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NEWS
- On July 13, SAG-AFTRA issued a strike order, joining the WGA, who have been striking since May. In an incendiary speech, the guild’s president, Fran Drescher, said: “SAG-AFTRA negotiated in good faith and was eager to reach a deal that sufficiently addressed performer needs, but the AMPTP’s responses to the union’s most important proposals have been insulting and disrespectful of our massive contributions to this industry…Until they do negotiate in good faith, we cannot begin to reach a deal.” This Vulture Q&A with Jonathan Handel, author of Hollywood on Strike!: An Industry at War in the Internet Age, delves into the details of the work stoppage.
- Applications are open for Open City Documentary Festival & Another Gaze’s third annual critics’ workshop, which will take place in early September during the festival. More information can be found here about the application process, open through July 23.
REMEMBERING
Jane B. par Agnès V. (Agnès Varda, 1988).
- Actress, singer, and 1960s icon Jane Birkin died this week at age 76. Last year, Lillian Crawford considered Birkin’s “je ne sais quoi” for Notebook by juxtaposing two documentary portraits: her friend Agnès Varda’s Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988), and her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg’s rejoinder, Jane par Charlotte (2021): “She is multifaceted, everlasting, and most assuredly human.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- After a surprise announcement last Friday, Steven Soderbergh’s self-financed new science-fiction-comedy series Command Z, starring Michael Cera, Roy Wood Jr., Chloe Radcliffe, and Liev Schreiber, is now available to watch, for a small fee, directly via the filmmaker’s own website. The trailer is embedded below.
- Cinema Guild have shared a trailer for Claire Simon’s Our Body, a gripping three-hour-long observational study of a gynecological ward in a Paris public hospital. It begins a limited release in the US on August 4.
RECOMMENDED READING
Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015).
- To mark the release of a certain impossible mission, the New York Times Magazine's gonzo extraordinaire Caity Weaver embarks on a full-throttle quest to locate its elusive star, Tom Cruise, in the real world. "My own mission, then, was simple: I was to travel to the ends of the Earth to see if it was possible to locate the terrestrial Cruise, out of context—to catch a glimpse, to politely shout one question at him, or at least to ascertain one new piece of intelligence about his current existence—in order to reintegrate him into our shared reality."
- On the Pioneer Works website, Nathan Lee takes the temperature of “anti-social horror,” a trend seen in films like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and Skinamarink (2022) that he sees as having emerged from “the acute alienation of pandemic life; the derangements of post-Trump politics; a retreat from overt political commentary in favor of oblique allegorical effects; and a microbudget DIY esprit more indebted to avant-garde cinema than even the most adventurous genre pictures.”
- “That’s the pioneer urge: nobody else was doing it! I was not seen on the screen; there was nothing, nobody that looked like me.” On Letterboxd’s Journal vertical, Mia Lee Vacino interviews Cheryl Dunye, talking about her feature The Watermelon Woman (1996) as well as some of her influences and inspirations.
- “Are texts closed, their meanings as secure as a textbook between two covers? Or open—determined only by the contexts in which they and their readers move?” In the New York Review of Books, Anna Shechtman unpacks the films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen.
- In the Film Comment Letter, Jessica Kiang assesses Il Cinema Ritrovato, writing that “the festival is not a recreation of bygone glories; it is a declaration of a peculiarly privileged present.” As is tradition, on the blog of the festival’s co-director Ehsan Khoshbakht, other attendees share their favorite discoveries from this year’s edition.
- “I’m talking about 1998, 1999, which were the years before everybody had a cell phone where they could easily record everything. [...] When I came up, it meant something to have a Hi8 cassette tape camera. Not everybody has that ability.” In BOMB, filmmakers Khalik Allah and J.P. Sniadecki talk about skateboarding, spirituality, camera technology, and image-making.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- New York, July 31: Monday Night Books is back at Light Industry in New York, offering rare film books at good prices for one night only. The venue will be sharing samples of what will be available for sale on their Instagram up until the event itself.
- London, August 17 through 27: A retrospective of choreographer, dancer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer will run at the ICA, in partnership with Invisible Women. The series starts with a screening of her debut feature Lives of Performers (1972) followed by an online Q&A with Rainer.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963).
- “To Anger, Hollywood was a sort of maternal womb, the amniotic element whose sinister luminescence he chiseled like a baroque sculptor”: a lyrical remembrance of Kenneth Anger, cinema’s very own Lucifer, by Celluloid Liberation Front.
- “The main essence of Nadja is just to be in the moment, and trust the moment”: As Christian Petzold’s Afire opens in the US, lead actress Paula Beer sat down with Chloe Lizotte to discuss how she’s honed her craft on stage and screen.
- “I've always been fascinated by the spaces where I grew up, wedged between the average town and the countryside,” begins Théo Jollet in his introduction to his short Meet Doug, which is now showing exclusively on MUBI. His introduction also includes a photo gallery and the film’s official mixtape.
EXTRAS
- Opening in early August In Texas, Spacy is a 35-seat microcinema based inside the Tyler Station complex in southern Dallas. Among the first screenings are programs of the work of Axelle Ropert, two films by Yasuzō Masumura, and by Jang Sun-woo, and "Drag of Genre,” an ongoing series focusing on queer cinema.