Rushes: Cannes Postponed, Free Film Magazines, "Animal Crossing" Meets "The Lighthouse"

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NEWS

The Cannes Film Festival in 2019, by Jean-Paul Pelissier

• The Cannes Film Festival has officially announced its indefinite postponement, with one potential option being to hold the festival during the end of June through the beginning of July. In an interview with Variety, Spike Lee says, "This is no joke. It’s not some movie. People are dying.”

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• A breathtaking trailer for Mondo Macabro's Blu-ray debut of Shinya Tsukamoto's Gemini (1999), a haunting, timely horror film about a Meiji-era doctor who treats plague victims who encounters a mysterious doppelgänger.

RECOMMENDED READING

A Horse is Not a Hammer by Barbara Hammer (2008)

• "Barbara Hammer’s cinema is a talking cinema in its most disarming sense: talking about cinema, talking with cinema, learning how to talk." An obituary for the late Barbara Hammer by Gabriella Beckhurst of Another Gaze.
• Due to the ongoing global lockdowns and sheltering in place procedures, there's an abundance of texts for the reading: Filmmaker Magazine has made its latest issue available online, including its cover story on Eliza Hittman.
• Film Quarterly, as the result of UC press making its journals free until June 2020, is also available for reading. The latest issue of FQ features a very special dossier on the fifty-year anniversary Asian-American cinema, with essays on Crazy Rich Asians and Kelly Loves Tony, and a roundtable on Asian-American experimental filmmakers in the eighties.

Brian De Palma's Body Double (1984)

• In an invaluable interview with the Associated Press regarding his debut novel Are Snakes Necessary, Brian De Palma discusses the influence of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, directing Mission: Impossible and working within the Hollywood system, filming women in thrillers, and laying out long visual sequences.  
• Film Comment is starting a new series called Reaching Out, in which the magazine checks in with industry colleagues as they respond to the pandemic and its impact on the immediate and long-term future.
• In a similar gesture of unity, Reverse Shot introduces a weekly column dedicated to finding connections between seemingly disparate films that two writers have watched recently. The first of the column pairs Guy Maddin's The Green Fog with Chris Marker's The Owl's Legacy.  
• A new interview with critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, published on his website, contains insights on Abbas Kiarostami, Orson Welles, and recent releases like Vitalina Varela and Parasite.

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

• Find all of our coverage of this year's Berlinale here, including both editor Daniel Kasman and contributor Ela Bittencourt's top ten films.
• For the Current Debate, Leonardo Goi provides a thorough overview at "film festivals in the time of Coronavirus," from the shift to streaming and virtual markets to the impact of Cannes's cancellation on the industry at large.
• A Close-up on Albertina Carri's The Daughters of Fire by Caden Mark Gardner, focusing on Carri's "utopian vision of polyamorous same-sex relations." The film is exclusively showing March 12 - April 10, 2020 in MUBI's Undiscovered series.

EXTRAS

• Meanwhile, on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, recreations of Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse abound.