Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- The lineup for the 52nd Semaine de la Critique as well as the 2013 Selection for Quinzane des Réalisateurs in Cannes have been announced. Also from Cannes: Kim Novak is set to be a guest of honour to mark a screening of the recently restored Vertigo.
- Above: The omniscient Twitter has revealed the first image behind the scenes of Abel Ferrara's new film featuring Gérard Depardieu as Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
- David Cronenberg has begun casting his next project, Maps to the Stars. The first names involved? Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson and Sarah Gadon.
- Two of MUBI's very own are in different (early) stages of realizing film projects. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has started shooting Ellie Lumme (production pictured above), having partly funded it via GoFundMe. Also head over to Vishnevetsky's blog for updates. Meanwhile, Kurt Walker (co-director of programming for MUBI Canada, Australia & New Zealand) is crowd-funding over at Indiegogo for Hit2Pass, a film that he's directing along with Tyson Storozinski—check the pitch video and the campaign here.
Finds.
- Above: the trailer for Asghar Farhadi's The Past, which is set to debut in competition at Cannes next month.
- Marcel Hanoun's filmography is online for free on Vimeo.
- Above: from a stunning spread of photos from an issue of LIFE titled Teenage Wasteland: Japanese Youth in Revolt, 1964 comes this photograph by Michael Rougier. The original caption reads: "Kako, languid from sleeping pills she takes, is lost in a world of her own in a jazz shop in Tokyo." The series holds in vivid still life a generation brought to the big screen in films of the era by Yoshishige Yoshida, Yasuzo Masumura, Imamura, Oshima, Kō Nakahira and others.
- Featureshoot has discovered a new project by photographer Reiner Riedler. Titled The Unseen Seen, it is "a series of macro shots of original filmrolls" sourced from The Deutsche Kinemathek. Below you can see a roll for Christian Petzold's Ghosts (2005):
- Over at Cinema Scope Online, Michael Sicinski has a report on Toronto's Images Festival:
"Unlike most other showcases of experimental film and video, Images has been integrating gallery and museum work into its presentations pretty much since it began back in 1988. In this respect, Images has quietly blazed the trail that festivals such as Rotterdam, Berlin, and even Sundance have chosen to follow, encompassing not just screenwork destined for theatrical presentation but also media installation, projection-based performance, as well as single-screen environmental works that demand in-gallery monitor looping, the better to highlight their inherent non-linearity and remove the cognitive cues of “start” and “finish” implicit in a seated screening.
Images, doing its level best to avoid all but the most basic boundaries of genre, divides itself into two programmes only: “On Screen” and “Off Screen.” The festival has been ahead of the curve in combining these modes within a single institutional aegis. Moving through the various spaces Images encompasses, one can certainly sense that Executive Director Scott Miller Berry’s overall vision is expansive and artist-driven, following “screen culture” as it’s currently evolving."
Above: the Polish poster by Maurycy Stryjecki for Pierre Etaix's The Suitor.
- Criterion Collection's Current blog is thoughtfully hosting a piece by Notebook columnist David Cairns on The Return of Etaix. Regular readers of Cairns will remember that he did some preliminary exploration of Pierre Etaix's wonderful comedies in his column The Forgotten. (Adrian Curry has likewise highlighted the director's posters, one of which you can see above.)
From the archives.
- Above: because it had somehow evaded me until last week, here's an amazing video shot by Jonas Mekas of Harmony Korine tap-dancing.