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NEWS
Women Talking (Sarah Polley, 2022).
- The 49th edition of the Telluride Film Festival, which doesn't reveal its lineup until the four-day festival starts, took place last weekend. Its program included world premieres of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking and Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, as well as Adam Curtis’s new 420-minute-long Russia [1985-1999] Traumazone, plus a tribute to Cate Blanchett. A.O. Scott, reporting from the festival for the New York Times, remarks that "Every so often, Telluride’s best is as good as movies can be," and singles out Women Talking specifically: "...what Women Talking shares with Moonlight is an absolute concentration on the specifics of story and setting that nonetheless illuminate a vast, underexplored region of contemporary life. A reality that has always been there is seen as if for the first time."
- Charlbi Dean Kriek—South African model, actor, and the star of Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or–winning Triangle of Sadness—died last week, shockingly aged only 32. “Charlbi had a care and sensitivity that lifted her colleagues and the entire film crew,” writes Östlund in a short tribute shared on his Instagram.
- 8.1 million people in the US went to the cinema for the first annual National Cinema Day last Saturday, making September 3 the highest attended day of the year so far for theaters in the country.
- The ten films in the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s “My Van Collection” are among the few surviving films in the U.S. filmed in Vietnam before the fall of Saigon in 1975. The organization is seeking donations to “preserve and restore these unique films before they are lost to the ravages of time.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- To kick off our new video series “MUBI Picks at Posteritati,” playwright and producer Jeremy O. Harris popped into the New York movie art gallery to discuss how filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch have influenced his work.
- Dead for a Dollar, a new western from Walter Hill (The Warriors), has a trailer. In the film, a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) attempts to track down a missing woman (Rachel Brosnahan).
- Inspired by the true story of two public prosecutors who dared to investigate and prosecute Argentina’s military dictatorship in 1985, Santiago Mitre's Argentina 1985 has a trailer. The film received a strong reception upon its premiere at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week.
RECOMMENDED READING
AGHDRA (Arthur Jafa, 2021).
- The September issue of Artforum features a still from Arthur Jafa’s 2021 installation AGHDRA on the cover. Inside, the artist’s new show “Live Evil” is reviewed by Olamiju Fajemisin, alongside a fun capsule series, “The Art We Love,” which includes Amy Taubin on Hitchcock, Rachel Kushner on James Benning, Yvonne Rainer on Jean Vigo, and more.
- A reprint of Ashley Clark’s Facing Blackness is available to preorder through the Film Desk. In the book, Clark examines Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, “guiding readers through Lee’s intricate representation of race, politics, and popular culture.”
- “All festival-goers love the idea that they are hip to a new discovery.” On her Substack, Farran Smith Nehme writes about the films of Hugo Fregonese, who was recently “a smash hit” at Il Cinema Ritrovato and is currently the subject of a “rich series” at MoMA.
- “I’ll do what I do until they carry me out feet first.” On the occasion of his 80th birthday, Werner Herzog chats to Eric Kohn at IndieWire about his life and legacy.
The United States of America (James Benning, 2022).
- “To really see it, we would have to slow down and take in not only what is there but what was and could be. We would have to think, like the filmmaker James Benning, that ‘place is a function of time.’” For the New York Review of Books, Blair McClendon ruminates on the politics of Los Angeles as represented in the works of landscape filmmaker James Benning.
- Alongside a new BFI season showing how “she rose to become one of the leading stars of US Blaxploitation cinema,” Ryan Gilbey interviews the great Pam Grier in the Guardian.
- “Maybe Todd Field isn’t ready to reappear just yet.” In the New York Times, Kyle Buchanan talks with Todd Field about the path to his new film TÁR, arriving sixteen years after his Oscar-nominated “one-two punch of In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2006).” Vadim Rizov made TÁR, which premiered at Venice Film Festival this week, the subject of his first dispatch for Filmmaker Magazine.
- In Sight & Sound, various staff members from the BFI National Archive, “currently the only UK organization to be licensed to project nitrate film stock,” reveal “everything you need to know about the beauty and explosive danger of nitrate film.”
