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NEWS
- Subscribe to Notebook magazine before November 1 to receive Issue 4, which explores cinematic soundscapes in their diverse sonic forms and includes contributions from filmmakers like Pedro Costa, Garrett Bradley, and Dominga Sotomayor, pop musician Julia Holter, plus a wide range of artists, writers, and scholars. Subscribers will also receive with this issue a very special gift, a seven-inch record featuring a song by filmmaker Gus Van Sant and a field recording by sound designer Leslie Shatz.
- This week brought the sad, shocking news that the legendary Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has retired from filmmaking due to illness. Hou's family confirmed in a statement that he is battling Alzheimer's, and the effects of long COVID have forced him to stop making films; they requested privacy during this time, adding that he is healthy overall, in the presence of family. Hou’s final film stands as 2015’s The Assassin, though he had been hoping to make the long-gestating Shulan River in recent years.
- Lea Mysius’s next film, her third, will be an adaptation of Laurent Mauvignier’s novel The Birthday Party: a thriller set in a rural French hamlet, revolving around a man planning a surprise for his wife’s birthday. Mysius’s earlier films The Five Devils (2022) and Ava (2017) are now showing on MUBI in most countries; she is also a credited screenwriter on Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (2022), Arnaud Desplechin’s Oh Mercy! (2019) and Ismael’s Ghosts (2017), and André Téchiné’s Farewell to the Night (2019).
REMEMBERING
Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971).
- Richard Roundtree, the star of Gordon Parks's Shaft (1971) and its sequels, has died of pancreatic cancer at age of 81. With his breakout role as detective John Shaft, Roundtree broke ground at age 29 as one of the first Black action icons: "the image kids see of him on the screen is of a Black man who is for once a winner," Roundtree told the New York Times in 1972, soon after the film's release. Roundtree's longtime manager, Patrick McGinn, confirmed the news in a statement: “Richard’s work and career served as a turning point for African American leading men in film,” he wrote, via Variety. “The impact he had on the industry cannot be overstated.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Christmas Carole (Agnès Varda, 1966).
- About five minutes of footage from Agnès Varda’s abandoned 1966 project Christmas Carole have been restored by Ciné Tamaris, and are now available to stream via Henri, the online video platform of the Cinémathèque française. In a 2019 Notebook interview with Giovanni Marchini Camia, excerpted from Fireflies #5, Varda recounts planning the project with actors Gérard Dépardieu, Francis Merle, and Hélène Viard: “We shot a few scenes. This producer, [Edmond] Tenoudji, had told me, ‘Show me what you’ve done and I’ll show it to my two young sons, let’s see if they like [Dépardieu].’ And the two sons said, ‘This guy’s impossible, he sucks!’ [Laughs] Tenoudji refused; the film was never made. There exist maybe four shots in all.”
- Altered Innocence have shared a trailer for a 2K restoration of The Strangler (1970), a psychological thriller by the underappreciated French filmmaker and Cahiers du Cinémacritic Paul Vecchiali. Described as “a noir refracted through Vecchiali’s own bodily and plangent cinema” by Patrick Preziosi in his primer of Vecchiali’s production company Diagonale, the film has several theatrical screenings upcoming in New York in November.
- With his new film Passages (2023) now streaming on MUBI, Ira Sachs recently joined MUBI at Posteritati to discuss some of his most beloved movie poster designs, spanning films by Bob Fosse and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
RECOMMENDED READING
- The sixth issue of SEEN, a film journal published by BlackStar Projects, is available to pre-order in print and digital editions. Two articles are currently available online: Lily Gladstone interviewed by Kelli Weston, and Danielle Deadwyler interviewed by Jasmin Hernandez. The issue ships from October 25.
- “Just as a scene in a movie may be made of dozens of shots of diverse durations, assembled in various ways, and often ranging far in time and space and tone, so Scorsese speaks in a free-associative, quick-cut, montage-like manner that is entirely his own, building drama as the details accrete and connect with verbal counterparts to cuts, dissolves, superimpositions, and other kinds of cinematic punctuation.” Richard Brody speaks to Martin Scorsese for the New Yorker, in an interview he calls "the fastest hour of conversation I’d ever experienced.”
- “Played by David Niven, the hero of A Matter of Life and Death is your emblematic Englishman—in that he is a muddle. He is trad and prog, romantic and practical, and amiably optimistic even in the teeth of disaster (and perhaps then most of all).” In the Guardian, Xan Brooks surveys the “morally complex, frequently carnal and often downright weird” films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
- “In the April 1982 issue of Playboy, Robert Towne, the Academy Award–winning screenwriter of Chinatown (1974), likened being a writer to being a woman, ‘because women tend to have more power and more acumen than they’re generally credited with,’ he said. ‘The same with a screenwriter…’” For Gagosian Quarterly, Fiona Duncan writes about the production, reception, and “ambitious girl world” of Towne’sunderrated debut as a director, Personal Best (1982).
- “Of all the heads to spin, why this one?” In a beautifully designed, multi-part piece featuring essays by Jason Zinoman, Manohla Dargis, and Erik Piepenburg, the New York Times celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- New York, November 4: Organized by artist and curator Stanley Schtinter, Last Movies is a day-long series of screenings of films that were the last that an individual saw before their death. Light Industry will present the last films seen by Lee Harvey Oswald, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Franz Kafka, and more. A book following the same idea has also been published by Tenement Press.
- Queensland, November 10 through 29: Running at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Cinema Obstructed, write season co-curators Charlie Shackleton and Robert Hughes, “is an eclectic survey of films that share one thing in common: each has something standing in its way.” Included in this unusual program are David Schickele's Bushman (1971), Marlon Fuentes’s Bontoc Eulogy (1995), plus the first public screening of Shackleton’s Paint Drying (2016), “a 607-minute film consisting of a single, unbroken shot of white paint drying on a brick wall, created in protest against the British censorship board.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Los muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 2004).
- “Throughout Los muertos, there is a towering muteness that registers as lament. Muteness, not silence. Because there are sounds, and they are visceral.” In this excerpt from the sixth volume of the Viennale’s ongoing Textur series, the filmmaker Deborah Stratman writes about the “fugue states of repetition” in Lisandro Alonso’s 2004 film Los muertos.
- "The artist’s interview at its best—at its most entertaining and challenging—is a space for self-mythologization." Charlotte Palmer writes about the stylish mystique cultivated by Jean-Pierre Melville in longform interviews.
- For this month’s Notebook Primer, Ciara Moloney revisits the comedies of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—a legendary partnership unfairly overshadowed by their individual stardom. When returning to their films together, one senses "the intimacy, intensity, and explosiveness that runs through a decade in each other’s pockets."