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NEWS
Uncut Gems (Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie, 2019).
- According to Adam Sandler in a new Vanity Fair profile, he will be shooting a new film with the Safdie brothers this winter. Not much is known about the project, but Sandler had previously mentioned that the film would take place in “the world of sports.”
- Artist-filmmaker Sky Hopinka (maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore) has been named as one of 25 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship’s prestigious “genius grant.” (Michael Sicinski interviewed Hopinka for Notebook in 2020.)
- A new TV series based on Herbert Asbury’s 1927 nonfiction book The Gangs of New York has been announced. Martin Scorsese, who directed the book’s 2002 feature film adaptation, is attached as executive producer of the series and director of the first two episodes.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A trailer has arrived for Laura Poitras’s latest feature All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), a portrait of Nan Goldin’s photography and her work with P.A.I.N., an advocacy organization founded by the artist to respond to the opioid crisis. (You can read Notebook editor Daniel Kasman’s TIFF review here.)
- One of Hong Sang-soo’s two 2022 releases, The Novelist’s Film, has a trailer from Cinema Guild. (Jordan Cronk wrote about the film for Notebook after its Berlinale premiere back in February.)
- There, There, a COVID-era experiment from Andrew Bujalski (Support the Girls, Computer Chess), also has a trailer. The Tribeca Film Festival's program described the project as an “experimental series that constructs a delirious mirror image of everyday life in a distinctly twisted and discordant world.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963).
- “And then, there was Godard.” None other than Martin Scorsese pays tribute to Jean-Luc Godard in a special issue of Cahiers du cinéma.
- Speaking of Godard, Nathan Lee grapples with The Image Book (2018) for Lithub. “To watch a Godard film was to grapple with an object whose pleasures had as much to do with what the films were trying to convey as in how the meaning-making capacity is activated in the spectator,” Lee writes.
- In an outstanding essay in the New York Review of Books, Anna Shechtman looks at Claire Denis's two 2022 releases, Stars at Noon and Both Sides of the Blade. For Shechtman, the filmmaker's "focus on the jagged displacements and psychological aftereffects of imperial violence is always also a focus on white femininity." (She also offers a sharp analysis of Juliette Binoche dropping her iPhone into the bathtub.)
- “The trash urge gave American movies its musk, its fun, its hickies, its exercise.” Wesley Morris celebrates cinéma du trash in the New York Times, from John Waters to Lee Daniels.
Final Destination (James Wong, 2000).
- “Capital-D Death has made several appearances in film—most famously, as the ultimate chess grandmaster in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal—but the Final Destination movies hold the special distinction of making a slasher villain out of Death in the abstract.” Writing in his newsletter The Reveal, Scott Tobias breaks down all five of the Final Destination films.
- In Artforum, Phoebe Chen unpacks Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (with some spoilers for the film), wherein “form is used to trouble feeling, blunting the lacerations of pathos, revulsion, and arousal, refusing its audience even the whiplash of a plot as it rips around a bend.”
- For his Film Show newsletter, Joshua Minsoo Kim speaks with Kazuo Hara about his life and career in a lengthy conversation recorded alongside the documentarian’s most recent film, Minamata Mandala (2020).
- David Ehrlich talks to James Gray about his new feature Armageddon Time (2022) over at IndieWire. Ehrlich describes the film as “the most logical origin story for a filmmaker whose work has always been wracked by a bone-deep belief in the plurality of being.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
David Lynch: The Art Life (Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm, 2016).
- New York: Pace Gallery are now representing the work of David Lynch. On November 4, they will open an exhibition of Lynch’s new and recent work, titled Big Bongo Night. The show will feature “mixed media sculptures, paintings, and a work on paper.”
- Vienna: The 60th edition of the Viennale will take place from October 20 to November 1. Among other major festival-circuit titles, their program includes Mathieu Amalric’s trilogy of films on John Zorn, a documentary about the actor Lars Eidinger, and a retrospective of work by the Iranian filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan.
- Jihlava: The Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival runs October 25-30, and their program is now out. As well as various enticing new films, they will also host a retrospective of Filipino cinema that reaches “back to the very beginning [of] when motion pictures were made in and about the country (1899).”
- London: From October 28-30, ICA London hosts a weekend of programming by La Clef Revival, “a Paris-based collective who made headlines and history when they occupied and reopened the city’s beloved La Clef cinema after its enforced closure.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Free Time (Manfred Kirchheimer, 2019).
- On FAQ NYC, host Alyssa Katz converses with “America’s least known great documentarian” Manny Kirchheimer (Free Time), whose films are screening at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York from October 15-23.
- Recorded live at the New York Film Festival, a new episode of the Film Comment Podcast brings together Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), Elvis Mitchell (Is That Black Enough for You?!?), and Tiffany Sia (What Rules the Invisible) for a stimulating conversation about “the role of critique and criticism in the arts and beyond.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967).
- "He is always a poet, even as prison takes away his language." Madeleine Wall writes about the newly translated memoirs of transfixing arthouse darling Pierre Clémenti, whose acting career was disrupted by wrongful imprisonment.
- "It’s in moving images that a birthing person’s story has mostly—and most recently—been allowed that sort of nuance." Kat Sachs writes a timely Primer that "looks at the history of abortion in film since its beginnings, considering arguments that might be termed 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice,' both in films made in the United States and abroad."
- "Maybe you’ve felt it, too—the musicality of Top Gun: Maverick." David Garry Hughes enthuses about the "anti-Marvel blockbuster" and the "Atlas-like personality and ego-propulsed humanism" of its star.
- Caitlin Quinlan examines an "early-career trilogy of 16mm works" by Betzy Bromberg, alighting on textures and moments in which the "city is at once scuzzy and decadent, a playground for women seeking liberation."
- Lucile Hadžihalilović introduces her film Earwig, noting that she loves "when films don’t 'explain,' but rather explore or make you “feel."
EXTRAS
- The Washington Post got a sneak peek at Studio Ghibli’s new theme park, located several hours southwest of Tokyo, Japan. The park opens on November 1, and features a real-life version of the titular Howl's Moving Castle (above).
- Written by her sister and translated by Molly Ringwald, My Cousin Maria Schneider is “a spare, heartbreaking memoir and tribute to Maria Schneider, the 1970s movie starlet who catapulted to fame in the controversial film Last Tango in Paris.” The book will be published by Scribner on April 18, 2023.
- In a parodic piece for McSweeney's, Laura Winther Galaviz shares a faux casting call for a possible Mission: Impossible film, requesting a “woman or beanbag chair” to “provide Tom with comfort and support to ease his troubles without adding any of your own bullshit (feelings, expectations) to his already important but weary brain.”