Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.
NEWS
- The Cannes Classics lineup was announced last week, and with it comes news of the premiere of Jean-Luc Godard’s posthumous, 20-minute-long short Phony Wars. Dubbed “a trailer of the film that will never exist,” the film has a short teaser courtesy of Saint Laurent Productions.
- Adèle Haenel (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) wrote a letter to the magazine Telerama about her decision to retire from acting. In an English-language excerpt, via the Guardian, she writes: “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession towards sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”
- Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers, Gummo) will receive the Pardo d’onore Manor, the Locarno Film Festival's lifetime achievement award, later this year. Korine, according to Locarno festival director Giona A. Nazzaro, is “a rebellious anarchist—both dangerous and poetic in his amused, cultivated radicalism.” Korine will screen two films at Locarno and also be present for a panel discussion that is sure to be a highlight of the festival program.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Spree director Eugene Kotlyarenko is the latest guest on MUBI Picks at Posteritati. He stopped by the movie art gallery in New York to discuss how posters for films by Scorsese, Almodóvar, and Fassbinder have influenced his own work. You can watch the video below and check out our ongoing retrospective, “Love Me Click Me: Films by Eugene Kotlyarenko.”
- Premiering soon at Cannes is Takeshi Kitano’s Kubi, a period epic based on the filmmaker’s own novel. “If possible, I hope this movie will be a hit, and I hope to be able to shoot a few more,” said Kitano, who is now 76 years old but still going strong, at a recent press conference.
- Last but not least, there is a new trailer online for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, releasing on July 21.
RECOMMENDED READING
Old Dog (Pema Tseden, 2011).
- Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden died this week, aged just 53. The filmmaker Tenzing Sonam recirculated an essay he wrote about Tseden in 2012 discussing Tseden’s ability to create a revelatory form of “cinema that has been shaped by the need to express itself as freely as possible within a restrictive context that seeks to crush that very freedom.”
- “The hand, gloved in nitrile, was inserting a notched metal rod into something that took a moment to identify as the tip of a penis.” For the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz speaks with “‘recovering’ anthropologists” Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor about De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), the latest in a line of “visceral confrontation[s] with the real” from the directing duo.
- “Every one of us has to decide, how much capital can we throw at this problem, the problem being modernizing,” For IndieWire, Brian Welk breaks down the perils, pitfalls, and unexpected costs of running a movie theater, interviewing theater operators about the struggles they are facing with keeping their equipment up-to-date and in good shape.
- For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Katharine Coldiron writes about her appreciation of the “liberal and relatable” pre-Code films, in which characters “struggle with money, make mistakes and muddle through them, and cope with competing life priorities.”
- For 4Columns, Andrew Chan eloquently introduces the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. “Like other cinematic poets of the sublime—Carl Theodor Dreyer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick—he’s given to metaphysical ruminations on love and death. What distinguishes him is the lightness of his touch.”
- "Content can be created in any way, by anything. Content, as opposed to the screenplay of a movie or TV show, does not imply the presence of a human being who starts the process by putting the proverbial pen to paper." In Fast Company, A.S. Hamrah analyzes the WGA writer's strike within a context of increasing automation and decreasing creative autonomy for writers in Hollywood.
- Finally, on his Kino Slang site, Andy Rector has shared a previously unpublished 1975 conversation between John Hughes and Bill Krohn and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. They talk primarily about Moses and Aaron (1975), then newly released, but also about filmmakers Ford, Mizoguchi, and Renoir, among other topics.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
A Moment in Love (Shirley Clarke, 1956).
- Paris: In response to Jean-Luc Godard’s statement that “we don’t know how to film sexual relations,” Nicole Brenez and Luc Vialle have programmed “L'image des plaisirs,” a series of 216 “films, love poems, visual caresses or scopic impulses.” The first phase of the series, taking place from May 11 to 28 May in the Cinémathèque Française, will combine “pornos of yesteryear with Mathieu Morel’s dreams, [...] Shirley Clarke’s amorous parades, François Reichenbach’s nudes or Barbara Rubin’s orgiastic shows.”
- New York: The New York African Film Festival has assembled an unmissable event. Souleymane Cissé will be in conversation at Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, May 14. Cissé’s films Yeleen (1987) and Den Muso (1975) will also screen as part of the festival, which runs May 10 through June 1 across several venues in NY. The full schedule is available on their website. Correction, 5/10: Martin Scorsese is no longer able to participate in this conversation, as originally announced.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The latest episode of the current music-focused season of the MUBI Podcast is about Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock," considered cinema's first rock needle drop. Music detective and author Jim Dawson, film writer Anna Ariadne Knight, and actor Peter Ford discuss the song’s function in Richard Brooks’s Blackboard Jungle (1955).
- Parker Posey is the guest on the new Back to One podcast. She talks about recent experiences on the sets of Beau Is Afraid (2023) and The Staircase (2022), and also about her role in Daisy von Scherler’s cult favorite Party Girl (1995), newly restored to 4K.
- Sydney Pollack’s Bobby Deerfield (1977)—the Formula 1 movie, starring Al Pacino—has inspired a concept album. Singer-songwriter Niia has announced an album out June 23, which imagines the perspective of the title character’s daughter. The first single, “Alfa Romero,” is available to stream.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Tokyo Heaven (Shinji Sômai, 1990).
- Timed to the first North American retrospective of Shinji Sômai’s films, Patrick Preziosi surveys the work of this undervalued director: a crucial individualist perched between two eras of Japanese filmmaking.
- "For a film that unfolds as a protracted therapy session, Beau remains curiously void, more cipher than full-fledged character." In this month’s Current Debate, Leonardo Goi descends into the purgatorial limbo of Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid.
- Adrian Curry spotlights more than 30 years of movie posters by Cruz Novillo, a titan of graphic design who “could rightfully be called the Saul Bass of Spain,” for the Movie Poster of the Week column.
EXTRAS
- UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Packard Humanities Institute have launched a new website devoted to newsreels that were shown by the Hearst Corporation in US theaters between 1929 and 1967. Hat tip to Dave Kehr for the link to “the ultimate timesuck.”