Rushes: Angelo Badalamenti, American Paranoia x ICA London, Wong Kar Wai Cassettes

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NEWS

Gush (Fox Maxy, 2023).

• The lineup for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival has been announced. Before the festival begins in Park City on January 19, peruse the selection on Notebook—including new films from Ira Sachs, Deborah Stratman (The Illinois Parables), Mary Helena Clark (Figure Minus Fact), and Fox Maxy (F1ght1ng Looks Different 2 Me Now).
• Victor Erice has just wrapped production on a new film, Cerrar los Ojos, in Granada, Spain, ahead of a 2023 release. This will be his fourth feature, arriving 31 years after 1992’s Dream of Light.
• The legendary composer Angelo Badalamenti—one of David Lynch’s most important collaborators, and the architect of all of his atmospheres—has died at age 85. In addition to his music with Lynch, Badalamenti worked with artists like Nina Simone, David Bowie, and the Pet Shop Boys, and also composed the theme music for Inside the Actors Studio and the 1992 Olympics. It doesn’t get much better than this video of him explaining how he wrote “Laura Palmer’s Theme.”

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Available online for two weeks from December 5, Repetition as Differentiation via Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle is a short lecture performance by curator and researcher Jemma Desai “considering the relationship between repetition and differentiation in film programming” through an expanded exploration of Alnoor Dewshi’s short film. 
• Coming six months after the death of its star Jean-Louis Trintignant is a new 4K restoration of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970), adapted from the Alberto Moravia novel of the same name. The restoration is being released in theaters in the US by Kino Lorber from January 6, 2023, and their new trailer can be seen here.

• Brandon Cronenberg’s new film Infinity Pool, which stars Alexander Skarsgård, Cleopatra Coleman, and Mia Goth, will premiere at Sundance in January. Ahead of that, NEON have released a tantalizing trailer.

RECOMMENDED READING

King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard, 1987).

• “I politely inquired if there was a script that I could read. As he puffed on a big cigar, filling the room with pungent smoke, he shook his head no but said that he would explain the idea to me.” In the New Yorker, Molly Ringwald recalls her time making King Lear (1987) with Jean-Luc Godard.
• “It's so emotional. My thing with Joanna is, I tend to follow where her interest is. If she has an interest somewhere, she'll tell me and I'll say, just let me send this to her. See what happens.” For Vanity Fair, Joanna Hogg talks to Martin Scorsese, who executive produced The Souvenir Part I (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021).
• In the New Left Review’s Sidecar, Jonathan Rosenbaum compares Jean-Marie Straub and Jean-Luc Godard, both of whom died recently in the Swiss village of ​​Rolle. “Godard was a city slicker and Straub was a rube, a hillbilly,” writes Rosenbaum, but “both of them were snobs as well as populists, gadflies as well as traditionalists. Each reinvented the medium for his own purposes.”
• Michael Guarneri, author of Conversation with Lav Diaz. 2010-2020 (M. Piretti, 2020), sits down again with Lav Diaz, this time for the French website Débordements, discussing the Filipino filmmaker’s History of Ha (2021).  
• ”In spite of what the layman may think, a film studio is no more the place for wild amusement than the backstage of a theatre. There is too much to worry about.” Sight and Sound have republished an article Georges Méliès wrote for their magazine shortly before his death in January 1938.
• Finally, for The Nation, Phoebe Chen takes a closer look at one of 2022's most divisive fictional characters, Lydia Tár. "Her onstage musings are dense with esoterica," observes Chen, "and stilted affectations mark her speech, as if she has rehearsed the cadence of profundity ... Like its title character, Todd Field’s Tár turns out to be extravagantly serious."

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz, 2020).

• London: Curated by Chris Cassingham, “Beyond Interpretation” brings together five recent US indies “exploring paranoia and precarity at the margins of the American film industry.” The mini-series, which includes films by Amy Seimetz, Tyler Taormina, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, and others, runs 12-19 January 2023 at the ICA London. 
• London: Between January and March 2023, BFI Southbank will screen every film included in the recent Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2022 poll. The first set of screenings, which goes down the list to 66, includes showings of Jean-Luc Godard’s 264-minute-long Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989–1999) and Béla Tarr’s 439-minute-long Sátántangó (1994), plus many shorter films.
• New York: Spectacle, in partnership with Icarus Films, are hosting a Heddy Honigmann retrospective through December 19. Sierra Pettengill surveys the work of the “relentless and prolific director,” who passed away earlier this year, for Screen Slate.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

• In a special episode of the MUBI Podcast, Park Chan-wook talks to host Rico Gagliano about the influence of "The Mist," a 1972 pop ballad, on his latest film Decision to Leave (2022). (He also unveils the musical inspiration for a possible future project.)

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Hardly Working (Total Refusal, 2022).

Features:

• Kicking off a new column Cutscenes—poised at the intersection of cinema and video games—Matt Turner writes about the moving-image work of Total Refusal, who recently won a prize at Locarno. The wryly self-aware collective invites us to break the rules, seeking to “subvert video-game spaces to political ends, slyly reorienting the function of game worlds beyond their creators’ original intentions.”
• For Kelli Weston, the newest films from Steven Spielberg and James Gray “make, at first glance, an unlikely match. The Fabelmans swells with ebullience; Armageddon Time is a tragedy.” She reflects on this pairing in a new essay, suggesting that “perhaps the two properties were destined to end up mirrors, composed by directors, both of Ukrainian-Jewish descent, in reflection on family, art, and identity.”

Quick Reads:

• With Decision to Leave now streaming on MUBI in many countries, Adrian Curry surveys a gorgeous array of fan-made posters for Park Chan-wook’s films for Movie Poster of the Week.
• "In Astrea and Celadon, the deliberately artificial costumes and make-up reveal that the past is not finished, not something that can be definitively known, only continually reanimated and performed." McNeil Taylor encapsulates Éric Rohmer’s final film in One Shot.
• To introduce MUBI’s presentation of her film El Planeta, Amalia Ulman selects her favorite photographs from the film’s preproduction in Gijón, Spain.

EXTRAS

• Attention completists and audiophiles: for the very first time, Cassette Dept. has assembled a box set of Wong Kar Wai’s original soundtracks on cassette. You can pre-order through Light in the Attic’s website; the box is set to ship in February 2023.
• Per a recent tweet, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission recently unearthed a major archive of PSAs on 16mm, which they plan to release online in monthly batches. A few are available on YouTube. This one, about “toy safety,” includes character actor Louis Nye.
• Finally, list season continues at Screen Slate. Crimes of the Future topped their 2022 poll alongside plentiful "first viewings and discoveries" from critics, programmers, artists, and filmmakers (including Béla Tarr, whose contribution is too good to spoil).