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NEWS
- Next week, we are holding a launch event for Issue 3 of Notebook in London. Join us at the ICA London on September 28 for a screening of a new 4K restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963), followed by a conversation between issue contributor Erika Balsom and critic Simran Hans. We are sorry to say that the event is now sold out, but you can still enter our competition to win a pair of tickets.
- Lee Kang-sheng’s Instagram seems to indicate that he and Tsai Ming-liang shot another installment of their ongoing Walker series in Washington, DC: a few images are posted here.
REMEMBERING
Pressure (Horace Ové, 1976).
- Horace Ové has died aged 86: His debut Pressure (1975) is considered the first full-length feature by a Black British filmmaker; it centers on a Trinidadian teenager living with his family in West London, "caught adrift between his Trinidadian parents’ religious conservatism and enduring respect for British colonial power, and the staunch Black Power activism of his elder brother," wrote Ashley Clark in Sight & Sound in 2020 (read an excerpt on his Substack, Keeping Up). Pressure was held back from release for a few years by its own funders, the British Film Institute, for its frank scenes of police brutality. Despite this, it became one of the defining works of Black British cinema, as detailed by Ryan Gilbey in his obituary in the Guardian. A 4K restoration of Pressure will screen at the London and New York Film Festivals this fall, with a larger BFI retrospective of Ové’s work taking place in November.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Fade to Black (Tony Cokes, 1990).
- e-flux’s Staff Pick for September is artist Tony Cokes’s Fade to Black (1990), a half-hour meditation on contemporary race relations that sees “two black men discuss in voiceover certain ‘casual’ events in life and cinema that are unnoticed or discounted by whites.”
- Pedro Costa directed the trailer for this year’s Viennale: “The libretto is by Bertolt Brecht, the melody by Hanns Eisler, the voice belongs to Elizabeth Pinard, the form was conceived by Pedro Costa, And the shudder that runs through the body is ours alone,” says the festival in the text accompanying the film.
RECOMMENDED READING
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016).
- “I found doing this piece, with the heavy trauma of it—it’s the same way a lot of people in my community back home talk about our history.” In Interview, Kelly Reichardt talks to actor Lily Gladstone about working on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
- In the Film Comment Letter, Emerson Goo recommends Yui Kiyohara’s second feature, Remembering Every Night (2022). For Goo, the designed lack of an overarching narrative “signals the loss of a kind of storytelling rooted in a reassuring historical continuity, and the creation of a new one in which time is disjointed and subjective.”
- “Karloff would spend the remaining decades of his career proving, many times over, that he was more than the monster people came to revere him as.” Mayukh Sen has published the first essay of a new three-part series for Hazlitt. Titled “Brown Hollywood,” the series will explore “undertold stories of South Asian performers in Hollywood.” The first entry explores the “Anglo-Indian roots” of William Henry Pratt, known more commonly as Boris Karloff.
- “Many might wonder why anyone would want to watch a film about someone who turns a Panasonic video camera on himself when he was so emaciated that one of his lovers referred to him as ‘Auschwitz Baby’ and who died before the result’s first broadcast.” For Metrograph, Bruce Hainley examines Modesty and Shame (1992), the only film made by French novelist and photographer Hervé Guibert.
- A new biography of avant-garde artist and filmmaker Harry Smith has generated some exciting writing: in Bookforum, Sasha Frere-Jones pens an essay on John Swed’s book, and considers the eclectic output of “a loud ghost running wires between worlds, a ‘gnomish’ saint who made connections more often than he made stuff.” Over in 4Columns, Ed Halter observes how his avant-garde cinema “revitalized the art of animation not once but twice, first with his early hand-painted films, later with his intricately choreographed cutout collages.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963).
- London, through September 21: The ICA’s two-part program on American actor, photographer and filmmaker Jack Smith will present his features, including the cult film Flaming Creatures (1963), alongside lesser-known shorts. All films will be shown on 16mm.
- Los Angeles, through September 23: “Fearless and subversive, the films of Arturo Ripstein artfully transform popular genres,” writes the American Cinematheque in the introductory text for their series on the Mexican independent filmmaker. The director, along with his wife and longtime collaborator screenwriter Paz Alicia Garcíadiego, will attend the North American premiere of the new director’s cut and 4K restoration of Deep Crimson (1996).
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- In a new episode of the MUBI Podcast, Sundance favorite Sebastián Silva tells host Rico Gagliano about his self-described "misanthropic comedy" Rotting in the Sun, the satirical story of a happy hedonist and a not-so-happy filmmaker who end up in the middle of a Hitchcockian mystery.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Ballad of Tara (Bahram Beyzaie, 1979).
- Looking back on Il Cinema Ritrovato, Imogen Sara Smith plucks highlights from an exciting slate of women-centered films, like Varda protégé Liliane de Kermadec’s Aloïse (1975), Bahram Beyzaie’s ravishing The Ballad of Tara (1979), and Renato Castellani’s boisterous, prison-set Nella città l’inferno (1958). Such movies feature “female characters who changed and grew, contradicted themselves, were flawed and expansive—who, in short, asserted their full humanity, liberated from constricting types.”
- “Are filmmakers still drawn to Eastern Europe as a site of lawlessness to prop up heroic genre narratives?” Across films like Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool (2023), Savina Petkova unravels the clichéd way in which moral ambiguity can be projected onto the region’s landscapes.
EXTRAS
- Little White Lies celebrate their one-hundredth print issue this month, with an anniversary edition that comes with four interconnected cover designs that collectively represent every film that has adorned the covers of the magazine’s previous 99 issues. “I’ve always believed that one thing that makes magazines unique is that they are a physical manifestation of the collective endeavour,” writes editor David Jenkins in his introduction, “where the work of writers, artists, illustrators, designers, researchers, proof-readers, editors and publishers can co-mingle and interact in a way that the digital world has yet to satisfactorily recreate.”
- Meanwhile, the latest issue of Film Quarterly is editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich’s fortieth; in her editor’s introduction, she announces that she will be stepping down from the role, passing the torch to associate editor Rebecca Prime. Writes Rich: “What does it mean to create a journal for a field? For me, it meant the chance of a lifetime to throw open the doors and redefine standards of excellence, in the process offering future generations of students and scholars an archive of analysis opened up to new subject positions, perspectives, and histories. Writing is the means to a conversation with the field, and these editorials have served that purpose for me over a decade of musings and instigations."
- Keep an eye out for a forthcoming Danish/English dossier on Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, which will be published in October by Danish film journal Balthazar. This will include contributions by Pedro Costa, Thom Andersen, Nicole Brenez, and others.