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NEWS
Until Branches Bend (Sophie Jarvis, 2022).
- Amidst a widespread debate on the merit of U.S. state financial incentives for film and television productions, a Georgia bill that would have limited the sale of tax credits was rejected by the Senate Finance Committee. In recent years, those credits have exceeded $1 billion despite findings that the state makes back only 19¢ on the dollar.
- Four of the thirteen labor guilds bargaining with IATSE have now reached tentative agreements with the AMPTP: Locals 600 (cinematographers), 729 (set painters), 800 (art directors), and 695 (production sound, video assist, video engineering, and studio projection). IATSE president Matthew Loeb has threatened to strike if a new contract is not in place when the current one expires on July 31.
- Due to financial constraints, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival will be discontinued after 36 years and presentations in over 30 cities.
IN PRODUCTION
- Zackary Drucker will direct, John Cameron Mitchell will produce, and Hari Nef will star in a biopic of Candy Darling, the Warhol superstar.
- Léa Seydoux and Tony Leung will star in Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, which “tells three stories from the perspective of a tree,” set to go into production next month.
REMEMBERING
Blood Simple (Ethan Coen, 1984).
- M. Emmet Walsh is dead at 88. The prolific character actor of stage and screen was eulogized by The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who praises especially his “immortal” and “demonically inspired performance” in the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). In a piece from the LA Weekly archives, Nicolas Rapold calls Walsh “a consummate old pro of the second-banana business.”
- Richard Serra is dead at 85. Known primarily for large-scale, site-specific sculpture, the artist was also responsible for an impressive body of moving-image work.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The first nine minutes of footage from a teenaged Orson Welles’s prep-school production of Twelfth Night have been rediscovered: “This is Illyria, lady.”
- Janus Films has released a new trailer for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist (2023), in theaters in the UK on April 5 and in the US on May 3. “His imagery and tone is suspiciously nonchalant,” Daniel Kasman wrote of the film at Toronto, “placed as it is on the uneasy edge of the arty and the beautiful.”
- Park Circus has released a trailer for the 25th-anniversary restoration of Lynne Ramsay’s haunting debut, Ratcatcher (1999), set in a condemned Glasgow public housing scheme during the 1970s sanitation workers strike.
RECOMMENDED READING
Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945).
- “Hitchcock would sometimes claim that storyboarding was his main creative duty, and that he regarded the directing process as mere donkey work, so dull that he barely bothered looking into the viewfinder.” In The Guardian, Tim Jonze details the yard-sale discovery of the original storyboards for Spellbound (1945), including one by Salvador Dalí.
- “I’m just thinking that a crisis like this should simply prompt cinema to catch up!” For Screen Slate, Radu Jude speaks to George MacBeth about Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), citing Caroline Golum’s Notebook essay on TikTok and the grammar of silent film.
- “She has the sort of face that looks like it knows the worst before it happens, and so when the worst does happen, it just confirms the anxiety in her eyes.” In The Chiseler, Dan Callahan summarizes the long life and career of Sylvia Sidney, who was typecast as a tragedian and “paid by the tear.”
- “What the films mainly reveal is a determinate pleasure in filmmaking, in the art of looking, and in the making and organising of images.” For Sabzian, Gerard Jan-Claes writes about Chantal Akerman’s long-lost first films—the four 8mm shorts she completed in the late 1960s as part of her entrance exam to Belgium’s INSAS film school.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949).
- Los Angeles, through March 31: The Film Noir Foundation presents the 25th edition of Noir City: Hollywood at the Egyptian Theatre, a showcase of 23 films, including twelve 35mm prints.
- New York, through March 31: Film at Lincoln Center presents “The Long Strange Trips of Wojciech Jerzy Has,” a comprehensive retrospective of the Polish surrealist.
- London, April 6: Tate Britain presents a rare screening of Carole Enahoro’s three-channel Oyinbo Pepper (1986), with the filmmaker appearing in person alongside Dr. Bunmi Oyinsan.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
exergue – on documenta 14 (Dimitris Athiridis, 2024).
- “Dependent on nation-states and multinational corporations for funding, major film festivals like the Berlinale are only politically outspoken, today, when it is convenient or uncontroversial.” Laura Staab interrogates the terms of political engagement with the Berlin International Film Festival.
- “Companies should look elsewhere for their shopping rather than try to strong-arm a platform for film celebration into one whose priority is film commerce.” Daniel Kasman weighs the various demands made on the Berlinale programmers by the public, the artists, the industry, and the festival’s sponsors.
- “Has’s films possess a hypnotic instability, a shapeshifting quality that discloses the process of their creation.” Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer considers the labyrinthine cinema of Wojciech Has.
- “The Discarnates revels in unfamiliarity, in that sweet space between the real and the unreal, whereas All of Us Strangers is preoccupied with historical context.” Juan Barquin compares two adaptations of the same Taichi Yamada novel, 36 years apart.
EXTRAS
- Martin Scorsese has donated his massive VHS collection, with shows and movies taped off of the airwaves and meticulously labeled, to the University of Colorado Boulder, where one can now peruse the catalog.