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NEWS
The 2022 poster for Cannes' Directors' Fortnight.
- Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight has announced the seven programmers and four consultants who will be supporting incoming artistic director Julien Rejl in his selection processes. Amongst the team is ex-Sheffield DocFest director Cintia Gil, Another Gaze founder Daniella Shreir, and Ming-Jung Kuo, former Program Director of the Taipei Film Festival.
- Dutch documentary festival IDFA has released the lineups for the first few strands of their 2022 edition, including the short and youth documentary competitions, plus a tribute to the late Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius.
- David Cronenberg’s Scanners is being remade as a TV series. Yann Demange (executive producer of Lovecraft Country and Top Boy) will direct, with Cronenberg also on board as an executive producer.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- After premiering in competition at the Venice International Film Festival, A Couple, Frederick Wiseman’s new fiction feature, now has a trailer.
- Knock at the Cabin, the new film from M. Night Shyamalan, has an early trailer ahead of its release in 2023.
- Showcasing the striking 65mm visuals from acclaimed cinematographer Darius Khondji, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, also has a new trailer.
- Currently up for free on Another Screen are “three West German films on familial and economic violence in the Märkisches Viertel,” plus an assortment of accompanying texts. (Phuong Le recently wrote on the series for Notebook.)
- A packed program of short films is available to watch on e-flux’s online curatorial platform for the next few months. Curated by Julian Ross, "Takeover"—which features work by artists such as Ephraim Asili, Toshio Matsumoto, and Tiffany Sia—examines the “experience of letting another being—their voice, or their mind—into our own.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973).
- A previously unpublished interview with Terrence Malick—conducted in 1974 by Newsday’s Joseph Gelmis, and focusing on the production of Badlands—has been transcribed. The PDF is available here.
- “They say don’t meet your heroes, so it’s a good thing that Don and I did this interview over email.” For the tenth anniversary of his film It’s Such a Beautiful Day, Sophie Monks Kaufman talks to independent animator Don Hertzfeldt for Little White Lies.
- “On my first viewing of Top Gun: Maverick, I was moved to tears. Many men who I’ve spoken to about the film have admitted to crying while they watched it.” In the LA Review of Books, Andrew Key waxes lyrical on the under-examined “late style” of Tom Cruise.
- “The most stunning scene of any movie this year was conceived partly as an attempt to beat your attention span.” Romain Gavras’s Athena, a recent festival favorite, opens with “one of the most impressive single shots ever put to film.” For Vulture, Bilge Ebiri looks behind the scenes of its making.
- “Risk is a defining artistic value for Moyra Davey, its absence a hallmark of mediocrity.” Tying into a mid-career retrospective of the artist’s films at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Johanna Fateman writes about Moyra Davey in 4Columns.
Blonde (Andrew Dominik, 2022).
- “The movie is ridiculously vulgar—the story of Monroe as if it were channelled through Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ.’” For the New Yorker, Richard Brody pans Andrew Dominik’s new film, Blonde, a Marilyn Monroe biopic that takes some creative liberties with its handling of the star’s life story. A recent interview with the director by Christina Newland for Sight & Sound is also attracting some heat.
- In BOMB, Esmé Hogeveen writes about Jacquelyn Mills’s Geographies of Solitude, a film that “explores the intricate connections between living subjects, landscape, observation, and artmaking.”
- “I was snapped out of my despair, reminded of the power of art for long enough to address my mental illness and recapture some enthusiasm for my creative work and political engagement.” In ArtReview, Juliet Jacques pens a personal letter to Jean Luc-Godard.
- For the New York Times, Ted Alcorn surveys the resurgent 35mm repertory scene in New York City, interviewing projectionists about their craft.
- For Reverse Shot, Greg Cwik reviews Ti West’s Pearl, a “libidinous and lurid story about a gaggle of pornographers who get killed off by a sad, sexually frustrated old lady and her impotent husband.”
RECOMMENDED FESTIVAL COVERAGE
Walk Up (Hong Sang-soo, 2022).
- In Variety, Jessica Kiang reviews Hong Sang-soo’s Walk Up, a film with “gentle profundity smuggled in under cover of multilevel playfulness.”
- José Teodoro reports from TIFF for Film Comment, where “beneath the hoopla, the glamour, and the belated in-person reunions among filmmakers, curators, and critics, there was an eeriness.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The poster for Crossroads 2022 Online Echo.
- Online: After the in-person edition of their annual experimental film festival in San Francisco, Crossroads presents an “online echo, a cross-sectional sampler of select works representing themes of the year’s festival.”
- New York: Coming to MoMA from November 1 to December 5 is a retrospective of difficult-to-see films by Mike De Leon, “one of Filipino cinema’s most fiercely political and dramatic storytellers.”
- Los Angeles: Taking place on October 9 and featuring work by Dorothy Wiley, Amy Halpern, and Joshua Gen Solondz, “Light Field in L.A.” is a new, one-off screening event presented by Los Angeles independent film series Mezzanine.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Hideo Kojima and Mamoru Oshii.
- A new podcast series led by the video-game maker Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid) sees him talk about creative processes with iconic anime director Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell).
- Filmmaker Claire Denis and critic J. Hoberman are the guests on the London Review of Books podcast, talking to host Adam Shatz about the work and legacy of Jean-Luc Godard.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Carter (Jung Byung-gil, 2022).
- In the latest The Action Scene column, Jonah Jeng writes about Jung Byung-gil’s new film Carter (2022), a work that “pushes the formal conceit of the “single-take” actioner to new extremes.”
- Chloe Lizotte closes out our TIFF coverage with one final dispatch, covering Hong Sang-soo’s Walk Up and Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker. Chloe and Daniel Kasman also provided their festival Top Tens, and also chatted with critic Juan Barquin, programmer Inney Prakash, and filmmaker Sophy Romvari about the festival at large in a transcribed festival-wrap conversation.
- We shared a few noteworthy early tributes to Jean-Luc Godard in last week’s Rushes, but Leonardo Goi gives the full roundup of recent critical writing related to the passing of the legendary French-Swiss filmmaker in his latest The Current Debate column.
- This month’s edition of Patrick Holzapfel and Ivana Miloš’s Full Bloom column is here. This one looks at the presence of the prickly pear in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
- “At the end of 2019, I was invited to share and perform some old songs in Hong Kong. It was a tumultuous time there.” Tsai Ming-liang introduces his short film The Night (2021), now showing on MUBI.
EXTRAS
25 Encounters, published by International Film Festival Rotterdam.
- Celebrating 50 years of the festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam contacted 51 people connected to their event, including Masaaki Yuasa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Yann Gonzalez, and paired them with conversation partners. They published the dialogues in 25 Encounters, a “special one-off high-quality print publication,” which can be ordered now.
- Sabzian have shared their always-essential list of new film publications, covering books coming out around the world in fall 2022.
- Legendary music critic Ian Penman has written a book on the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Thousands of Years is coming in April from UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Press.
- Speaking of books, Tom Hanks has announced that he is writing his first novel (following a 2017 short story collection): The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece, an epic spanning 80 years. Just seven and a half months to go until it is published on May 9, 2023.