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NEWS
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, 2024).
- Politically engaged documentaries—including some of the most lauded films of the festival season, like No Other Land (2024)—are struggling to find buyers, with many filmmakers resorting to self-distribution or service deals (in which a distributor is paid to release the film while filmmakers retain the rights).
- After the ignominious resignation of Italian Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano, many in the nation’s film industry are calling upon his replacement, Alessandro Giuli, to abandon plans for new legislation that would curtail government subsidies for film production.
- With drastically expanded tax incentives and brand-new soundstages, New Jersey hopes to again become a major hub for motion pictures. First Lady Tammy Snyder Murphy emphasizes the importance of every community, and perhaps every resident, being “Film Ready certified.”
- The Motion Pictures Editors Guild (IATSE Local 700) has notified members who are out of work that they can no longer expect to receive free health insurance extensions, as industry contributions to the health and pension plans—based on hours worked by union members—are down 20% since 2022.
FESTIVALS
Piece by Piece (Morgan Neville, 2024).
- Anti-war protestors disrupted Cameron Bailey’s introduction before the Toronto International Film Festival’s opening night screening of Nutcrackers in protest of the Royal Bank of Canada, a major sponsor of the festival with significant investments in Palantir, whose AI surveillance technology Israel has used to prosecute its war on Gaza.
- An animal-rights protestor likewise crashed the Q&A after the Toronto premiere of Piece by Piece (2024) Pharrell Williams’s “LEGO biopic,” demanding the star use his leverage as Louis Vuitton’s men’s creative director to end the company’s use of fur and skin, to which he replied, “Rome wasn’t made in a day.”
- The TIFF Moirée grid is complete, with seventeen critics rating titles from across the festival’s eleven sections. Their favorites from each are listed here.
DEVELOPING
- Lars von Trier is poised to direct a new film, entitled After, about which very little is yet known except that it will receive some funding from the Danish Film Institute.
REMEMBERING
Matewan (John Sayles, 1987)
- James Earl Jones has died at 93. The American actor began his career on the stage and made his screen debut in Dr. Strangelove (1964), going on to take roles in such films as The Great White Hope (1970), The Man (1972), Matewan (1987), and Cry, the Beloved Country (1995). His basso profondo voice was immortalized in the Star Wars films (1977–present) and The Lion King (1994). “He was everything to me as a budding actor,” Denzel Washington says. “He was who I wanted to be.”
- Aruna Vasudev has died at 88. The Indian critic and scholar was considered “the mother of Asian cinema,” having founded both Cinemaya, the first pan-Asian film quarterly and the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC).
- Will Jennings has died at 80. The American lyricist received Academy Awards for “Up Where We Belong,” performed by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes for An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), and “My Heart Will Go On,” performed by Celine Dion for Titanic (1997). He also won a Golden Globe and two Grammys for “Tears in Heaven,” performed by Eric Clapton for Rush (1991).
RECOMMENDED READING
Batman Dracula (Andy Warhol, 1964).
- “Occultism and Method acting: [Jack] Smith demonstrates they are one and the same.” For 4Columns, Melissa Anderson reviews a series of Andy Warhol’s “bone-deep cuts” in New York.
- “I asked him if someone is possessed by the devil what you do, and he went on and we just shot it.” On Notes on Cinematograph, Ehsan Khoshbakht has transcribed a 1978 Q&A with Iranian auteur Marva Nabili.
- “As he read, Maccioni felt the hairs on his neck stand.” For the Financial Times, Marianna Giusti details one lawyer’s sixteen-year-long search for the truth about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder.
- “Every issue you can have with a trailer seems to stem from a misinterpretation of what audiences want.” For the New York Times, Esther Zuckerman bemoans the sorry state of the modern movie trailer.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
If Every Girl Had a Diary (Sadie Benning, 1990).
- New York, through October 19: Paula Cooper Gallery presents the American premiere of Christian Marclay’s Subtitled (2019), a found-footage video installation that “forms a mesmerizing, flickering and fluid concrete poem.”
- Brussels, September 19 through 29: Bozar presents A Conversation with the Sun, a virtual-reality experience by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (and scored by Ryuichi Sakamoto) in which “the spectator will be drawn into an entanglement of reality, dreams and other states of being.”
- Chicago, September 19 through 29: Sweet Void Cinema present Peripheries, an experimental film and video festival featuring work by R. Bruce Elder, Deborah Stratman, Jem Cohen, and many others.
- New York, September 20 through 29: The Museum of the Moving Image presents “Personal Belongings: First-Person Documentary in the 1990s,” a program of American nonfiction artists who “produced work of deep intimacy and invigorating formal playfulness.” For a preview of Sadie Benning’s early Pixelvision work, two examples of which screen on September 21, see Kelley Dong’s essay in these pages.
- London, September 23: The Barbican presents “The Poetic Lens of Margaret Tait,” a 16mm program of work by the Scottish filmmaker, introduced by Sarah Neely.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- MUBI has released a behind-the-scenes featurette of Zia Anger’s My First Film, which follows the project from its troubled production to rejection, then “abandonment,” and finally reclamation.
- Amazon MGM Studios has released the first trailer for RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (2024), which will premiere later this month at the New York Film Festival.
- Nikkatsu has released a trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud (2024), which our own Leonardo Goi calls “a work that both distills some of the director’s motifs and heralds intriguing departures.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Adrift Potentials (Leonardo Pirondi, 2024).
- “When it comes to militant cinema, the central question is: how can the moving image be in solidarity with a resistance to the ongoing atrocities?” In an essay commissioned by and published jointly with Fantômas, the Belgian film quarterly, Gawan Fagard and Reem Shilleh discuss possibilities for the militant image in besieged Palestine.
- To celebrate the life and work of Alain Delon, Adrian Curry takes a look at how the actor’s illustrated image evolved, from anonymous handsome lug to the immediately recognizable blue-eyed stunner who took European cinema by storm.
- “Anytime the gown buzzed I felt as though I was being pulled out of the story and reminded of all the different planes in which it was unfolding.” Leonardo Goi caps off his dispatches from Venice with considerations of the festival’s VR section, as well as Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (all 2024).
- “Each year, the city’s spirit is rekindled as the August heatwave announces the arrival of the annual event, and Locarno is adorned in yellow-and-black leopard print.” This year’s Locarno Critics Academy correspondences conclude with contributions from Victor Morozov, Fareyah Kaukab, Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer, and Sasha Han.
- “They’re tasked with mimicking classic bits and mannerisms, but it scans as futile; prestige pictures don’t often call upon performers to act, but to chase the ghosts of real people.” Our first dispatch from Toronto comes from Chloe Lizotte, who casts a wary eye upon the pop-historical masquerade of Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night and Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, but finds something far odder and more endearing in Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship (all 2024).
- “A camel, it has been said, is a horse designed by committee.” Michael Sicinski reviews this year’s Wavelengths program at Toronto, which year after year is asked to do more with less.
WISH LIST
The Dark Angel (Sidney Franklin, 1935).
- W. W. Norton has published Mayukh Sen’s Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, a biography of the Indian-born actress, the first performer of color to receive an Oscar nomination, for The Dark Angel (1935).
- Mack Books has published i shall sing these songs beautifully, a photo-text work by Yorgos Lanthimos which tells “a haunting new story” with images shot on the set of Kinds of Kindness (2024).
EXTRAS
- Resurfacing: A 1989 laundry detergent commercial finds Edward Yang and Tsai Chin performing the roles of bumbling husband and fastidious wife, respectively.