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NEWS
Nighthawks (Ron Peck, 1978).
- Buenos Aires—1970s Los Angeles—outer space—all of these destinations are contained in Issue 2 of the Notebook print magazine, which will ship out at the end of January. Click here to learn more and subscribe.
- If you read this New York Times profile of Jennifer Lawrence carefully, you’ll find that she is planning a project with Lynne Ramsay—an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love. (The book’s synopsis begins thusly: “In a forgotten patch of French countryside, a woman is battling her demons…”) In a follow-up tweet, Kyle Buchanan added that Martin Scorsese will produce.
- X Crucior is the heavy-metal name of the next film project written by Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks—a musical, of course, continuing their momentum with Annette (2021). No director is attached yet, but if it's not too much to ask, a reunion with Guy Maddin would be fun.
- According to The Times, the Edinburgh International Film Festival will be revived next year after all, coming just a few weeks after reports of mass layoffs and the closure of the Filmhouse cinemas in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
- The independent British filmmaker Ron Peck died last week. He’s best known for directing Nighthawks (1978), the first British film to empathetically depict gay life in London; in 2020, he spoke to Another Man about its resonance 40 years on.
- Jafar Panahi recorded a brief speech from prison to accept an award at the Miami Film Festival, embedded below:
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- An unsubtitled trailer was released this week displaying the colorful visuals of Blossoms Shanghai, a new television series created, directed, and produced by Wong Kar Wai. Filmed entirely in Shanghai, where Wong was born, the series will tell the story of Mr Bao (Hu Ge), a self-made millionaire who sees his luck turned around during Shanghai’s 1990s economic boom. This is the first project from Wong since The Grandmaster in 2013.
- Some thirteen years since the first Avatar film broke box office records, James Cameron’s follow-up Avatar: The Way of Water is nearly here. The new trailer shows off the film’s serene-looking aquatic settings through an array of lush cerulean imagery.
- Hanging over from Halloween for one more week, Another Screen have put two British underground lesbian films online for all to watch. The Mark of Lilith (Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin, Zach Mack-Nataf, 1986) and Sex, Lies, Religion (Annette Kennerley, 1994) “confront some of the under-discussed and controversial currents of their filmmakers’ contemporary queer scenes.”
- Illuminating the before and after of film post-processing and visual effects design, this super cool video overviews the impressive VFX work that the Korean studio 4th Creative Party contributed to Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave.
RECOMMENDED READING
A Short Story (Bi Gan, 2022).
- On the Metrograph Journal, Bi Gan is interviewed by Jordan Cronk about his cat-centric short A Short Story (above), the Chinese filmmaker's first film since his bravura 3D feature Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018).
- "What I saw was my own desire for murder and torture, represented to me as an inconceivable, voluptuous temptation. I found it magisterial!" Also on the Metrograph Journal, a translation of Catherine Breillat writing on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, excerpted from Fireflies Press's Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper.
- “In 1972, one of the most paradigmatic performers of the Nouvelle Vague wrote, directed, and costarred in a little-known, rarely screened film that we can today appreciate as a worthy entry in the post–New Wave, post–May ’68 canon.” Melissa Anderson writes about Anna Karina’s Vivre Ensemble, which screens on November 12 at Light Industry in New York.
- On Screen Slate, Tyler Maxin interviews video artist Michael J. Masucci about the work he made with ia Kamandalu under the moniker Vertical Blanking. Maxin describes their art as “rife with many of the high-water marks of ’90s proto-digital aesthetics: propulsive editing and computer-generated visuals, ‘fourth world’ trance music, and hints of a cyber-inflected New Age spirituality.”
- “As Leigh returns to it again and again in his films, class is not just a matter of money alone but also the social distance that breeds callousness and defines society’s bitter divisions.” In the Nation, Ela Bittencourt writes about Mike Leigh's considered representation of the complex workings of class in Britain.
- Edited by Terri Francis and featuring contributions from Maya Cade, Daniella Shreir, Jon Dieringer, and more, Film Programming as Social Justice Work in the Wake of Covid-19 is a open-access dossier from the University of Michigan which offers crucial insights from programmers about their work during summer 2020.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Stonewalling (Huang Ji, Ryûji Otsuka, 2022).
