features, three shorts programs, and one featurette—it's clear that "cinema is a fine art, and radical voices keep it alive. "
- Lastly, Jessica Kiang reflects on Locarno. Her roundup focuses largely on Radu Jude's Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, a “cacophonous, brilliant sneak attack on the status quo.”
- Kayleigh Donaldson lauds Mink Stole, who, despite having appeared in nearly every John Waters film to date, remains the “most cruelly overlooked among the ragtag ensemble known as the Dreamlanders.”
- Juan Barquin tracks the use of the follow shot in Thomas Hardiman’s Medusa Deluxe, a film “which centers on a hairstyling competition that everyone involved treats as a matter of life or death.”
- “One can often tell a cinephile by the rituals they establish. For my part, I begin every summer by revisiting Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953),” writes Jonathan Mackris in a deft close analysis of the various cuts of “the feature debut of [Tati's] most beloved character.”