Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.
NEWS
Liam Neeson in Martin Scorsese's Silence
- We're still waiting for Martin Scorsese's new film set in 17th century Japan, Silence (an adaptation of the same book Masahiro Shinoda's 1971 film is based on), but things may be moving quickly for his next project, the long-in-gestation The Irishman, set to star Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. We'll believe it when we see it, but we sure want to see it!
- Cannes begins! If this week's Rushes seems a bit threadbare, it's because we've arrive at the Cannes Film Festival and can't think of anything else. Stay tuned on the Notebook for our festival coverage.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Our very favorite video essayist, Tag Gallagher, has made a new one for Sight & Sound on Raoul Walsh's classic noir western, Pursued (1947).
- Radiohead dropped their new album, A Moon Shaped Pool, this week, and part of the rapid build up to the release was last week's premiere of the video for "Daydreaming," directed by none other than Paul Thomas Anderson.
- "She was right...I am dangerous": The latest trailer for Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon.
- The teaser trailer for one of the most bizarre and anticipated movies premiering later this week at the Cannes Film Festival: Catalan director Albert Serra's La mort de Louis XIV, starring French New Wave mascot Jean-Pierre Léaud as the Sun King.
RECOMMENDED READING
A condensation of Fantasia
- AnOther has a stunning piece on Jason Shulman's practice of condensing whole movies into single photographs:
"'The images vary so wildly, that’s the remarkable thing about it,' Shulman continues, 'and they’re also quite didactic. You can learn something about the director’s style from this kind of kooky translation: you can learn that Hitchcock deals with people, for example, Kubrick deals with composition, Bergman deals with… I mean lots of Bergman films are kind of moody and psychological, much more so than other films. So it’s odd that in one exposure all of these things, although very subjective, kind of come through.'"
- Interview has re-published a 1994 interview with Jean-Luc Godard conducted by the great American critic, Andrew Sarris:
"...I can still be inside both kinds of history, but that doesn't put me on the barricades. I write and film history; I don't make it. One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker. I didn't have to pick up a rifle to make Les Carabiniers [1963]."
- Woody Allen doesn't grant many interviews these days, but with his new film Café Society opening the Cannes Film Festival today, the Hollywood Reporter sat down with the New Yorker for a chat:
"I wanted to do kind of a novel on film, about a family and the relationships of the members toward one another, and the protagonist's love relationship. I wanted it to have the structure of a novel, so I could move around and dwell on various members of the family. That's why I narrated it because I was sort of the writer of the novel that you were experiencing when you saw the film."
- American documentarian Frederick Wiseman has been making the rounds with his wonderful new documentary, In Jackson Heights, and Keyframe has one of the best interviews we've read with this legendary filmmaker:
"I don’t particularly like editing digitally, but I have to. I’m old, I’m accustomed to using film. I like editing film much better than digital editing, but there’s no turning back now. Most of the labs in America that did 16-milimeter processing don’t exist anymore, or they’ve converted solely to digital. Fuji, at least the last I checked, was still making film negative. Kodak doesn’t even make it anymore, other than for special order. I do not agree with those who think that it is less expensive to shoot digitally. It’s true that the shooting is less expensive, but the finish costs are more expensive. Color grading is infinitely more expensive than film grading. I used to grade the films in two passes sitting with the color grader in a lab. Now it takes two weeks. What you can do in the color grading is extraordinary but I’m not sure it’s that much better. So a lot of the money you save in the shooting, you spend in the color grading."
- Finally, to continue the theme of director interviews, Daniel Kalder at the Los Angeles Review of Books has a lovely and extensive conversation with Chilean artist Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose new film Endless Poetry premieres soon in Cannes:
"I always am thinking about really inner problems; the inner search. What is the beautifulness of a human being? Moral problems — something like that, no? You need to ask yourself: What is the goal of my life? At what age I will die? How many years I have? What I will do with the years that I have?"
RECOMMENDED LISTENS
Clint Mansell
- You certainly know the soundtrack work of musician and composer Clint Mansell; several of his throbbing themes for Requiem for a Dream alone have been endlessly reused in ads and trailers. He did the score for Ben Wheatley's High-Rise, and over at the Criterion Collection's Current, Hillary Weston talks to Mansell about his work:
"I don’t like a lot of film music because I don’t think it does enough of a job half the time—it’s just wallpaper. But then you talk about Indiana Jones, and you remove the score from that film and all you’ve got left is Harrison Ford making some strange faces; the score does everything in that film, it just adds what’s required. Not every score should contribute in that way, but we have an industry now where I’ve had producers say to me, “Can you make it more neutral?” You often get this, “Oh, the best film scores are the ones you don’t notice.” Yeah, some scores are like that, but there’s not only one way to score a film, and that’s what has always driven me. When I first met Darren Aronofsky, one of the first things we agreed about was the fact that we didn’t like film music because it was rubbish and wallpaper and just sits there a lot of the time."
- John Carpenter isn't only one of the great American film directors; he is also one of the great composers of film music. Dummy magazine talks to Carpenter about his favorite movie soundtracks, which include Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo, James Bernard's The Quartermass Xperiment, and Tangerine Dream's Sorcerer.
- Film Comment's latest podcast begins with an overview of the magazine's new issue, but it's second half is particularly of note, centered on the most important film event in New York this year, the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of the work of French filmmaking duo Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Digital Editor Violet Lucca talks with Film Society of Lincoln Center programmer Dan Sullivan, MoMA curator Josh Siegel and editor and translator Ted Fendt about the series.