- This week, Semiotext(e) published The Cinema House & The World: the first English translation of the seminal volume by Serge Daney. The book has already inspired stellar essays by Beatrice Loayza (for Bookforum) and Nick Pinkerton (for 4Columns). The Baffler features A.S. Hamrah's introduction to the volume.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Circus Tent (Aravindan Govindan, 1978).
- London: Buried within the program of the recently announced London Film Festival is the always interesting “Treasures” strand, which focuses on new restorations of older films. This year’s highlights include Aravindan Govindan’s The Circus Tent, Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of Remembrance, and Mikko Niskanen’s Eight Deadly Shots, a 316-minute-long film “frequently acclaimed as the greatest Finnish film ever made.”
- Portugal: Eclectic documentary festival Porto/Post/Doc will return from November 16-26. Two focus programmes have already been announced. One is a focus on Hungarian filmmakers Márta Mészáros and Miklós Jancsó, and the other looks at neurodiversity on screen.
- New York: Running at Gladstone Gallery from September 10 to October 15, “Real Corporeal” is a group exhibition “contemplating the notion of the physical body as an intrusion in the traditional gallery space.” The show features work from an array of artists who use film in their practice, including Arthur Jafa, Rhea Dillon, Mark Leckey, and Sara Sadik.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Funny Pages (Owen Kline, 2022).
- Owen Kline, director of Funny Pages, a film about “a teenage cartoonist who strikes up a demented friendship with a former low-level comic artist,” is the guest on the latest episode of the Screen Slate podcast.
- In the latest of in their continuing run of podcast episodes tied to the Locarno Film Festival’s “Future of Attention” event series, Film Comment speak with Kevin B. Lee, a critic and filmmaker who is currently the resident Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at the Swiss festival.
- For a one-off show on NTS Radio, artist, composer, sound designer, recordist, and founding member of Black Audio Film Collective Trevor Mathison shares unreleased works and field recordings which relate to his current London exhibition.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Black Tuesday (Hugo Fregonese, 1954)
- “Hugo Fregonese’s best films are fueled by desperation, a clean and potent but highly flammable form of energy,” Imogen Sara Smith writes in her piece on the Argentine director. She captures the vivacity of his Hollywood films, often “stripped down and packed tight as a grenade.”
- “The bigger the event, the stronger the illusion.” Leonardo Goi shares two dispatches from the Venice Film Festival this week. The first covers Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo, and Todd Field’s TÁR. The second is on Frederick Wiseman’s A Couple, Romain Gavras’s Athena, and Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985.
- The actual process of making movies is mostly drudgery. Filmmakers [...] don’t like to talk about that very much, preferring to show those above the line stewing, pouting and yelling.” Writer, film editor, and filmmaker Blair McClendon examines Jordan Peele’s third feature Nope, looking at Peele’s decision to tell the story of Hollywood from the perspective of its artists and technicians.
- Conor Williams talks to Owen Kline about his new film Funny Pages, “a fantastically fucked-up coming-of-age story about Robert, a young cartoonist who will go to any lengths to reach success.”
- Lastly, Thomas Quist explores The Cinema House & The World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962-1981, a collection of newly translated critical texts by Serge Daney. As Quist frames it, “Daney’s approach to cinema as a global art, his protean set of interests, his applications of philosophical concepts, and his autobiographical bent made him particularly equipped to be the critic in the age of images.”
EXTRAS
A double spread from Tell It to the Stones.
- Tell It to the Stones is a new collection of “artistic and intellectual responses” to the filmmaking methods and body of work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. The book was edited by Annett Busch and Tobias Hering and recently published by Sternberg Press.
- Nicole Kidman’s viral pre-show AMC Theaters ad will have a sequel, according to Vanity Fair. The original spot was written by Billy Ray, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Captain Phillips, Richard Jewell, and Flightplan. Although he plans a “different approach” for the second piece, we’re sure he won’t forget how good heartbreak can feel in a place like this.
