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NEWS
Above: Wonder Woman 1984.
- Warner Bros announced the surprising decision this week to have its entire 2021 theatrical slate—which includes Dune, Wonder Woman 1984, and even Clint Eastwood's Cry Macho—on the streaming service HBO Max for each film's first month of release, in addition to a concurrent theatrical release.
- In other seismic shifts in cinema history, Kodak has sadly discontinued its color internegative stock, a decision that will no doubt have long-term consequences. As John Klacsmann points out on Twitter, this is "the most used stock when preserving 16mm experimental film."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Co-organized with the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) and Taiwan Cinema Toolkit, Anthology Film Archives is presenting a must-see, free series of Taiwanese b-movies, a realm of cinema containing "the down-and-dirty genre films that proliferated in the late 1970s and early 1980s and which marked a sharp break from the more staid and respectable Taiwanese cinema that had dominated the country’s screens up to that point."
- Media City Film Festival has announced a new initiative, Thousandsuns Cinema, a virtual cinema and artist index featuring works shown at MCFF over the last twenty-five years. The roster includes filmmakers like Sky Hopinka, Barbara Hammer, Mati Diop, and Joyce Wieland.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.
- In light of the release of David Fincher's Mank, Vulture's Bilge Ebiri charts the rise and "inevitable fall" of Citizen Kane as the long-considered "greatest movie ever made."
- At the end of an unprecedented year, list season persists, starting with a list for the top ten films of the year from Vulture, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times, Indiewire has also published its annual list for the best undistributed films.
- Fireflies Press has announced The Decadent Editions, a series of 10 books about 10 films, one for each year of the 2000s. The series starts with critic Nick Pinkerton's book, a meditation on Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn, movie theatre closures and corporate takeovers, and the death of cinema.
- In a new interview with The Baffler, Julie Dash discusses her relationship to historiography and anthropology, the influence of Afrofuturism on her work, and the early research process for her upcoming Angela Davis biopic.
- "The future of movies is foggy, but the decisions of a financialized Hollywood are as clear as day." From Peter Labuza at Polygon, a deeper look into Warner Bros and HBO Max's 2021 release strategy.
- Coinciding with his new series and film at Fondation Cartier in Paris, Sight & Sound has published an overview of the legendary 82-year-old Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian and his "impressionistic, textless torrents of often abstracted imagery."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- A haunting new John Carpenter track from Carpenter's new album, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Florence Scott-Anderton and composer Lim Giong have an intimate conversation on imagination and time, working with filmmakers like Jia Zhang-ke and Hou Hsiao-hsien, and calling up old friends.
- David Perrin reports on this year's Viennale, one of the years only "in person" festivals, including the retrospective section on found footage filmmaking.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum shares two questions for Marta Mateus regarding the autobiographical and contradictory elements of her film Barbs, Wastelands. The film is exclusively showing December 8 - January 6, 2021 on MUBI in the Brief Encounters series.
- In an interview with Nicolas Rapold, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt shares his insights on filming David Fincher's Mank, his previous photography work, and using digital composites.