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NEWS
The Way of the Wind (Terrence Malick).
- According to Terrence Malick’s producer, Alex Boden, the filmmaker is in the editing room working on his biblical epic The Way of the Wind, formerly known as The Last Planet. “Terry is very happy with what he is working on so far is the word,” Boden told Variety. Over at The Film Stage, Nick Newman compiles all of the updates and rumors so far about the production. Mark Rylance, who plays Satan in the film, says of Malick’s process: “It’s like a fine wine or whiskey; it only gets better with time.”
- We’ve updated our TIFF lineup master post to reflect new additions—notably the excellent selections that make up Wavelengths, TIFF’s experimental program. Featuring films by Radu Jude, Eduardo Williams, Pedro Costa, Ja’Tovia Gary, Miko Revereza…and Jean-Luc Godard’s posthumous Trailer for the Film that Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Beatrix (Milena Czernovsky and Lilith Kraxner, 2021).
- Available on Le Cinéma Club for the next two weeks is Beatrix (2021), a feature film by Milena Czernovsky and Lilith Kraxner that played at FIDMarseille and Art of the Real a few years back. The film, which was shot on beautiful 16mm, explores, per the directors’ description, “how the smallest movements, gestures and facial expressions work.”
- Viewable on e-flux’s film platform for the month of August are several short films by Toronto-based artist and filmmaker Chris Kennedy. Among the selections are Towards a Vanishing Point (2012), a film where footage from Coba, Mexico, and the Siwa Oasis in Egypt, and California “serve as inspiration for a series of sketches on the notion of the vanishing point.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2022).
- “The temptation for directors to parody the art life or to romanticize it is strong. And artists are, for the most part, quite ordinary, even boring in some cases. Talking about art isn’t good cinema,” says Dan Fox, in a piece for his Substack that uses Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up (2022) and Maria Mochnacz’s Reeling With P.J. Harvey (1994) as launching-off points for broader musings on how we talk about art, and the representation of artists' ordinary lives in literature and cinema.
- “Studios were entrusted with preserving the silent era, and 75% of that film history is now lost or intentionally destroyed.” For Screen Slate, Ayanna Dozier examines archiving and distribution in the digital age.
- “Film kind of happened to me, I didn’t really expect it. I didn’t know anything about that world, but somehow it fell into my lap.” French actors Adèle Exarchopoulos and Isabelle Adjani meet for an Interview Magazine conversation presented with great accompanying photography. Together, they talk acting, work, jealousy, and emotional contortionism.
- “The humor I’m interested in is the kind that helps you see a situation in a new light. Like, just look at us. We’re sitting together, looking all serious, but when you stop and think about it the whole scene is just ridiculous.” For Filmmaker Magazine, Leonardo Goi interviews Radu Jude, whose latest film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, just won a Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival.
- “There are many ways to define a hack, but the least judgmental is that you don’t know who they are,” writes Sam Adams for Slate in an article arguing for a return of “the hack”: filmmakers who “don’t consider themselves better than the material” who take on studio jobs-for-hire. This, Adams argues, would stop studios from “sending auteurs to do a hack’s job,” a better outcome for everyone.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978).
- In memory of the Band's Robbie Robertson, who died last Wednesday, the CBC has compiled selections from the original scores he composed for Martin Scorsese. “I’ve found that when I sit down to work, sharpen my pencils, and get all my papers laid out, I can hit a wall,” he told Vulture's Drew Fortune in 2019, recently after composing music for The Irishman. “I can’t think of anything to write with those pencils. It’s not necessarily superstitious, but if I’m just walking around the room whistling, and I sit down at the piano and touch the keys, suddenly, it’s like, 'Whoa! I wonder where this is going.' There’s a certain joy in that, a pleasure in the discovery.”
Robertson's "Remembrance," used prominently in Scorsese's The Irishman (2019).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Let's Talk (Simon Liu, 2023).
- New York, through September 17: Running at KAJE in Brooklyn, "Let’s Talk" is a new film and installation by artist and filmmaker Simon Liu. The show “surveys the evolving physical and emotional landscapes of contemporary Hong Kong in the wake of mass sociopolitical change and upheaval.”
- New York, September 1 through 17: With 24 films included, Film at Lincoln Center’s retrospective “Korean Cinema’s Golden Decade: The 1960s” is “one of the largest retrospectives ever of 1960s Korean Cinema outside of Korea.” Highlights include films by Kim Ki-young, Kim Soo-yong, and Lee Man-hee.
- London, September 14 through November 4: Sadie Coles’s London Mayfair gallery will host a solo exhibition by Martine Syms, director of The African Desperate (2022). Titled “Present Goo,” the show collects works “spanning film, installation, drawing and photography,” and is presented in “three distinct groupings” that each represent new avenues in her ongoing critical examination of narrative production.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Zero Fucks Given (Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre, 2021).
- As a new MUBI retrospective devoted to Adèle Exarchopoulos, Fire Starter, sets the platform ablaze—not to mention her lead role in Ira Sachs’s Passages, in theaters now—Shonni Enelow writes about her role in Zero Fucks Given (Rien à foutre, 2021), starring Exarchopoulos as a worn-down flight attendant. “Rien à foutre is a film about exploitation as both choice and social compulsion, and it makes smart use of Exarchopoulos’s type,” Enelow observes. “One gets the sense that she is playing with it herself.”
- “Whether you arrive on the tip of a blade or the cusp of a kiss, there is no wrong place to start with Yasuzo Masumura.” Let Jessica Kiang be your guide through the Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s retrospective of the postwar Japanese auteur, whose filmography is “unruly as a rule” and endlessly exciting.
- “What’s most fascinating about Oppenheimer—and what makes it such a confounding and exhilarating watch—is that it is a movie-paradox,” contends Leonardo Goi in the newest installment of The Current Debate. Goi explores how Christopher Nolan’s latest epic, both monumental and intimate, challenges the “summer tentpole” framing of its marketing.