Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Ham on Rye (2019, Tyler Taormina).
- Tyler Taormina, director of the idiosyncratic Ham on Rye (2019) and Happer's Comet (2022), has wrapped production on his next feature. Filmed on Long Island, Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point is a Christmas comedy that stars Michael Cera, Elsie Fisher, and Gregg Turkington, plus the progeny of two prominent filmmakers in Francesca Scorsese and Sawyer Spielberg.
- The Guardian reports that filmmaker Brian Rose is attempting to “recreate” the lost version of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which was altered significantly by RKO prior to its release. Using “the latest technology to reconstruct lost material and animate charcoal sketches,” Rose has reportedly spent four years recreating “around 30,000 frames” of Welles’s original rough cut in order that viewers can visualize what Welles intended in lieu of seeing the director’s original cut, the print of which has long been searched for but is still missing.
RECOMMENDED VIEWINGS
- The second and third episodes of our special Cannes-themed series of MUBI Podcast: Cannes Conversations are now online. Watch host Rico Gagliano talk with Kleber Mendonça Filho below, whose documentary Pictures of Ghosts screened at the festival, and with Quebecois actor and director Monia Chokri.
- Quentin Tarantino was a special guest at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes last month. The festival has now uploaded the recording of a master class he conducted after a screening of John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder (1977).
RECOMMENDED READING
Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982).
- “A thriving magazine culture is a sign of a good culture. I owe everything to magazines. Without them, I wouldn’t exist.” For Interview, Sarah Nicole Prickett speaks with Ian Penman, author of Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors about films, smoking, coffee, culture, magazines, and much more besides.
- “The Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis observed that the characters in telenovelas do not dialogue with each other: they tell gossip about themselves.” In The Baffler, Byron Davies writes, “as a gringo,” about Latin American telenovelas, specifically those produced by the Mexican network Televisa, “a central piece of the Televisa network’s (colonial, racializing, neoliberal) propaganda machine.”
- “Wes Anderson’s precise, symmetrical, planimetric compositions, the most readily identifiable hallmark of his cinema, can be traced to the filmmaker’s passion for the theatrical,” says Nick Pinkerton, reviewing the filmmaker’s latest film Asteroid City for 4Columns. Elsewhere, in IndieWire, Eric Kohn spoke to Anderson over the phone to “unpack the many themes and inspirations behind his new work.”
- “The curtains are closed. Baldwin throws back the covers and gets up; he is wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs.” For the Yale Review, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi examines Sedat Pakay’s James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973), an eleven-minute documentary that, prior to its recent reappearance on the Criterion Channel, “has long been almost impossible to see in the United States, aside from a short clip on YouTube.”
- “Life was happening here and now, on this lonely road in the space between the old and new, the east and west, Japan and America. Stranded in the “middle of nowhere,” Ozu made movies.” Emerson Goo writes about Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But... (1932) for Screen Slate, examining the film’s transpacific influences and the history of benshi, and drawing links between Japan and the US, specifically Hawai’i.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Step Forward Youth (Menelik Shabazz, 1977).
- New York, June 27: With an introduction by Ashley Clark, Light Industry will screen two rarely seen British documentaries from the late 1970s, one of which, Step Forward Youth (1977), was the first film by the pioneering, recently passed filmmaker and journalist Menelik Shabazz.
- Berlin, June 9 through August 19: At neugerriemschneider gallery, the eleventh solo exhibition of Sharon Lockhart (Goshogaoka, Lunch Break) includes a number of new cyanotype paintings, and photographs by the artist, plus a screening of her recent film EVENTIDE (2022). Jennifer Lynn Peterson wrote about the film for Texte zur Kunst.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
The African Desperate (Martine Syms, 2022).
- Artist Martine Syms (The African Desperate, 2022) was the guest on the most recent Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, speaking to Kate Wolf about her exhibition “Loser Back Home,” currently on view at Spruth Magers in Los Angeles.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
It is Night in America (Ana Vaz, 2022).
- “Immersed in the universe of the Brazilian artist Ana Vaz you may find yourself equally entranced by and alienated from the beauty of nature.” Ela Bittencourt surveys the ecological dreamscapes of Ana Vaz, subject of a MUBI special showing in most countries.
- In Adrian Curry’s latest Movie Poster of the Week column, “the artist known as Plakiat, real name Maks Bereski,” one of the brightest lights of the new Polish school of movie posters, and “an avid cinephile as well as a brilliant designer,” shares some of his influences and inspirations.
EXTRAS
Blue Island (Chan Tze-woon, 2022). Chan is one of the signees of the Hong Kong Free Cinema Manifesto.
- Included in the latest issue of Film Quarterly is The Hong Kong Free Cinema Manifesto, “a call-to-action that aims at uniting a new wave of Hong Kong filmmakers committed to truthfully telling the stories of our times and breaking new ground despite growing censorship and production challenges.” Below it are 30 named signees of support.
- Released parallel to the film, a children's menu and comic made by US hotel chain Howard Johnson's to tie into Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) has been unearthed by the Dreams of Space blog. Highlighting the chain's product placement role within the film, the comic also gives "the story of the movie in a slightly different way than I remember," writes the site's author John Sisson.
