The Noteworthy: MUBI + Tumblr, Friedkin Rediscoveries, Swallowing Celluloid

Adam Nayman on Friedkin's _Sorcerer_, Fincher abandons Jobs, Bordwell on the Hong Kong International Film Festival, digested film & more.
Notebook

Edited by Adam Cook

  • Above: a production still from the set of Manoel de Oliveira’s new production O velho do restelo, via our new MUBI Tumblr!
  • Sight & Sound is poised to unveil a Best Documentaries of All Time list and Richard Brody has unveiled his ballot in advance, with annotations:

"...The history of documentary filmmaking isn’t the fact of capturing events on the wing but the idea of doing so, not the invention of investigative recording but its reinvention. That’s why, for this list, I selected movies that open new vistas for documentary filmmaking, which imply vectors of activity and thought that are still being realized today by the era’s best documentarists—and why, in mentioning these films, each of them implies many others that they have inspired. "

  • Above: Nathan Silver is turning to Kickstarter to fund his next project, Stinking Heaven. Keep your eyes out for his brilliant film, Exit Elena, coming soon to MUBI!
  • For Cinema Scope Online, Adam Nayman writes on the newly re-released William Friedkin film, Sorcerer:

"Sorcerer, of course, was the definitive opposite of an Exorcist-sized hit, becoming perhaps the preeminent casualty of the Summer of Star Wars—Friedkin’s equivalent of Apocalypse Now (1979), absent the subsequent critical and commercial reclamation. The Icarus-like trajectories of the Easy Riders/Raging Bulls crowd are familiar enough to preclude too much rehashing here, but suffice it to say that (as the received narrative has it) the 'New Hollywood' brats, fuelled on the hubris of the artistic and financial capital earned by their earlier incursions into the mainstream, dreamed too big and were correspondingly brought low, some briefly (Spielberg, Scorsese), others more or less permanently (Coppola, Cimino). But where many of these directors have either disavowed or downplayed the elephantine films that threatened to (or in fact did) crush their careers, Friedkin has stuck to his guns on Sorcerer, claiming that it is 'one of my only films that I can watch, because it came out almost exactly as I had intended.'"

  • Above: more Friedkin rediscovery, this time in the form of his debut, the 1962 documentary The People vs. Paul Crump, which is being put out by Facets.
  • David Fincher has left the production of the Aaron Sorkin-scripted Steve Jobs film he was attached to after Sony Pictures was unwilling to meet Fincher's demands for control over the project.
  • David Bordwell has a report on the films he caught at the Hong Kong International Film Festival—with an accidental focus on genre.
  • Above: "student artists Luke Evans and Joshua Lake swallowed single frames of 35mm film, folding each piece in a brightly colored capsule that allowed for the acids and bodily fluids to process the film with minimal risk of colon damage. Once excreted, the negatives were recovered, cleaned, and studied in detail by an electron microscope; ultimately, they were printed into giant black and white works."
  • In an interview with Esquire, Jonathan Glazer reveals some of his influences, including Nicolas Roeg, Bresson, Vigo, Pasolini and Fassbinder.

  • Above: Maureen O'Hara in conversation with Robert Osbourne before a recent screening of John Ford's How Green Was My Valley.

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The NoteworthyNewsWilliam FriedkinDavid FincherNathan SilverJames BenningManoel de OliveiraPaul Thomas AndersonJonathan GlazerKenji MizoguchiJohn FordMaureen O'HaraspotlightFestival CoverageVideos
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