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NEWS
- Notebook readers, rejoice—the MUBI Shop has launched anew in the US and UK, and you can finally broadcast your love for the world’s sharpest international film criticism via this stylish, crisply screen-printed Notebook tote bag, featuring a clapperboard calligram design. Also in the store is a Cannes Film Festival–themed print by Dutch artist and cartoonist Joost Swarte, which was commissioned for our limited-edition print broadsheet issue of Notebook, distributed in Cannes. (There are only 76 copies available, so move quickly!)
- Sundance announced its lineup last week, including new films from Jane Schoenbrun, Steven Soderbergh, Debra Granik, Yance Ford, Brett Story, and more (a DEVO doc, a Brian Eno doc that’s “different every time it’s shown” through generative AI...). This will be the first Sundance under the directorship of Eugene Hernandez, formerly of Film at Lincoln Center.
- Keep that winter coat handy—the Berlinale has announced that Lupita Nyong’o will lead the jury. Meanwhile, Tricia Tuttle, formerly of the BFI, will succeed Carlo Chatrian and Mariëtte Rissenbeek as the new director of the Berlinale, which will take effect following the 2024 edition. This follows some turbulence at the festival: In September, the Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin, which oversees the festival, announced that they would not extend Chatrian’s contract, which was expected to last past the 2024 edition. This was met with pushback from filmmakers, over 400 of whom signed an open letter in support of Chatrian.
- Via The Film Stage, Jim Jarmusch has quietly begun work on a new movie, Father Mother Sister Brother, with Cate Blanchett in West Milford, New Jersey. No plot details yet, but the production will continue filming in Paris next year.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- In the newest installment of MUBI Picks at Posteritati, Todd Field (TÁR, In The Bedroom) stopped by the Posteritati gallery in New York to share his selection of the best movie posters of all time, including designs for films by John Sayles, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and more.
- Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, the beguiling feature debut of Vietnamese filmmaker Thien An Pham, has a trailer from Kino Lorber ahead of a US release on January 19, 2024. The tranquil and beautiful film, which follows a character named Thien as he travels across Vietnam in search of his estranged older brother following the sudden death of his sister, saw Pham receive the Camera d’Or, Cannes’s prize for a first-time feature filmmaker, earlier this year.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Dupes (Tewfik Saleh, 1972).
- Recently restored by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Tewfik Saleh’s The Dupes (1972) is a devastating drama about three Palestinian exiles that make a treacherous journey from Syria to Kuwait in the back of a tank truck. Sabzian has shared Jonathan Mackris’s new translation of an interview with the film’s director, originally conducted in 1976 for La Palestine et le cinéma, a collection of writing edited by Guy Hennebelle and Khemais Khayati.
- “Her words reflect broadly liberal pablum meant to give the appearance of care and mean just enough that her fans can project radicalness upon her but not so much that she would ruffle anyone enough for her to lose money or be forced to stand for something.” Angelica Jade Bastién does not hold back in her precise and well-argued Vulture review of Renaissance: A Film, a new concert film by Beyoncé related to the tour and album of the same name in which the artist seeks to position “herself not as a goddess bestowing a peek of humanity to her loyal subjects but as a relatable figure we can and should connect with.”
- “I wanted to see if I could remap the century of cinema based on something other than the usual categories or value judgments.” In the Guardian, Ryan Gilbey talks to Stanley Schinter about his new book, Last Movies, which looks at the last films various figures—including Charlie Chaplin, Kurt Cobain, and Bette Davis—saw before they died.
- “Where does cinephilia end and derangement begin, when does a putative love of movies mask darker, danker impulses?” In Bookforum, Melissa Anderson writes about Brian, a novel by Jeremy Cooper centered around the filmgoing experiences of an individual “whose zeal for the seventh art seems to have been leached of all pleasure and has instead transmogrified into grim compulsion.”
- Also in Bookforum, read Phoebe Chen on Yunte Huang's new biography of Anna May Wong, which focuses on “the strange ambivalence that marks any racialized performer’s ascent to fame. Wong’s star image was built on endless contradictions that, at times, rattled her sense of self.”
- Surveying the year in film for ArtReview, Caitlin Quinlan observes a trend of universal yet nonspecific films with “broad narrative themes and non-specific references,” all of which “took from their audiences without giving much back, leaning into the notion of audience self-recognition as effective storytelling.”
- “Okay, I need to develop a style that can never be easily recreated without my direct involvement.” Upon the conclusion of the third, and final, series of John Wilson’s HBO show How To, Chris Gayomali profiles “our foremost chronicler of the strange” for GQ.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Léon G. Damas (Sarah Maldoror, 1994).
- New York, December 19: Light Industry is hosting a book launch for Ntone Edjabe’s La Discothèque de Sarah Maldoror, a volume that “takes the form of a mixtape on the soundworld” of the legendary anti-colonial filmmaker. The event is part listening party, part screening, and part reading, with music by DJs Andrew Castillo and Melissa Lyde, a screening of Maldoror’s 1994 documentary on the poet Léon G. Damas, plus selections from the text of La Discothèque read by poet Vee Arumemi.
- London, January 31, 2024: In what should be a special event, Sonic Cinema presents a unique screening of Gaëlle Rouard’s atmospheric film diptych Darkness, Darkness Burning Bright, projected by the artist at Cafe Oto from her personal 16mm print. Maximilien Luc Proctor spoke to the artist about the work for Notebook after seeing it in a “compromised form” at the 2022 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
- New York, February 9 through 16, 2024: MoMA are screening the three features directed by Ilkka Järvi-Laturi. A Finnish filmmaker who died in March 2023, Järvi-Laturi’s “small but fascinating and idiosyncratic body of work [...] straddles late-1980s Cold War anxieties about the threat of nuclear annihilation and a kind of hard-won, punkish humanism that bloomed after the fall of the Iron Curtain.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2022).
- Our end-of-year coverage continues with a survey of movie soundtracks and scores. Robert Barry looks—and listens—back on some of the strongest, which were far from bloviated Hollywood exploitation. Instead, creative instrumentation and imaginative sonic palettes deepened films like The Zone of Interest, Poor Things, Beau Is Afraid, and Skinamarink.
- Writing from the Camden International Film Festival, A.E. Hunt is drawn to grassroots gatherings that upend the status quo, and expands a festival diary into a deeper work of critical reflection. "While festivals remain a fixture of the prevailing dysfunctional film ecosystem," writes Hunt, "I find value in communities like CIFF’s, which manage to hold together, if shakily, all the industry’s contradictions."
- “If I could have made popular commercial films, I would have. It isn't really a matter of choice. I believe in something. If I betray it, then I destroy myself.” Brandon Kaufman speaks to Nothing But a Man (1964) director Michael Roemer, now 95, about his remarkable pathway through American independent cinema. As underappreciated films like The Plot Against Harry (1971) and Vengeance Is Mine (1984) receive a contemporary reappraisal, Roemer shares thoughts on his creative philosophy and his refusal to conform to the mainstream.
EXTRAS
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023).
- “David saw that for artists in this moment, their work must speak truth to power, and therefore that aesthetics are inseparable from politics.” A sizable number of Artforum contributors withdrew end-of-year coverage they had provided for the December issue after news broke of the firing of the magazine’s editor-in-chief David Velasco. Some of these contributions have since appeared elsewhere online, such as Amy Taubin’s list of her favorite fIlms of 2023, published on Screen Slate, and John Waters’s list, which is up on Vulture. Both lists are great and varied, with just the one film (above) appearing in both.