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RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- We're very much in love with Zama, Lucrecia Martel's long-anticipated return to filmmaking. The new trailer calls us back to our encounter of the film at Toronto last year and our conversation with the director.
- We all know that Rainer Werner Fassbinder made a lot—a whole lot—of films in his all too brief 15 years of activity, but it's truly remarkable how new (old) work of his keeps appearing. First there was the revelation of World on a Wire (1973) and now another made-for-TV epic has been restored and is being re-released, Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1972-1973). We wonder what other future delights and provocations RWF has in store for us!
RECOMMENDED READING
- At The Guardian, Lili Loofbourow takes a look at how stories about women are perceived and received differently than those about men.
- Armando Iannucci's new film The Death of Stalin has been banned in Russia. At The New York Times, Iannucci reflects on the censorship:
There’s something rather mid-20th century about censorship. Then again, that’s no surprise, since international politics is going through a retro phase — the Chinese Communist Party leader granting himself leadership for life, the Russian president announcing he has developed a nuclear superweapon, right-wing parties assuming power in Europe by comparing immigrants to vermin, spies-on-the-run getting poisoned in London. Like ghosts from the past, these old tropes now haunt the present.
- The highly prodigious and inimitably cultivated Chilean director Raúl Ruiz kept a diary, which critic Jaime Grijalba has been generously translating into English via a TinyLetter subscription. The entries are intellectually darting and delightful—highly recommended.
- Speaking of translations, every time someone translates the great French film critic Serge Daney into English it's a call for celebration—and doubly so if that piece of writing is on Jerry Lewis! Kino Slang has run an English version of Daney's article on Lewis's Which Way to the Front?, in advance of a screening in Los Angeles this Friday.
- From Louis XIV's bedroom to Berlin's Volksbühne: Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra has followed up his exquisite film The Death of Louis XIV with a new stage play, which has been reviewed by Frieze.
- Legendary photographer and filmmaker William Klein provides a riotously cantankerous interview with Hyperallergic on the occasion of a retrospective of his films at New York's Quad Cinema. Also at Hyperallergic is a great appreciation for an exhibition of elaborate, diorama-like models made by Jean-Luc Godard in anticipation of a large scale Centre Pompidou exhibition that never properly happened.
- At a major London retrospective of her work, the filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha had a public discussion with fellow director Xiaolu Guo (Golden Leopard winner for She, a Chinese), which has now been published at Ocula.
- Hollywood star Olivia de Havilland changed the way studios contracted their actors through a 1944 lawsuit, and is aiming to have a similar impact in 2018 by suing the FX network over the unapproved portrayal of herself in the 2017 miniseries Feud.
- With her collaborations with director Hong Sang-soo, South Korean actress Kim Min-hee has quickly become one of our favorite performers, an actress whose dynamism and extreme intelligence makes every role something special. The Ringer takes a look at the controversy in Korea over her relationship with Hong and the roles she's played in his movies.
- Finally, to come back to Fassbinder, The Paris Review has published an excellent overview of the importance of Alfred Döblin's 1929 book Berlin Alexanderplatz, a title now most famous for the German director's 1980 television miniseries adaptation. A new translation of the book may change that.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Jonny Greenwood's terrific score for Lynne Ramsay's lean, dark thriller You Were Never Really Here has been released on Spotify:
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- A report from True/False, a film festival in Columbia, Missouri programming cutting edge nonfiction movies.
- New reviews: Hong Sang-soo's Claire's Camera, Thomas Riedelsheimer's Leaning into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy, Alex Garland's Annihilation, and the re-release of Jackie Chan's Police Story.
- Cristina Álvarez López shows how Portuguese director João César Monteiro unfolds a vast cinephiliac constellation around Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar.
EXTRAS
- Due to the infamous snafu at last year's Academy Awards, Moonlight Barry Jenkins didn't get to read the speech he had prepared. At South by Southwest this year he shared what he wrote: