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NEWS
Jean-Louis Trintignant directing A Full Day's Work (1973).
- The legendary French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant has died aged 91. Trintignant made his screen debut in 1956, starring alongside Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim's ...And God Created Woman. Since then, he has become one of the most well-known and well-respected performers in global cinema. The Guardian took a look back on his life in pictures, a filmography spanning more than 140 films and seven decades.
- Russian filmmakers Kantemir Balagov (Beanpole) and Kira Kovalenko (Unclenching the Fists) will present a series of films at the 49th edition of Telluride Film Festival in September. The pair, who are a couple, spoke recently with IndieWire about the war in Ukraine and their decision to relocate from Russia to the US. Like the rest of the Telluride program, their selections will not be announced until the first day of the festival, September 2.
- Having been operated by the Odeon Cinema Group for ten years, the BFI IMAX, the UK's largest cinema screen, will again be programmed and operated by the British Film Institute from July onwards.
- This year's Pardo alla carriera Ascona-Locarno achievement award at the Locarno Film Festival will go to Costa-Gavras, "a filmmaker whose work has openly denounced injustice, turning his gaze unflinchingly on some of the darkest chapters in our history." The festival will host a conversation with the filmmaker alongside screenings of two of his films, Shock Troops (1967) and The Sleeping Car Murder (1965).
- Kevin Costner has shared ambitious plans for his forthcoming Western epic Horizon: he has a vision to break the film up into four discrete features, premiering a new installment every three months. This will mark his fourth film as director (and potentially his fifth, sixth, and seventh).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Available to watch now on Ecstatic Static are five entrancing short films by artist-filmmaker Jenny Brady exploring language, translation, and communication.
- A teaser is out for Andrew Dominik's new film Blonde. Based on the bestselling novel by Joyce Carol Oates and starring a convincing-looking Ana de Armas, the film will tell a fictionalized version of the story of the life of Marilyn Monroe. Additionally, MUBI's trailer for Dominik's other new film of the year, This Much I Know to Be True, about Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' creative relationship, has been released.
- A new trailer has premiered for Jessica Beshir's lyrical Faya Dayi, a MUBI release. The film arrives in UK theaters on June 24 and streams exclusively on the platform from August 10.
- The Rehearsal, a new series from Nathan Fielder (Nathan For You, How To with John Wilson), also has a teaser. Little is yet known about the show, and this cryptic promo doesn't reveal a great deal more. "Very soon," is all that Fielder said in his tweet accompanying the teaser, but then, several days later, HBO announced a July 15 premiere date for the series.
RECOMMENDED READING
Michael and Christian Blackwood.
- "A long attention span and respect for the subject are at the heart of the documentaries Michael and Christian Blackwood made over the last sixty years. Time and time again, they manage to get out of their own way, beautifully." In an essay commissioned by Pioneer Works to accompany their online series, which is streaming free on their website until June 28, Sasha Frere-Jones writes compellingly on the documentary films of Michael and Christian Blackwood.
- For Interview Magazine, Spike Jonze invites Hiro Murai to his Malibu home for a photo shoot. While there, they exchange observations on life and filmmaking.
- In an impressively wide-ranging article titled "The Topography of Opportunities," published on the Latvian platform Kino Ratski, scholar and critic Elīna Reitere uses a recent instance of a Russian-born critic being listed as Latvian on a Screen International festival critics grid as a starting point from which to explore a number of ideas, looking at everything from "the hierarchy of cultural capitalism to processes of decolonization."
- Ela Bittencourt interviews Flora Gomes, Guinea-Bissau’s preeminent director, for Metrograph's Journal in a piece tying into the cinema's screening of two of his films.
- "You as the viewer perhaps once walked those very same streets, and in a flash, a mysterious effect might occur: as your eyes search the screen, your legs feel a slight ache, as if, in following the narrative, you too are wandering a familiar road." In a text commissioned for the website of the recently opened M+ cinema in Hong Kong, Bryan Chang Wai-hung walks the city's streets and ponders the role that pedestrians have played in the history of Hong Kong's silver screen.
Alaska (Dore O., 1968).
- In Artforum, Beatrice Loayza writes about Dore O., a figure whose works of a "sensual and haunting force" had, until recently, been hard to see or screen. They are the subject of a current retrospective at New York's Anthology Film Archives.
- "It was about looking back at the viewer and saying: while this is going on in your country, what were you attending to? What did you think mattered?" On the occasion of the show's twentieth anniversary, Caitlin Quinlan speaks to the cast and crew of The Wire about the show's final episode.
- "It started as a sanity exercise that turned into an insanity exercise." Filmmaker Magazine's Vadim Rizov talks to Andrew Bujalski about his new film, There There, which premiered recently at the Tribeca Film Festival.
- Dennis Zhou writes for The Nation on the multilayered narratives of Hong Sang-soo. He elucidates how "no filmmaker has been able to chronicle the long hangover of South Korea’s abrupt exit from military dictatorship and rocky entry into the global economic and cultural marketplace as ably as Hong."
- Finally, Greg Laemmle of Los Angeles's Laemmle Theatres passionately advocates for the importance of arthouse film criticism to the cinemagoing ecosystem, noting the absence of regular coverage in the L.A. Times.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The latest in NTS's Otaku series, focused on film and video game soundtrack music, is dedicated to the sounds of Yuji Ohno, the mind behind the soundtrack for the anime Lupin III.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Afterlight (Charlie Shackleton, 2021).
- Berlin: Running until August 28th at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, "No Master Territories" is a significant historical survey of women working in the fields of documentary and artists' moving images. The exhibition's curators, Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, have also edited a book focusing on "intersectional, intergenerational and international perspectives on nonfiction film- and videomaking by and about women," calling upon a host of great contributors.
- UK/Ireland: Having screened the film in cinemas around the US, Charlie Shackleton is touring the single existing print of his self-distributed feature film The Afterlight around the UK and Ireland, starting at the BFI Southbank on June 29.
- Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato, the much-loved festival focusing on retrospectives, rarities, and restorations, returns on June 25. Its programmers have created a carefully considered guide to navigating the films found in this year's selection.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Gemini Man (Ang Lee, 2019).
- In a closely observed essay, Bliss Fields examines Will Smith's starring roles in two sci-fi films—M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth and Ang Lee's Gemini Man—in which "Black characters aren’t consciously separated into a microcosm by mannerisms or genre trappings tailored specifically to their race, yet their Blackness remains central to who they are."
- Henry K. Miller delves into the kinetic, corporeal works of underground filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin, particularly his collaborations with avant-garde dancer Beatrice "Trixie" Cordua, in which he sought to bridge "what he called the 'barrier between looking at life and experiencing life.'”
- "Bergman Island, rather than being a film about a woman finding herself as an artist, is about an artist whose serious, deliberate process sets out to tell the story of a woman's life. And so, the challenge is: How to tell the story of Chris? And how can Chris tell the story of Amy, the protagonist of her own film?" Rafaela Bassili explores the "ambiguous women" of Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island, a MUBI release, which is now playing in UK theaters.
- "The transformation of that area—from the glittering center of prosperity and culture, to a battleground of vice and crime, to a towering Babylon of corporate globalism—undeniably reflects the evolution of modern Western civilization." The Deuce Notebook returns with an epic trek through the Times Square locations of Ivan Passer's Born to Win (1971), his first American feature starring George Segal and Karen Black.
EXTRAS
- The "definitive versions" of Hal Hartley's screenplays for Amateur and Flirt are now available as a single volume from Elboro Press. Also for sale is Hartley's limited-edition CD, Leitmotif, featuring "radically reimagined" music from Flirt and Amateur, original music intended for Meanwhile, and music from his Possible Films 2.
- The Ghibliotheque Anime Guide, the second book by the creators of the Ghibliotheque podcast, has been announced. It is due for publication on October 13 in various languages.
- Sabzian have put out the latest in their always invaluable series of overviews of upcoming cinema-related books and publications.
- Australian home entertainment label Imprint are releasing a boxset of six films by Walter Hill, which will be shipping out later in the year.