Rushes: NYFF Main Slate, William Friedkin, Who Was “Barbie”?

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NEWS

La Práctica (Martín Rejtman, 2023).

• The New York Film Festival has announced its Main Slate. Alongside a good showing of Cannes prizewinners, the festival will present new films from Radu Jude, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrew Haigh, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Hong Sang-soo (x2 this year), Raven Jackson, Martín Rejtman, and the feature debut from playwright Annie Baker.
• In an interview with Indiewire, Ira Sachs shared that he and Ben Whishaw are preparing a new film about the photographer Peter Hujar, titled Peter Hujar’s Day (and presumably inspired by Linda Rosenkrantz’s book of the same name).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• In memory of William Friedkin, who died this week at the age of 87, revisit Christopher Small and James Corning’s video essay about his films’ deftly constructed endings. “Over the course of Friedkin's films,” they write in their introduction, “our perspective fluctuates wildly—often sometime well after the halfway point— and we end up confronted by the same protagonist, a figure once close to archetype, viewed in an entirely different light.”

• Music Box have shared a trailer for Babak Jalali’s Sundance standout Fremont, which releases in select US theaters on August 25. Reminiscent of Aki Kaurismäki, the film follows a young immigrant from Afghanistan (Anaita Wali Zada) who works at a fortune-cookie factory in the Bay Area, trying to reconcile her troubled memories of the past with her present. Alert: Gregg Turkington has a supporting role as a Jack London–obsessed therapist.

RECOMMENDED READING

Who is she?: Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023).

• The question on everyone’s lips: who was Barbie? n+1 recently assembled an all-star group of contributors to respond to Greta Gerwig’s film—featuring, in alphabetical order, Lisa Borst, Ari M. Brostoff, Cecilia Corrigan, Jon Dieringer, A.S. Hamrah, Arielle Isack, Mark Krotov, Jasmine Sanders, and Christine Smallwood. You'll find reflections on childhood dolls, '90s soda commercials, and for Smallwood, the sound of “a nail going into the coffin of mumblecore.”
• Not done with Barbie? For Another Gaze, Rebecca Liu expounds thoughtfully on her apprehensions about “the encroachment of commercial interests into art.”
• “The beauty of films is they are like a dream that you enter, and unless you’ve seen it before, you don’t know where it’s taking you.” In the Believer, Melissa Locker speaks with the filmmaker, screenwriter, musician, poet, artist, “voracious reader and beaver enthusiast” Jim Jarmusch about his films, collage art, and the music he has been making with his band SQÜRL.
• “Why and how did TCM find itself the victim of cost-cutting measures — and the subsequent eye of a media storm?” A must-read Entertainment Weekly piece by Maureen Lee Lenker explores the behind-the-scenes turmoil at Turner Classic Movies, impacted by Warner Bros. Discovery’s post-merger strategy shifts.
• “If all discussion of a film’s merits before release is left to influencers, whose driving ambition is to receive free merchandise by speaking well of the studio’s products, what can we expect the film landscape to look like?” In the Guardian, Manuela Lazic explores a blurring of the lines between the critic and the influencer in a film release landscape actively incentivizing the dissolution of the boundaries between marketing and criticism.
• For Metrograph, Nick Pinkerton praises Jean Grémillon, one of his “era’s far lesser-known great French directors,” and “the man whom Jean Cocteau eulogized as ‘a singular being in a plural world.’”

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

When one closes...: Doors (Christian Marclay, 2022), on view in September in London.

• New York, August 19 through 29: John Wilson has curated a two-part series at Anthology Film Archives. The first part is a program of original work made by crew members from his series, How To With John Wilson; the second is a selection of films he’s found inspirational, including work by George Kuchar, Les Blank, and Bruce Brown.
• New York, August 23 through September 6: Highlighting “the use of tinting, hand- and stencil-coloring, and the early experimental systems that predate Technicolor,” MoMA’s amazing-looking film series “Eye Candy: The Coming of Color” includes sixteen programs of restored versions of shorts, features, and avant-garde animation produced between 1894 and 1937 that document early efforts to bring color to film. 
• London, September 6 through 30: White Cube’s London gallery is showing Christian Marclay’s video installation Doors (2022), an intriguing-sounding moving-image project made from ten years of “collected film clips in which a door opens or closes,” alongside a new series of sculptures from the artist. 

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

• This week’s special guest on the MUBI Podcast is Ira Sachs, whose sultry Sundance hit, Passages, opened in New York and Los Angeles last week: "Let's just say I wanted to make a liberated film. I felt like...am I allowed to say 'fuck it?' Like, 'fuck it.'" (For Passages tickets & showtimes, click here.)

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Our Body (Claire Simon, 2023).

• Claire Simon’s stunning new documentary Our Body is surely one of the nonfiction highlights of the year. Ela Bittencourt spoke to Simon about the film, which explores a range of women’s health issues at a women’s clinic in Paris. As Bittencourt writes in her introduction, “Few filmmakers capture the world with as passionate a sense of exploration and generosity as the French director Claire Simon.”
• “In five minutes flat, Rude Boy (1980) tells you everything you need to know about Britain at the dark end of the 1970s”: Sophia Satchell-Baeza travels back to the punk clubs of the pre-Thatcher era with Jack Hazan, who co-directed Rude Boy with David Mingay. They discuss the improvisational approach to this punk film maudit, which is “as much a gritty social-realist document of a country in transition as a charged concert film of the pioneering punk band the Clash.”
• Horror films, luchadores, and macabre comedy: in conjunction with a Locarno Film Festival retrospective, we’re pleased to present Rafael Paz and José Luis Ortego Torres’s essay “The Inevitable Morbidity of Mexican Cinema.” This piece is an excerpt from Spectacle Every Day: Essays on Classical Mexican Cinema, 1940-1969 (Les éditions de l'Œil, 2023), edited by Jorge Javier Negrete Camacho and Alonso Diaz de la Vega.
• In an excerpt from the second issue of Outskirts Film Magazine, the one and only Laura Mulvey speaks to Sofie Cato Maas about the work of two exceptional filmmakers, Kinuyo Tanaka and Douglas Sirk. “My hope is that this conversation is ultimately, if anything, illuminating and precious in its unusual exploration,” writes Maas, “with one of the greats of film theory, of the work of two exceptional filmmakers and notions of melodrama, desire, and death.” (The full issue is now available from Outskirts’s e-shop.)