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NEWS
*Corpus Callosum (Michael Snow, 2002).
- Michael Snow, Canadian artist and avant-garde filmmaker best known for Wavelength and La Région Centrale, has died at the age of 94. Via Sabzian, Snow’s 2020 email exchange with Brandon Kaufman is a worthy read; the artist reflects on a life of filmmaking, painting, and playing jazz piano. “Though I’ve had an interesting life, I don’t think I’m particularly nostalgic,” he types.
- According to The Hollywood Reporter, Francis Ford Coppola's long-gestating, self-funded passion project Megalopolis is in mid-production peril, with a number of key collaborators departing as the budget expands.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A new restoration for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s turn-of-the-century classic Millennium Mambo (2001) is in US cinemas now. Metrograph have shared a trailer for the 4K restoration of the “transfixing trance-out of a movie” that catalogs the trials, tribulations, and elations of a forlorn nightclub hostess in neon-soaked, post-Y2K Taipei clubland.
- Grasshopper have shared a trailer for Albert Serra’s newest film Pacifiction (2022). An elliptical, elusive political thriller, it stars Benoît Magimel as a diplomat based in French Polynesia who sees his comfy position challenged by threats from both near and far.
RECOMMENDED READING
Twin Peaks; The Return (David Lynch, 2017).
- “The nuclear era of American cinema has been over for a long time.” Drawing a line from Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964) to David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), Nicholas Russell surveys the role of the nuclear bomb on screen for the Baffler.
- “Death and the fortunes of love are treated in the same way as making a cup of coffee, reading the paper or getting up in the morning.” Alongside a new foreword by translator Theo Mantion, Film Quarterly have republished the first piece of criticism written by French novelist, philosopher, and feminist theorist Monique Wittig. Originally published in 1966, the piece examines the “lacunary” qualities of Jean-Luc Godard's early films.
- “Albeit a donkey, Eo is a typical Skolimowski protagonist, haplessly wandering through an incomprehensible, violent, and dehumanized world.” For the Nation, J. Hoberman writes about Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, “the flashiest, wildest, most heedless—in short, the most youthful—movie” he saw last year.
- “In the hands of the late Jean-Louis Trintignant, the seemingly unexceptional bourgeois is always more than meets the eye.” For Metrograph, Beatrice Loayza remembers Jean Louis-Trintignant through the pleasures of watching him embody roles such as the “sensitive simpleton” in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956) or his “mute gunslinger” in Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence (1968).
- “Noting the labs responsible for a distinctly tinted restoration, it becomes clear that certain houses have a style, a color profile or signature that marks the vast majority or all of their work.” For Filmmaker Magazine, Bingham Bryant writes about the “house styles” of the “powerhouse labs” responsible for many of the digital restorations of classic films and how certain “recurring tintings” have “flattened and homogenized” the images for him, “deadening” his experiences of seeing old films brought back to life and color.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Aftersun director Charlotte Wells joins host Rico Gagliano for a bonus episode of the MUBI Podcast. Among other topics, they talk about discovering the songs that make up the film’s impactful soundtrack, from David Bowie & Queen to Bran Van 3000.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Woman in the Moon (Fritz Lang, 1929).
- Paris: Fritz Lang is the subject of a current retrospective at the Cinematheque Française. Many of the films are screening twice or still to play, so most of them, like Metropolis (1927), Woman in the Moon (1929), and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (1933), can still be seen before the series's conclusion on February 13.
- London: A two-part event at Close-Up, "Strange Objects: Reflections on British Colonial Legacies" brings together various films by artist filmmaker Miranda Pennell that use archive photographs as a starting point for a reflection on Britain’s colonial legacies. Pennell will be present at both screenings, speaking with Kamila Kuc and Jananne Al-Ani about her practice in turn.
- New York: RaMell Ross, director of the highly acclaimed documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), has new work on view at Pace Gallery in an exhibition running from January 13 to February 25. "Desire Paths," which focuses on the area of Hale County, Alabama, puts Ross in dialogue with the late photographer, painter, and sculptor William Christenberry, and includes work from both artists in various forms, including sculpture, photography, and performance.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Ferny & Luca (Andrew Infante, 2021) + Take Care of My Cat (Jeong Jae-eun, 2001).
Features:
- Our year-in-review coverage of 2022 continues apace! In our annual Fantasy Double Features poll, our contributors pair new releases with repertory discoveries. Florence Scott-Anderton’s Soundtrack Mix looks back on a year of standout scores, and Jonah Jeng’s Action Scene column barrel-rolls through 2022’s most pulse-raising sequences.
- Speaking of “looking back,” Charlotte Wells reflects on directing memory-piece Aftersun in conversation with Caitlin Quinlan.
- At the end of December, Elissa Suh spoke to Marie Kreutzer about her lush, seething period piece Corsage, starring Vicky Krieps as Empress Elisabeth of Austria.
- In the newest Current Debate column, Leonardo Goi synthesizes the film-critical maelstrom surrounding Avatar: The Way of Water, a film of technical artistry and “cornball sincerity.”
- Closing out a year of Full Bloom columns, Patrick Holzapfel considers the common reed in Aleksandr Petrović’s Three (1965).
Short Reads:
- For our One Shot column, Jonah Jeng examines a single “mesmeric” shot in Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, a film that is “about visceral engagement itself—the means and the ideological ends to which we’re made to, in one character’s words, ‘feel so intensely.’”
- The aesthetics of bad taste are on the menu as Joshua Bogatin contemplates a frame from Hong Kong horror film Ebola Syndrome, another entry in our One Shot series.
EXTRAS
- Like wholesome clockwork, Steven Soderbergh has shared his annual viewing and reading log on his website.
- Another reading recommendation: Caesura has made available three poems by Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad, excerpted from a new translation of Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.