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NEWS
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross, 2018).
- RaMell Ross—whose 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening was among the best releases of the 2010s—will direct an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winner The Nickel Boys, which will star Aunjanue Ellis.
- In another major production announcement, Kantemir Balagov will make his English-language debut with Butterfly Jam, produced by Ari Aster. (Ela Bittencourt wrote about Balagov’s WWII-set sophomore feature Beanpole for Notebook.)
- ’Tis the season. Yorgos Lanthimos is also about to begin filming his next movie—the un-Googleable AND—in New Orleans. The cast includes Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, and, for Stars at Noon fans, both Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn.
- That’s not all. James Gray is on board to direct and substantially revise the screenplay for a “young John F. Kennedy” biopic (focusing on his adolescence, his relationship with his father, and his military career, but not the Presidency—an origin story, if you will).
- The Sundance Film Festival announced that they would cancel their VR and AR program New Frontier in 2023, while hinting that it might be substantially revamped for 2024. New Frontier began in 2007; the 2023 edition was originally planned to be exclusively virtual.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Martine Syms, whose film The African Desperate (2022) is now showing exclusively on MUBI, shares her Moviegoing Memories. The short video covers her key cinematic influences and the experimental microcinema scene in Los Angeles.
- Austrian film Flaming Ears (Ursula Pürrer, Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek, 1991) is back in select US theaters, courtesy of a Kino Lorber re-release beginning November 17. Set in a post-apocalyptic city in the year 2700, the movie follows the adventures of three women—a comic book artist, a pyromaniac, and an alien—whose wild lives become irreversibly entangled. Shot on Super 8 and blown up to 16mm, this new trailer shows off the cult lesbian film’s vibrant visuals.
- Also a cult classic that has long been tricky to see, Michael Almereyda’s idiosyncratic, David Lynch-produced vampire film Nadja (1994) is now available to watch on Le Cinéma Club for just one week. Featuring stylish black-and-white cinematography and scenes shot with a PixelVision toy camera, this wry riff on the vampire genre updates Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936) in strange new ways.
RECOMMENDED READING
Nan Goldin, the subject of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022).
- “Every major city teems with clean, white boxes whose primary purpose is to puff up the reputations of its patrons.” For ArtReview, Nathalie Olah reviews Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, praising the film and admonishing the state of a contemporary art world rife with complicity and compromise of the sort that Nan Goldin, Poitras’s film’s subject, continues to vehemently oppose.
- In the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv reports on allegations that Asghar Farhadi lifted the story for his film A Hero from a former student, Azadeh Masihzadeh; Aviv interviews Masihzadeh, several of Farhadi's collaborators, and the filmmaker himself.
- Georgie Carr, writing for Another Gaze, interrogates Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning film Triangle of Sadness, criticizing the film for its surface level socialist politics and “zeitgeisty political engagement” that only serve to make “the unpalatable parts of what might be a radical politics digestible.”
- “On a recent video call with his cast, he confessed to blowing off the movie for a few years while indulging his passion for deep-sea exploration.” Kyle Buchanan talks to James Cameron for the New York Times, surveying the long road to Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) and his future plans for the “all mapped out” five-film franchise. “Scripts are already written, everything’s designed. So just add water.”
- Written by Michela Zegna and translated by Gualtiero De Marinis, Sabzian has put up a piece on Cecilia Mangini, “the first Italian woman with the audacity to step behind the camera to document the socio-political transformations of post–World War II.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Midnight After (Fruit Chan, 2014): on-set photographer Sharon Salad features in Off-sets: Photographies of Hong Kong Cinema.
- Hong Kong: “This is not a film stills exhibition, at least not in the usual sense.” Off-sets: Photographies of Hong Kong Cinema brings together twelve artists who “have contributed to shaping the Hong Kong cinescape through their multiple roles as directors, art directors, cinematographers, production and stills photographers, costume and set designers, and journalists.” Featuring images by Christopher Doyle, Fong Ho Yuen, Karen Cloudy Tang, and others, the exhibition runs across several galleries in the city until November 27.
- New York: Programmed by Pooja Rangan and Brett Story, Watch the Cops! Policing New York in the Movies screens from November 4 through 7 at BAM. The program includes films from the ’60s to the ’90s, like James Mangold’s Cop Land (1997) and Steven Fischler, Joel Sucher, and Howard Blatt’s Frame Up! (1974), that together are intended to “offer a cinematic survey of the movement to resist police and reallocate resources.”
- Rotterdam: IFFR has announced the first round of titles for 2023, including their Bright Future section of feature debuts and their Limelight section of “avant-premieres” and “cinematic highlights” from 2022 (more films to come in both sections). The 2023 festival runs from January 25 through February 3.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Album art for Jozef Van Wissem's Nosferatu, The Call of the Deathbird.
- In 2019, Jozef Van Wissem—the lutist behind the score for Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive—was commissioned by the Cinémathèque Française in Paris to compose a soundtrack for Nosferatu (1922). Instead of creating something straightforward, he mixed lute, guitar, and electronics with distorted found recordings of extinct birds, coalescing in a soundtrack that culminates in "dense, slow death metal,” having run the gamut from “silence to noise.” The soundtrack is now available to stream or order on limited edition vinyl or CD.
- Produced and presented by Travis Mushett, The Haunted Screen is a new narrative podcast about “film, history, and film history.” The first season, titled “From Caligari to Hitler,” “investigates the chaotic, creative world of Weimar Germany.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb (Jon Bois, 2022).
- “If cinema does exist and can be gestured toward, it must be the thing that materializes history, makes memory artifactual. Cinema, then, must pass through Jon Bois.” Frank Falisi dives deep into Bois’s online sports documentaries, all one-of-a-kind collages of muzak, statistics, and Google Earth.
- Matthew Thrift sat down with Ruben Östlund after Triangle of Sadness screened at the London Film Festival. The director reflects on his wariness of the “arthouse niche” and describes why a gong can be a helpful instrument to have on set.
- A fresh generation of Spanish filmmakers, according to Anna Bogutskaya in a new feature, have carved out a niche in horror filmmaking, conjuring “terrors both bodily and internalized.”
- The 60th Viennale wrapped up yesterday. To coincide, we presented excerpts from three new books published by the festival: two new additions to its ongoing TEXTUR series (below), which are dedicated to Darezhan Omirbayev and Alain Guiraudie, and a collection of conversations, interviews, and essays about the past, present and future of film festivals.
EXTRAS
- Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper is now available to order from Fireflies Press. The publisher shares details and stunning photos from these “two complementary volumes” in the below thread (and for those of you in New York, the publisher has curated a Pasolini series opening this Friday, November 4, at Metrograph).
- Conveniently for the film's marketing team, Cate Blanchett’s episode of Hot Ones premiered the day before Tár expanded to a wide release in the US. We're endeared to Blanchett’s enthusiasm here, and there is an exquisite awkwardness when she asks the host of Hot Ones when he realized that presenting the show was “his gift.” (The Notebook tip line is open for anyone who can decipher the notes on her hand, visible at 6:40.)