- Brussels: On December 18, Wang Bing will deliver the annual “State of Cinema” address at an event organized by Sabzian and Bozar, followed by a screening of Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka’s Stonewalling (Wang’s selection). More information is available here, along with a link to purchase tickets.
- London: “Show Me The World Mister” is a new solo exhibition from Ayo Akingbade. It Includes two new short works building upon the British experimental filmmaker’s “continued interest in history, place-making, legacy and power” that are described by the gallery as her “most ambitious productions to date.” The show runs from November 10 through February 5 at the Chisenhale Gallery.
- Bilbao: Taking place at Azkuna Zentroa—Alhóndiga Bilbao from October 28 through February 26, “Somewhere from here to heaven” is an enticing looking exhibition collecting creative responses to Bruce Baillie, a behemoth of the North American avant-garde, which includes new work by Eduardo Williams, Ben Rivers, Ana Vaz, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
- Rotterdam: Taking over WORM this coming weekend, Field Recordings returns for a fourth edition of screenings “oscillating between anthropology, cinema, and art.” The lineup includes films by Lana Askari, Loes Moree, and Zheng Lu Xinyuan, alongside accompanying conversations.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- House Sparrow Press are publishing Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction—the “surreal, fabular, lyrical” Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping—in a lovely looking holographic cover edition (above). Listen to Jarman read an excerpt from the book here.
- The fourth season of TCM’s podcast The Plot Thickens focuses on Pam Grier and features numerous interesting and candid interviews with the actor. The newly released second episode covers Grier’s studies at UCLA and her early work singing backup for some of the biggest musical acts of the ’60s.
- James Gray guested on Sam Fragoso’s Talk Easy podcast. They talk about Armageddon Time (2022) and Ad Astra (2019), but also the distinctive auteur’s neglected feature debut, the crime drama Little Odessa (1994).
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993).
Features:
- Dan Schindel details the madcap artistry of stop-motion animator Henry Selick, whose newest film, Wendell & Wild, was recently released on Netflix. From the beloved Nightmare Before Christmas to the critically misunderstood Monkeybone, Selick's films resonate "not just for the cult following his released films attract, but also for what all of his unrealized projects might have added to the practice of stop-motion animation."
- Although the word "parasocial" is often used as a pejorative, a select group of films make a case for a more compassionate reading of spectator-performer relationships. Cultural critic and poet Auroni discusses three such films: John Cassavetes's Opening Night, Satochi Kon's Perfect Blue, and Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair.
- Kutlukhan Kutlu unfurls the pleasures of Metin Erksan's dreamlike melodrama Time to Love (1965), MUBI's first restoration project, now showing exclusively on the platform. A tale of love and isolation set off the Anatolian coast, the film stands as the Turkish auteur's "most unique, peculiar, and personal work."
- "We may be more than the sum of our childhood movies," observes Nora Rosenthal, "but they seep into us... They lay the foundation for our thinking." In a new essay, Rosenthal reflects on introducing her children to movies.
Quick Reads:
- "What [Bruno] Dumont undertakes in L'humanité, and indeed in most of his early films, is a visceral phenomenology of the human face." In our newest One Shot column, Vedant Srinivas seeks the essence of Dumont's sophomore feature.
- With Oliver Hermanus's Living now in theaters, the film's screenwriter—Nobel Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro—shares his Moviegoing Memories.
EXTRAS
- Ecologies of Encounter—volume 7 of the documentary journal World Records—is slowly appearing online. The volume is edited by Counter Encounters, a curatorial and research collective consisting of Laura Huertas Millán, Onyeka Igwe, and Rachael Rakes.
- Get ready for this sentence: Infinite Conversation uses AI to generate a never-ending fictional audio dialogue between the filmmaker Werner Herzog and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. The uncanny site is designed to raise awareness about deepfake technology and pose “questions about the importance of authoritative sources, breach of trust and gullibility."
- In 2023, you will be able to rent an AMC Theatres auditorium to host a Zoom meeting (pricing pending). According to a helpful report at Indiewire, these 75- to 150-seat "Zoom Rooms" can be rented for up to three hours, and "AMC will even provide concessions, possible movie viewings and 'concierge-style personalized handling of meeting needs'" (additional pricing pending). Does heartbreak feel good at work?
- Many are saying (scroll past the embedded trailer) that an offer of on-set Cheetos was key to negotiating David Lynch's appearance in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans.