Edited by Adam Cook
- The Austrian Film Museum has made video excerpts available online of forty years worth of Q&As with various filmmakers and actors.
- This is really interesting: Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience is going to become a television series written and directed by Lodge Kerrigan & Amy Seimetz.
- In their continuing series of English translations of Cahiers du cinéma articles, Indiewire have published a review of Mia Hansen-Love's Goodbye First Love by Florence Maillard.
- For Criterion, Geoffrey O'Brien writes on "The Secret Heart of Judex":
"That images so hauntingly beautiful should carry such an edge of anxiety comes close to the secret heart of Judex. It is a cinematic paradise, evoking a world that at that very moment was being irrevocably swept away. For Franju, it was linked, as he acknowledged, to his memories of childhood. He was four years old when Feuillade’s film came out (although there is no evidence of his having seen it), right in the middle of the Great War, of which he was at that age blissfully unaware. Judex’s melodramatic crises are framed—casually by Feuillade, and with fervent and fetishistic devotion by Franju—by the design and texture of clothes, furnishings, hallways, gardens, the accoutrements of a world apparently stable. But this was a paradise already lost in the moment of its inception, and it is not so much a question of bringing it back to life as of creating it again, through the alternate reality of cinema."
- Another piece via Criterion, this one by Farran Smith Nehme on Jane Wyman's performance in All That Heaven Allows.
- Above: a new trailer for the 4K restoration of Jacques Tati's PlayTime.
- Celluloid Liberation Front writes on a programme organised by the Palestine Film Foundation in London in a web exclusive piece for Sight & Sound:
"The fate of their struggle notwithstanding, the history of Palestinians will most probably be, and as a matter of fact already is, subjected to the kind of violent manipulation reserved to the oppressed, the wretched of the earth, the defeated. In order to delegitimise what is ratified by international law, repressive forces need to reinvent (hi)stories, engineer toxic narratives to feed to gullible readers and passive spectators eager to see ‘good’ triumphing over ‘evil’. Mass-mediated propaganda works miracles: ethnic cleansing can be made to look like self-defence, apartheid like a just necessity and resistance denounced as terrorism. The oppressed always face a twofold injustice simultaneously aimed at their present and past; their history is distorted and their right to self-expression effectively taken away."
- More from Celluloid Liberation Front, this time on Hito Steyerl for Cinema Scope Online.
- Above: from our Tumblr.
- In The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes on Spike Lee's latest film, the Kickstarter-funded Da Sweet Blood of Jesus:
"Lee looks at his own multiple lives—including his sheltered comforts and his exacting artistic vision, his popular background and his cultural heritage—and puts them into hectically overlapping multiple perspectives. He overlays the effect of Gunn’s film on him and the view of black American life that it conjures, his own desires and inhibitions, his ethical sense and his inner passions, his rueful meditations on his contradictory cultural and religious heritage."
- The Spring issue of Film Quarterly is now available.
- Above: Werner Herzog, featured on an episode of the South Bank Show in 1982.