Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- The latest edition of La Furia Umana is now available in print, with some content online as well, and features a collection of pieces on Joseph Losey and Bertrand Bonello.
- Esteemed film critic Dave Kehr has been named the MoMA Adjunct Curator for Film.
- The Rome Film Festival is just a couple weeks away, and the competition (which will be presided over by this year's head of the jury, James Gray) has some exciting titles. I'm especially jealous of those who'll get to see Takashi Miike's brilliantly titled The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji, which had an awesome teaser pop up recently. Out of competition it looks like there's an hour-long film from Miike as well, and Castello Cavalcanti, a new short from Wes Anderson.
Finds.
- Above: the first trailer for Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel.
- A web exclusive piece from Sight & Sound: filmmakers Ben Rivers and Albert Serra have a chat.
- One last dispatch from David Bordwell on the Vancouver International Film Festival. This one covers new films from Hirokazu Kore-eda, Jia Zhangke, Manoel de Oliveira, and Jean-Luc Godard.
- Outlaw Vern recounts his entryway into the cinema of Dario Argento, through his 1975 masterpiece Deep Red, and goes on to describe the pleasure of seeing the legendary horror composers Goblin perform live in Seattle (I was lucky enough to catch their appearance in Vancouver!).
- In The Film Society of Lincoln Center's blog, producer Don Boyd writes about his experience working with Jean-Luc Godard on the omnibus film Aria:
"I first came across Jean-Luc Godard above a Leicester Square camera shop near the London Film School in 1968 when he came to London with One Plus One aka Sympathy for the Devil featuring the Rolling Stones. The room was packed with journalists and they were taunting him. This was the era of les soixante-huitards, and Godard’s outrageous vociferous political opinions were already legendary. One stupid tabloid hack asked him why he thought that his films deserved so much public attention and contemporary cultural validity. Godard paused and with absolutely no irony at all said, and I paraphrase from memory:'I will give you £50: Go downstairs and buy ten 8mm movie cameras, and ten rolls of film. Take them into the street and stop the first ten people you meet there. Give them a camera each and a roll of film and ask them to make a film. Their film will have as much validity as mine, and certainly more than the article that you will write about me.' This was one of the most inspirational moments in my budding directorial career."
- Above: Swiss publishers Fold and everyedition have put out a replica of the newsstand magazine from John Carpenter's They Live "that the film's protagonist Nada picks up while first realizing he can – while wearing the sunglasses – 'see' through the gloss of consumer society and even the 'aliens' who control it."
- In the 37th issue of Screening the Past, Adrian Martin has edited Part 1 of "Aesthetic Issues in World Cinema", which features a piece by Nicole Brenez entitled "Political Cinema Today — The New Exigencies: For a Republic of Images":
"I wish to question what could be an internationalism for today, in the field of cinema – a critical internationalism that defies the powers of state, nation, administration and global economy. Almost all the examples I will cite are provided by filmmakers who are trying to help, through images, people other than their own. Thanks to the films themselves, it seems possible to consider, even very briefly, new proposals concerning the conception of history; the conception of the history of cinema; of an oeuvre; of the filmmaker; of political forms; of curating; and, finally, of spectatorship.
But the main issue here, the main contemporary event, is the suppression of the ‘division of labour’ (la division du travail). Today, anyone has the technical possibility to become a producer of images, a film critic, a curator, even a teacher of cinema. And that is the most beautiful and fertile dimension of cinema: no longer a matter of experts or of specialised activities, it has become, simply, different gestures that the same person can accomplish during a single day: film something, post it on a website, present, discuss, defend it, and comment on other images. Whatever the quality or the tastes, these are now daily gestures for a new generation all over the world."
From the archives.
- Above: I don't know about you but I'm tired of waiting for The Wolf of Wall Street (though the release date is now confirmed for Christmas day). For temporary appeasement, here's Martin Scorsese's late mother, Catherine, making pizza on television with David Letterman. Thanks goes to Neil Bahadur for this one.