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NEWS
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975).
- At last, Sight & Sound have released the results of the 2022 Greatest Films of All Time critics’ poll. 1,639 ballots later, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) has risen to the number-one spot, accompanied by a new piece from Laura Mulvey. The New York Times offers a useful interactive feature to unpack how the rankings have evolved over time. (The results of the filmmakers’ poll are available here, with 2001: A Space Odyssey taking the brass ring.)
- The American documentarian Julia Reichert—best known for Growing Up Female (1971), Union Maids (1976), and the Oscar-winning American Factory (2019)—died last week of cancer at age 76. Eric Hynes wrote an elegant appreciation of her work in a 2020 piece for Crosscuts, published by the Walker Art Center:
Consistently through half a century of filmmaking, Reichert spends time with people. She’s interested in them. She asks questions. And what she learns always seems irreducibly nuanced, and endlessly, fundamentally compelling. She has a point of view—there’s a reason she’s drawn to laborers, communists, feminists, activists—but so do the disparate people she meets. And she makes room for those points of view, regardless of how closely they match her own.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Cem (Bani Khoshnoudi, 2012), presented in Another Screen's newest program.
- Online until January 4 on Another Screen, you’ll find 20 films from Iran made by women and non-binary filmmakers between 1979 and the present day. The program, convened by Another Gaze’s Daniella Shreir, intends to “extend solidarity to the struggle in Iran, and contribute some much-needed nuance and context to the long history of feminist resistance to state violence that has existed there.”
- The December Staff Pick from e-flux is Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on Franz Kafka's “Amerika” (1983), a short portrait Harun Farocki made about the filmmaking pair.
- A trailer has arrived for one of the best films of the year, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, ahead of a January 13 US release.
RECOMMENDED READING
VHS Diaries (Niyaz Saghari, 2018).
- The editors of the MIT Press Reader interview Blake Atwood about his new book Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran. Featuring interviews with dozens of members of the country’s VHS underground, “the book is as much a reflection on how people remember, interpret, and reinterpret past experiences as what the underworld actually was.”
- “To put it in cinematic terms, soccer offers perhaps the closest thing one will find on television to an exercise in pure mise-en-scène,” observes Daniel Witkin in a thrilling exegesis of the soccer highlight video for Reverse Shot.
- In a piece for World Records Journal’s new dossier “Technological Ecologies,” Chrystel Oloukoï discusses the intersection of archival work, colonialism, and nonfiction cinema.
- For New Left Review’s Sidecar, James Wham writes thoughtfully on the films of Hong Sang-soo, invoking Dennis Lim's recent Tale of Cinema monograph, Cézanne, and Lacan along the way. “The pleasures of watching a Hong film stem from familiarity, not just with the works that came before, but crucially also with the director himself,” he notes. “Corpus fits: Hong himself is the ur-shape. His films are self-expression by way of self-obsession.”
- With Avatar: The Way of Water on the horizon, Jaime Lauren Keiles mulls over its odd legacy for the New York Times Magazine: though it was “the world’s top-grossing movie, its most oft-cited claim to fame is its surprising lack of cultural impact.” Speaking of evaporating cultural impact, the Times’ Wesley Morris investigates the extent to which conventional movie “stardom” is a thing of the past.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
What's Up Connection (Masashi Yamamoto, 1990).
- New York: On until December 15 at Metrograph, a mini retrospective of Japan’s hachimiri movement, in which filmmakers such as Sogo Ishii and Masashi Yamamoto made films quickly and cheaply using 8mm film, “shooting run-and-gun-style.” The films, which are hard to see, have been restored to 2K digital from the original 8mm print sources.
- Online: With films selected by managers from twelve of Japan’s independent “mini theaters,” JFF+ Independent Cinema intends to showcase the diversity of Japanese cinema culture through some of the nation’s finest independent films. The films will be available to watch worldwide online from December 15, 2022, through March 15, 2023, but the lineup is up now.
- Los Angeles: Curated in parallel to the Academy Museum’s exhibition Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971 and running in February 2023 at the venue, Maya Cade’s series "Try a Little Tenderness" “uses tenderness—pointed moments of affection—as a guide to navigate Black cinematic history.” The series includes pairings such as Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man (1964) with Charles Burnett’s Several Friends (1969), and Richard E. Norman’s The Flying Ace (1926) with George Randol’s Midnight Shadow (1939).
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Armageddon Time (James Gray, 2022).
- This week, James Gray embarked on the WTF with Marc Maron experience. Armageddon Time is on the menu, as well as the filmmaker’s crisis of confidence after completing Little Odessa (1994) and how the Lost City of Z (2016) film shoot “almost killed him.” (In October, Jeremy Strong went on WTF to discuss Armageddon Time and the craft of acting.)
- NPR’s Morning Edition featured a story on the historic Castro Theatre in San Francisco, whose future is in jeopardy after a live concert company took over its lease.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Don DeLillo, illustrated by Leonardo Goi.
Features:
- Following the release of Noah Baumbach's White Noise, Leonardo Goi journeys into the cinematic world of Don DeLillo, hopscotching between adaptations of his novels and filmmakers who have influenced his writing.
- “In melancholy moments, I often feel that neither you, nor me, nor anybody else has truly seen a film yet,” Peter Greenway told Dan Schindel in a brand-new, career-spanning conversation. Together, they look back on The Draughtsman’s Contract and slalom between discussions of painting and new media.
- With Sight & Sound chatter reaching a fever pitch, Jeremy Carr looks back at the first-ever list from 1952, appraising it as “an indication of film history’s unending fluidity.”
- “Godard made films against: against the milieu from which he came, against dominant rules, and also against himself and his previous films,” writes Luc Moullet in a poignant remembrance of the filmmaker. This week, we’re thrilled to feature Moullet’s 2021 Trafic essay on Godard, newly translated into English by Ted Fendt.
Quick Reads:
- Introducing his new feature That Kind of Summer, set in a sun-dappled retreat for women with nymphomania, Denis Côté writes: “We spend 26 days with these characters with no conclusions, no assessments. We open doors. We don't close them.”
- “Can anyone be a movie hero?” Paweł Łoziński asks in an introduction to his inventive documentary The Balcony Movie, which sees him strike up conversations with passers-by from his Warsaw balcony.
EXTRAS
Sick of Myself (Kristoffer Borgli, 2022), featured on John Waters's year-end list.
- It’s list season: Artforum has dropped their first batch, including rankings from Erika Balsom, James Quandt, Amy Taubin, and, of course, John Waters. Over at the New Yorker, Richard Brody has assembled a pleasingly comprehensive, eclectic list.
- What are you doing on March 19, 2024? (Forget 2023—we’re already talking 2024.) You could spend it with Bong Joon-ho and Robert Pattinson, now that Warner Bros. has released a teaser for their forthcoming Mickey 17.