Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Canadian documentarian Peter Wintonick has passed away at the age of 60. Aaron Cutler has some words and links on the artist.
- The Festival Internazionale del Film di Roma, also known as the Rome Film Festival, has announced its awards from a Jury chaired by James Gray. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Seventh Code was among the winners, picking up Best Director and Best Technical Contribution.
- The Seventh Art's latest video mag is now online, featuring interviews with João Pedro Rodrigues and Corneliu Porumboiu, among others.
- What's next for Joe Dante? A horror-comedy starring Anton Yelchin titled Burying the Ex (it's the sort of cheesy title we'd only let him get away with!).
Finds.
- Above: from our friend Adrian Curry's Tumblr, a French poster for The Big Sleep that auctioned off for $21,510.
- Check out this fun, totally bizarre interactive video for Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone".
- For Film Comment, Max Nelson takes a look at the different approaches to "Faust on Film".
- Above: over at Transit, Adrian Martin & Cristina Álvarez López have an incredible piece comprised of videos, images, and text on the cinema of Leos Carax.
- For The Nation, J. Hoberman has a "guide for watching movies while stoned."
- In The Front Row, Richard Brody reviews Frederick Wiseman's At Berkeley:
"In Wiseman’s view, the university is a sort of permanent summer camp, a serene place apart where professors transmit to students the substance, practice, and ethos of their own exacting and disciplined research and, in turn, students also engage in self-disciplining and exacting enterprises of their own, whether in classes or in their extra-curricular activities. The protests themselves, with their emphasis on strategy, organization, and management, come off as superb methods of training for professional activities of all sorts (the speech in tribute to Savio even makes reference to sixties protest leaders who are now in positions of authority, and the university chancellor is one of them). Wiseman dramatizes, throughout the film, the issue that arises in the great early classroom scene: the development of formidable skills for the exercise of power and the enactment of significant real-world changes, whether technological, intellectual, artistic, or political."
- Occasioned by its screening at AFI Fest, Darren Hughes and Blake Williams discuss Ramon Zürcher's The Strange Little Cat.
- Above: to go along with other Studio Ghibili goodies this week, including an American trailer for Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises and a new trailer for Isao Takahata's The Tale of Princess Kaguya, is this 6-minute prologue for Takahata's latest.
From the archives.
- Translated by Laurent Kretzschmar and Ted Fendt, Serge Daney in English has published the great French critic's review of John Ford's final masterpiece, 7 Women:
"Seven Women’s stage is an enclosed mission, a gate and a courtyard which smells of boards even though it is sand. There is nothing else for the characters to do than not to mess up their entrances and exits. There is nothing more entertaining, for the filmmaker, than playing with the characters by using false alarms, false exits, delayed entrances. The gates of the mission become a real character which often hinges on emptiness. The first time, Charles Pether goes through them and comes back empty handed: he hasn’t found the doctor. But the doctor arrives soon after, on a horse, almost on the sly. The second time, Pether leaves through the gates and doesn’t come back. But at the sound of the car horn, the gates are thrown wide open for Tunga Khan and his horsemen who bring back the car and the Chinese driver. There is an art of entrances and exits that is the other face of the human animal. In the end, the company of missionaries leaves the mission under the jeers of the bandits, like a company of amateur comedians leaving after the audience has thrown tomatoes at them. “The stage is a world”, quite, but the world is not a stage. Ford’s cinema doesn’t fold cinema over theatre and vice versa. This squaring of the circle would be too comfortable. Instead, it is cracked by what comes from the back."