Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Above: via The Cinephiliacs, the ten best films of 2013, as decided by Cahiers du Cinéma. Here's the complete list in English:
4. Gravity
6. Lincoln
7. Jealousy
10. Age of Panic
- An upset at the 50th Golden Horse Awards in Taipei! East Asian cinema giants Jia Zhangke, Tsai Ming-liang, Johnnie To, and Wong Kar-wai were beaten out by Anthony Chen's feature debut, Ilo Ilo.
- The Film Independent Spirit Awards have announced their 2014 nominations, with Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, and Alexander Payne's Nebraska leading the way.
Finds.
- Above: the poster for Drafthouse Films' re-release of Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45. We already shared the new trailer on Twitter, and needless to say we're very excited to see this restoration.
- David Bordwell on "Otis Ferguson and the way of the camera".
- At Long Pauses, Darren Hughes has a fresh take (a close-up?) on Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color:
"I’m interested, primarily, in one aspect of this film. I saw Blue is the Warmest Color projected onto a large screen in a wide ratio (2.35:1). If IMDb is to be trusted, it was shot on a Canon C300, and the resulting image is uncannily detailed in that too-real-to-feel-real style of hi-def video. Because Kechiche frames nearly every shot in a tight closeup (an unusual move, generally, but especially so in this aspect ratio), and because of the film’s 179-minute run time, watching Blue is the Warmest Color in a theater means spending more than two hours looking at faces through a telescope. When my attention drifted from the content of the film, as it did fairly often, I’d distract myself by looking at Léa Seydoux’s teeth and gums or at the warts on the back of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s hand. (This is a cinephile’s prerogative. We are habitual voyeurs, and there are few opportunities in real life for this kind of intimate examination.)"
- Above: "Original Russian film posters in minimalist style" from Russia Beyond the Headlines (thanks to Batuhan Albaş for the link!).
- For Artforum, Travis Jeppesen writes on this year's DocLisboa.
- The Los Angeles Review of Books has published an excerpt from Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, a new biography by Noah Isenberg:
"When the émigré filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer passed away on the last day of September 1972 at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, the prevailing fear among family members was that his work would be forgotten forever — something he himself had articulated near the end of his life — that it would slowly, inexorably drift into oblivion. Although his departure did not go entirely unnoticed, with obituaries published in Variety, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, the legacy of his life and career was surely in jeopardy. Because of the irreversible decline in his health, he was never able to finish the multisession interview with Peter Bogdanovich that he began in February 1970, after the initial strokes had already left him partially paralyzed (the recordings essentially trail off after the two men discussed Ruthless and Carnegie Hall, both from the late 1940s, with only passing mention of the films Ulmer made in the 1950s and ’60s). By the time the interview was published, in Jonas Mekas’s Film Culture magazine in 1974, Ulmer was already an obscure figure, someone who was recognized — if at all — only by fringe cinephiles, devotees of the Cahiers circle, of film societies and the art-house circuit, and of the film pages of the independent weeklies like the Village Voice, the Chicago Reader, and the Boston Phoenix."
From the archives.
- Above: speaking of Ferrara and Zoë Lund, here's the original script (right click + save) for Bad Lieutenant, courtesy of Cinephilia and Beyond.