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NEWS
Gasoline Rainbow (Bill and Turner Ross, 2023).
- London Film Festival have announced the films in their competitive sections, with new work by Zhang Mengqi, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and Bill and Turner Ross included in the Official Competition, plus films by Ehsan Khoshbakht, Cyril Aris, and Chloe Abrahams up for the Documentary award.
- Meanwhile, the Alliance of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently returned to the bargaining table with the Writers Guild of America, with CEOs like Bob Iger, David Zaslav, and Ted Sarandos in tow. "On the 113th day of the strike—and while SAG-AFTRA is walking the picket lines by our side—we were met with a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was,” wrote the WGA in a statement circulated to members, followed two days later by a thorough explanation of why this proposal was inadequate. As negotiations stall, the Academy has canceled reception events at fall festivals including TIFF, Telluride, and the London Film Festival.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- David Fincher’s newest film, The Killer, has a new teaser ahead of a Venice premiere, an October 27 theatrical release, and its Netflix arrival on November 10. A neo-noir graphic novel adaptation starring Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton, Fincher has said that, among other things, the film will explore the mechanisms of the “revenge genre as a tension delivery-system.”
- Ahead of a forthcoming US release on September 6, Cinema Guild have shared a trailer for the new restoration of Shinji Somai’s underseen P.P. Rider (1983). Based on a Leonard Schrader story, the film involves three students who find themselves involved with the Yakuza, ending up in what Patrick Preziosi, in a recent Notebook overview of the director, described as “a blizzard of cocaine and blood.”
- In the run-up to the TIFF premiere of his latest feature, He Thought He Died (2023), the experimental filmmaker Isiah Medina has been sharing some of his previous films—including Semi Auto Colors (2010), 88:88 (2015), and Inventing the Future (2020)—on his YouTube channel for a short time only. A trailer for the new feature is embedded below.
RECOMMENDED READING
Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023).
- “I don’t think about mortality. I’m busy.” In Variety, Stephen Rodrick speaks to Michael Mann about his new film Ferrari, but leaving room to cover other projects like Blackhat (2015), Heat (1995), and his novel Heat 2.
- “A collection of physical media is a bulwark against fear—the fear that rights holders may take works out of circulation, whether because of a mere contractual lapse or a calculated market-making and desire-stoking scarcity.” In the New Yorker, Richard Brody makes the argument that, within an ever-shifting streaming landscape, collecting physical media can be the best form of film preservation. Meanwhile, Carina del Valle Schorske writes for The New York Times Magazine about a program of dance films curated by Solange Knowles, and the need to keep rare media in circulation, regardless of commercial demand. “No new god is coming to the rescue,” she writes. “It’s up to us to take the whole world in our hands, and pass it on.”
- ”The show’s hyperlinked approach to montage catalogues the unreal and sinister texture of everyday life while simultaneously creating a world of set-ups, punch lines, and goofy psychedelic puns, like Sans Soleil but with jokes.” In Artforum, Charlie Fox writes about How To With John Wilson, which concludes its third and final season on HBO this week.
- In Air Mail, Jake Malooley gets the story of “how Martin Scorsese pulled himself out of one of the darkest periods of his career the only way he knew how: by shooting a movie,” talking to the director and his collaborators for an After Hours (1985) oral history.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
A Picture for Parco (Ayanna Dozier, 2022).
- Winnipeg, August 30 through October 11: Running at PLATFORM Centre, “Touch Me On The Inside And Call Me By My Name” is filmmaker and artist Ayanna Dozier’s first solo show in Canada. The exhibition “brings together new and recent film, text, and installation work that builds on Dozier’s practice of locating the body as an oft-contested site of pleasure, labour, and care.”
- Paris, August 30 through November 8: The Cinémathèque française has a retrospective of the films of American director Raoul Walsh. Making more than 80 films over a half-century long career, Walsh was a pioneer in the adventure, western, war, and film noir genres, and worked with performers including Douglas Fairbanks, Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, and more.
- New York, August 31: The latest Film Comment Live is a free screening program of 1970s 16mm shorts on labor. Curated by Elena Rossi-Snook, Collection Manager at the New York Public Library, the selections offer a glimpse at “cinematic microhistories of work, workers, and solidarity struggles across industries.” The screening is followed by a conversation between Rossi-Snook and filmmaker Brett Story.
- New York, through September 13: At Metrograph in coming weeks are micro-focuses on the directorial works of Babette Mangolte—a renowned downtown New York avant-gardist, and cinematographer for Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, and Agnès Varda—and Paul Vecchiali, “a master of melodrama whose always surprising films draw equally on ’30s poetic realism, Jacques Demy, Jean-Luc Godard, and his unique strain of dangerous, disruptive and very queer emotion.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Free Will Mode: Disposable Muses (Or, Your Turn Now, Fuckers) (Angela Washko, 2023).
- Cutscenes—our column exploring, and blurring, the intersection of cinema and video games—is back. In this edition, Matt Turner speaks to new media artist Angela Washko about her courageous, confrontational practice, which has led her to duel internet pickup artists and use The Sims as a sandpit: “Washko’s practice, per her own description, is ‘devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in the spaces most hostile toward it.’”
- “The point of my filmmaking is probably—there’s this conflict situation, but what can we do next? How do we step out to consider those influences positively?” A.E. Hunt interviews Daisuke Miyazaki on the occasion of a mini-retrospective of his work in Brooklyn. They talk about how Miyazaki’s films—location-rich, politically engaged, and full of pop music—reflect modern Japan; his latest film, Plastic (2023), centers on a young couple brought together by their love for a ’70s glam band.
EXTRAS
- For this week's animal-themed archive issue, the New Yorker have resurfaced a 2009 fiction piece by Noah Baumbach that we might call: Cocaine Bee. The premise of Buzzed is introduced in an epigraph: "To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain..." This is Samuel Beckett's Not I, if performed by a bee on cocaine.