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NEWS
The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg, 2021).
- Equity, the British entertainment industry trade union, has greeted the incoming Labour government—the first in fourteen years, having won in a landslide—with demands for reforms to the government’s arts funding.
- Meanwhile, across the Channel, snap French parliamentary elections resulted in an upset victory for the leftist coalition Nouveau Front Populaire over Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, which had promised to privatize, at least partially, the national television and radio broadcaster, amid other cutbacks.
- IATSE has released more details regarding its tentative contract with AMPTP, including allowances and limitations around the use of artificial intelligence.
- Teamsters Local 399 is still bargaining with AMPTP and may still be far from resolving issues ahead of their contract’s July 31 expiration date.
IN PRODUCTION
- Mia Hansen-Løve will direct If Love Should Die, a biopic of Mary Wollstonecraft, the British writer and philosopher, set to begin shooting next year.
- After stops and starts, Harmony Korine will direct The Trap as an anime, in collaboration with production partners in Japan, resulting in his first animated feature. He is also developing a motion-capture comedy.
REMEMBERING
The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973).
- Robert Towne has died at 89. The American screenwriter and script doctor is best known for The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974), and Shampoo (1975), but he is also renowned for his contributions to Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Godfather (1972), and many other films.
- Jon Landau has died at 63. The American producer was a longtime collaborator of James Cameron’s since True Lies (1994), having produced Titanic (1997) and the Avatar series (2009–ongoing). “He produced great films,” Cameron said, “not by wielding power but by spreading warmth and the joy of making cinema.”
- Martin Mull has died at 80. The American actor began his career as a musical comedian before playing twin brothers Garth and Barth Gimble on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976–77) and spin-offs Fernwood 2 Night (1977) and America 2 Night (1978). He went on to roles in such films as Mr. Mom (1983), Clue (1985), and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993).
- Bud S. Smith has died at 88. The American film editor’s first feature credits are on Robert Downey Sr.’s films. He would go on to work frequently with William Friedkin, cutting six of his films, including The Exorcist (1973), Sorcerer (1977), and Cruising (1980).
RECOMMENDED READING
Roadhouse (Rowdy Herrington, 1989).
- “Dancing and loud singing punctures the aura of quiet reverence that typically pervades artist film screenings, injecting some welcome anarchy.” For ArtReview, Sophia Satchell-Baeza and her toddler attend an experimental film program for young children, hosted by this year’s Open City Documentary Festival in London.
- “I destabilize the old hierarchy of cinema’s various components by freeing them from their original uses and letting them interact in new and unforeseen ways.” For the Museum of Modern Art, Erica Papernik-Shimizu interviews Rosa Barba about her film installation Aggregate States of Matters (2019).
- “The emotions spend their days hotdesking the big console; they sleep just upstairs; a classic, artisanal, live-work arrangement.” On his City of Industry blog, J.D. Connor examines X-Men ’97 and Inside Out 2 (both 2024) as markers of the Disney/Hollywood industrial crisis.
- “Whereas the roguish John Travolta transmitted an urban cool, his fancy footwork better suited to neon-lit nightclubs, Swayze was a denim-clad chevalier; his courts, forest lodges and highway saloons.” For the Metrograph Journal, Beatrice Loayza extols the magnetic charms of Patrick Swayze.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Hot Ticket (Zoë Lund, 1993).
- New York, through July 31: Nick Irvin and Amalia Ulman present “MiCasa,” an exhibition of visual art, open by appointment only.
- New York, through August 2: Broadway Gallery presents “Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns,” an exhibition by Sky Hopinka including photo-text works and a two-channel video installation. On July 18, Hopinka will read from Denizens of Hell, a chapbook published on the occasion of the show.
- London, July 11: The Barbican presents “Night Fever,” a program of short experimental films by Jeanne Liotta, Nino Rota, Malena Szlam, and Tsai Ming-liang. The screening will be introduced by Shany Jhaveri, who edited a new book by the same title, and followed by readings from that book by Erika Balsom, Charlotte Jansen, Elena Gorfinkel, and Lou Stoppard.
- New York, July 12–18: Anthology Film Archives presents a retrospective of Zoë Lund including the premiere of a new restoration of Hot Ticket (1993), a two-minute short that represents Lund’s only completed directorial effort.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Le Cinéma Club presents Torbjörn Axelman’s Cowboy in Sweden (1970), the first of several collaborations with Lee Hazlewood during the musician’s decade-long Scandinavian sojourn.
- Marianne (2024), directed by Michael Rozek, is Isabelle Huppert’s first one-woman feature, streaming July 16 through 23.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Sans soleil (Chris Marker, 1983).
- “Like, your armpits smelled like an empty bag of sour cream and onion chips.” Kit Zauhar shares You Made Me Feel, a one-act play that shares a lineage with This Closeness (2024), her second feature.
- “I tried to keep the documentary process there, somehow, all while navigating the fiction baggage.” Leonardo Goi speaks to Payal Kapadia about All We Imagine as Light (2024), her Cannes Grand Prix winner.
- “I grew up in Hollywood; movie theaters were my art galleries.” Adrian Curry interviews Dawn Baillie, one of the unsung heroes of American movie poster design, on the occasion of her new exhibition at Poster House in New York.
- “I'll be honest in saying that the writing process of that work was literally calling our friendship into question.” Matt Turner sits down with Larry Achiampong and David Blandy to talk about their Genetic Automata tetralogy.
- “Much of Marker’s work is conveyed as an offering, an encouragement to those touched by his entangled words and images to remember something of their own pasts.” Kaitlyn A. Kramer considers Chris Marker’s long engagement with Japanese culture on the occasion of a new English-language edition of his photo-text book Le Dépays.
- “A Denver omelet. Ham on rye. Nothing more, nothing less.” In the first installment of our rebooted One Shot column, Elissa Suh reads into the iconic diner scene in Michael Mann’s Thief (1981).
WISH LIST
The Desperadoes (Budd Boetticher, 1943).
- The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929–1959, published to accompany this year’s Locarno Retrospective, features essays by Notebook contributors Imogen Sara Smith, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Elena Lazic, Christopher Small, David Cairns, Chris Fujwara, Farran Smith Nehme, Christina Newland, and more.
- The first issue of Enthousiasmos, a magazine “for the curious enthusiast,” features a long interview with Luca Guadagnino by Roman Coppola and Johan Chiaramonte.
- In her upcoming book Cauleen Smith: Breaking Cinema, Romi Crawford “elucidates a critical phase of the artist’s career and how Smith recasts film history in the context of the artistic and cultural ferment of Chicago’s South Side.”