Rushes: Dario Argento's Comeback, NYC Vampires, Garrett Bradley's "America"

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NEWS

Dario Argento's Dark Glasses

• Following his appearance in Gaspar Noé's Vortex, Dario Argento returns to directing with Dark Glasses, his first feature since Dracula 3D (2012). Starring Asia Argento and Andrea Zhang, the thriller follows a serial killer, a blind sex worker, and a 10-year-old Chinese boy in Rome's Chinese community.
• John Woo is also set to make a return to Hollywood with Silent Night, a "no dialogue" action film about a father (played by Joel Kinnaman) who seeks to avenge his son's death.
• Film Labs, a "worldwide network of artist-run film laboratories," now has a new website! The website includes more than 500 films made at artist-run film labs from Vancouver to South Korea, as well as technical resources and distribution information.
• Dancer, choreographer, theatrical director, and filmmaker Wakefield Poole has died. A pioneer of the gay pornography industry, Poole's films, including Boys in The Sand and Bijou, were acclaimed for their elegant depictions of stylized and unsimulated gay sex. As Jim Tushinski argues in Indiewire: "Without Poole’s work and its influence on other LGBT filmmakers, there would be no independent gay film, no big LGBT film festivals, and certainly, no accurate depictions of gay male sex on the screen."

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Garrett Bradley's third film America (2019) is now available to watch online, thanks to Field of Vision. Inspired by one of the earliest surviving feature films with an all-Black cast, Bert Williams' s Lime Kiln Club Field Day, America "challenges the idea of Black cinema as a wave or 'movement in time,' proposing instead a continuous thread of achievement."

• To celebrate Halloween, Barbara Hirschfield's Transformations (1972) is available on Le Cinéma Club. Recently restored by the Vermont Archive Movie Project and made in collaboration with Hirschfield's feminist collective, the short film depicts a coven of witches who gather in Vermont.
• You can also view several horror films, including Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space and Peggy Ahwesh's The Scary Movie, as part of Ecstatic Static's program Horror of the Rented World.
• It's another trailer for Ridley Scott's House of Gucci, offering a further look into the chaos leading to the murder of Maurizio Gucci by Patrizia Reggiani.

• A trailer for Asghar Farhadi's Grand Prix winner A Hero, which arrives in theaters January 7 and on Amazon Prime Video January 21.

• The new restoration of Dennis Hopper's Out of The Blue, starring Linda Manz, is opening November 17 at Metrograph.

• Mia Hansen-Løve's debut feature, the family drama All Is Forgiven (2007), arrives to U.S. theaters this Friday.

RECOMMENDED READING

Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir Part II (2021)

• For GQ, Joanna Hogg guides us through the fashion displayed in The Souvenir Part II, many of them from and inspired by her own wardrobe.
• James Ivory's memoir, brilliantly titled Solid Ivory, is out now. In her review of the book, critic Alexandra Jacobs describes Ivory's recollections as sexually frank and wistfully defiant.
• Metrograph has published a 1998 interview with Andrzej Żuławski, in which he details his opinion on Andrzej Wajda (for whom he once worked as an assistant) and other Polish filmmakers, the production of Possession, and how Orson Welles is one of his heroes.
• Critics Christian Blauvelt and Kristen Lopez have outlined several steps towards "[creating] a robust future for classic film appreciation" in our current era, a time in which films are more accessible than ever before.

• In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Lucille Hadžihalilović discusses Earwig, her mysterious adaptation of Brian Catling's novel.

• John Menick's essay on spiritualism's afterlife in the movies shines a light on the ghosts haunting the communication technologies of Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper (2016), Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001), and more.

Michael Almereyda's Nadja (1994)

• From Vulture, Alison Wilmore has written a tribute to the vampires of mid-90s New York City, the stars of Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, and Larry Fessenden’s Habit.
• A new Halloween-themed issue of Caligari features an overview of Mexican horror cinema from the 1960s to 1990s by Armando Hernández, a "sonic account" of 1980s cinema by Masha Tupitsyn, and Jennifer Reeder on 20 "twisted tales about twisted women." Also included is an article on three ideas for how to cook with a Thai pumpkin, or kabocha squash, by Chef Jazz of the Hollywood Thai restaurant Jitlada. Enjoy!
• The first part of Luc Moullet's monograph on King Vidor's The Fountainhead has now been translated into English over at The Seventh Art.
• In an expansive conversation with Ultra Dogme, Jerome Hiller shares his thoughts on the influence of Stan Brakhage, his own approach to editing, and his friendship with Gregory Markopoulos.

• From Andy Rector's Kino Slang, a brief excerpt from Sergei Eisenstein's Method, describing his visit to a women's clinic in Zurich.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

• We recommend this episode of the Rialto Report podcast, in which the late Wakefield Poole discusses his film career alongside Jim Tushinski, who directed I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole.

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

• "The spectator also finds himself between two realities, two juxtaposed times." Christelle Lheureux's introduces her film 80,000 Years Old, which is showing exclusively on MUBI in the series Brief Encounters.
• Dana Reinoo's Notebook Primer is dedicated to John Carpenter, one of Hollywood's great genre filmmakers.
• An excerpt from Melissa Anderson’s book on David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire, the third release in the Decadent Editions series, devoted to milestones of the 2000s.
• For The Current Debate, Leonardo Goi outlines the ongoing discussion regarding the style and substance of Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi epic Dune.
• Peter Kim George's essay on Rebecca Hall's Passing investigates the film's relationship to the 1929 novella by Nella Larsen that serves as its source.
• Rafaela Bassili reflects on the distillation of autobiography in Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir Part II, the follow-up to her 2019 film.
• In a new conversation for The Deuce Notebook, No Wave progenitor Amos Poe and The Deuce take a tour through downtown Manhattan, with a stop at the 8th Street Playhouse for Alphabet City.

• For our Just One Film series, Ruairi McCann recommends Nguyễn Trinh Thi's How to Improve the World, which attempts to collapse cultural and generational barriers related to her home country of Vietnam.

EXTRAS

• Vinegar Syndrome and Altered Innocence have announced the release of LA Plays Itself: The Fred Halsted Collection, a boxset dedicated to the "taboo-shattering" films of Fred Halsted. The boxset includes a video essay by critic Caden Mark Gardner, audio commentary by Evan Purchell of Ask Any Buddy, and a gallery of promotional art.
• A Halloween miracle: A 3.5 hour, 16mm, black-and-white director's cut of George Romero's Martin has been located by Kevin Kriess and the Living Dead Museum.
• Dune star Timotheé Chalamet was once an Xbox YouTuber known as ModdedController360, who specialized in custom paint jobs of Xbox 360 controllers.