Rushes | IATSE Votes, AI Dubs, Chalamet Ping Pongs

NEWS

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001).

• Voting is underway to ratify IATSE’s tentative agreement with AMPTP, as union leaders try to assuage the fears of members about new allowances for AI. Results will be announced tomorrow, July 18.
• Agnieszka Holland, James Gray, Andrew Haigh, and Kleber Mendonça Filho, are among the members of the main competition jury of next month’s Venice Film Festival, led by Isabelle Huppert. 
• An AI company called Flawless is developing technology to dub films and television programs into different languages with “perfectly lip-synced visuals,” playing to the aspirations of non-English-language productions, especially, to reach a subtitle-averse market in the US.

IN PRODUCTION

• Timothée Chalamet will star in and produce Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, apparently inspired by the professional ping pong player Marty Reisman. This is Safdie’s first solo outing as a director since The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008), having shared the credit for his last five films with his brother, Benny.
• Emerald Fennell (Saltburn, 2023) is teasing plans to adapt Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights for the screen. 

REMEMBERING

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977).

• Shelley Duvall has died at 75. The American actress was known for her frequent collaborations with Robert Altman, having accepted a role in Brewster McCloud (1970) after meeting crewmembers at a party in Houston. In an interview with Andy Warhol, Duvall recalls being cast: “I said, ‘I’m not an actress.’ They said, ‘Yes, you are.’ Finally, I said, ‘All right, if you think I’m an actress I guess I am.’” She went on to appear in seven of Altman’s films, including Nashville (1975), 3 Women (1977), and Popeye (1980). Having worked with the likes of Terry Gilliam, Jane Campion, and Guy Maddin, Duvall is perhaps best known for her exacting performance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). In the 1980s, she created two acclaimed anthology series for children, Faerie Tale Theatre (1982–87) and Tall Tales & Legends (1985–87). 
• Bill Viola has died at 73. The American artist worked primarily in new media and video installations, exploring spiritual and religious themes in commissions for museums, and also churches and cathedrals, across the world. “I see the digital age as the joining of the material and the spiritual into a yet-to-be-determined whole,” he said in a 2010 interview.

Stations of the Elevated (Manfred Kirchheimer, 1980).

• Manfred Kirchheimer has died at 93. The German American filmmaker and teacher was an esteemed documentarian of New York City in such films as Stations of the Elevated (1980), Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan (2006), and most recently, Free Time (2019), an assembly of footage he had shot with Walter Hess in the 1950s and ’60s. “I wanted to shoot the city as if I was a visitor from the future,” he said in a 2021 interview.
• Shannen Doherty has died at 53. The American actress began working as a child, including roles in Little House: A New Beginning (1983), Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), and Heathers (1988). She went on to star in Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–94) and appeared in its revamps, 90210 (2008–09) and BH90210 (2019); with that legacy in mind, Gregg Araki cast her in his high-school film Nowhere (1997), which he wanted to feel like “Beverly Hills, 90210 on acid.” “She never tried, she just was,” remembered co-star Tori Spelling.
• Richard Simmons has died at 76. The American fitness instructor hosted an eponymous television show (1980–84) and produced dozens of workout videos, including the long-running Sweatin’ to the Oldies series (1988–2010). Known for his flamboyant proselytizing for aerobics, he made frequent television appearances and many film cameos. “When the king gets depressed,” Simmons remarked in a 2012 interview with Men’s Health, “he doesn’t call for his wife. He doesn’t call for the cook. He calls for the court jester.”

RECOMMENDED READING

Boyz n the Hood (John Singleton, 1991).

• “There are truths that can be heard but not seen.” For the New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix profiles Lawrence Abu Hamdan, whose sound work is encountered both as art in museums or galleries and as evidence in investigations of human rights abuses.
• “Soon there would be Jersey Shore knockoffs on other networks. The subcultural strip mining of America had begun.” For Bookforum, A. S. Hamrah reviews Emily Nussbaum’s history of reality television, bringing to bear his former day job as a brand analyst.
• “Singleton crafts an immediacy and vividness that sidesteps much of traditional Hollywood. . . To show South Central on film was novel alone.” For It’s Nice That, Meg Farmer visits an exhibition dedicated to John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991) at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles.
• “Pour one out for poor Antoine Doinel . . . who finally achieves his dream of seeing the ocean at the end of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) only to be trapped in that moment forever, the word FIN superimposed on his image like the bars of a prison cell.” For Vulture, Chris Stanton delivers an ode to the freeze-frame ending, that standby of 1980s action and comic cinema.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Daguerréotypes (Agnes Varda, 1976).

• New York, July 17 through August 28: The Paris Theater presents “Agnès Varda’s Paris,” which pairs Varda’s shorts with feature-length works by Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Maurice Pialat, Éric Rohmer, and Leos Carax.
• London, July 18 through August 25: The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents “Let Cinema Go to Its Ruin,” a comprehensive retrospective of Marguerite Duras’s film work.
• New York, July 20: The Metrograph Summer Book Fair will offer 500 rare film books from the collection of the late Robert Gottlieb, the esteemed literary editor.
• Salzburg, through September 8: Salzburger Kunstverein presents “Flashes of Resilience,” an exhibition by Philipp Fleischmann featuring a 24-foot-long looped 16mm film sculpture which dispenses with “traditional frame inscription, hence accentuating the dynamic and ever-changing perception of the visuals.”

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• MUBI has shared a teaser for Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), in theaters this September.
• A24 has shared a trailer for Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man (2024), in theaters this September.
• Neon has shared a trailer for Sean Baker’s Anora (2024), in theaters this October.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943).

• “Brenez saw in cinema not only a record of history and the present, but also schemas for a world to come.” Hicham Awad provides an introduction to the singular theoretical writing of Nicole Brenez, whose 1998 collection, On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular, is now available in English for the first time.
• “She played up the contradiction between her expressive, expansive mouth and the apparent frailty of her body, moving with a sense of brash confidence amid mortal danger, which her body picked up and her face transmitted like a radio antenna.” Peter Goldberg considers the brilliant, brief career of Zoë Lund on the occasion of a new restoration of Hot Ticket, her sole directorial effort, and an accompanying New York retrospective.
• “In the wake of president Javier Milei’s recent decision to defund INCAA, the main state financing body of Argentine cinema, El Pampero’s longtime outspoken refusal to take money from the state has taken on an unfortunate poignancy.” Joshua Bogatin pens an appreciation of El Pampero Cine’s low-budget, longform epics, discussing each of the collective’s four members in term.
• “The doctors at Saint-Alban did not see patients as objects to be diagnosed nor pathologized; fittingly, the images of the film are mutually created, which refuses to position patients as only objects of documentation.” Perwana Nazif surveys the filmic documentation of Francesc Tosquelles, the French psychiatrist who revolutionized institutional psychotherapy.

EXTRAS

• While shooting Megalopolis (2024), Francis Ford Coppola remodeled a Days Inn Motel outside of Atlanta, Georgia, into a 27-room hotel and post-production studio, intending to offer film crews a place to “live and intimately connect.” “When I didn’t want to think about the movie, I would think about this hotel,” Coppola has said, “and when I didn’t want to think about the hotel, I’d think about the movie.” That hotel will open to the public later this month.