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NEWS
Anna May Wong in Piccadilly (Ewald André Dupont, 1929).
- Trailblazing film star Anna May Wong will be the first Asian American to appear on US currency. Wong, whose legacy is overviewed in this Guardian article by Pamela Hutchinson, will be the face of more than 300 million quarters.
- Alice Diop has won the Prix Jean Vigo, an award given to a French director each year since 1951, for her first fiction feature Saint Omer. Earlier this year, the film won won two awards at the Venice Film Festival and was selected as the French entry for Best International Film at the 2023 Oscars.
- Paweł Pawlikowski’s next feature—tentatively titled The Island—will be led by Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara. Per Variety, they play an American couple who “turn their backs on civilization to build a secluded paradise,” until a European countess “arrives with her two lovers planning to take over the island and build a luxury hotel.” (Hate it when that happens!)
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Below, a new trailer for Mireille Dansereau’s Dream Life (1972), a vibrant film about sexism, women's liberation, and desire (and also the first narrative feature from Quebec directed by a woman). In the film, two women become entangled in each other's lives after meeting through their job at a film production company.
- 59 films by acclaimed Indigenous filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin can be watched for free worldwide on the National Film Board of Canada's website.
- To celebrate its 60th edition, the Viennale has asked six filmmakers to create unique festival trailers. The directors are: Claire Denis, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Narcisa Hirsch, Sergei Loznitsa, Nina Menkes, and Albert Serra. Denis’s film, titled Le Soldat, is embedded below.
RECOMMENDED READING
Lars Eidinger in Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 2022).
- “Irma Vep differentiates itself from its film-about-filmmaking forebears like François Truffaut’s Day for Night and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore through its focus on cinema’s future as a practice and an institution,” writes Vikram Murthi, unpacking Olivier Assayas’s television series for The Nation.
- Speaking of Irma Vep, Lars Eidinger will soon lead Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hamlet in New York. In a great New York Times profile, Elisabeth Vincentelli details his “highly physical, no-holds-barred” acting style, and during a photoshoot, she watches him clamber into a fountain like a “giant besuited stork."
- “In a mood-forward film, the prevailing sense is one of girlhood taking its last untroubled breath.” Over at 4Columns, Michelle Orange reviews Charlotte Wells’s debut feature Aftersun (2022).
- For Gawker, Adam Nayman revisits Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997), a film that, 25 years after its release, “stands alone as one of the most unnerving features of its era, and maybe of all time.”
The Island of Prohibited Pleasures (Carlos Reichenbach, 1978).
- In Film Comment, Giovanni Marchini Camia explores the Carlos Reichenbach retrospective at Doclisboa. For Camia, Reichenbach’s “intellectually sophisticated but resolutely anti-highbrow films, genre versatility, and political commitment warrant his recognition as a fierce, independent auteur who understood cinema as an instrument of both protest and pleasure.”
- One hundred years after its release, Adam Piron writes for Documentary Magazine about the legacy of Nanook of the North (1922), which he describes as “a cautionary tale of the real consequences brought on real people when the medium is irresponsibly used.”
- Marius Hrdy reports for the Brooklyn Rail on the 2022 edition of Miami's Third Horizon Film Festival, “a leader in the exhibition and discussion of filmmaking and other works about the Caribbean.” (Out of the same festival, Hrdy interviewed filmmaker Miryam Charles for Notebook.)
- Joshua Minsoo Kim speaks with James Benning for his Film Show newsletter, covering the filmmaker's “childhood, his organizing experiences, his pedagogical strategies as a professor, and various films from throughout his career.” Elsewhere, for Alt Kino, Sophia Satchell-Baeza wrote about Benning’s 2022 feature The United States of America in one of four London Film Festival correspondences with Patrick Gamble.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Horse Money (Pedro Costa, 2014).
- Barcelona: An intriguing Pedro Costa exhibition has opened at the La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, running through April 23, 2023. The show “approaches the film-maker's work from the specific perspective of the direction it may take in the future,” and five out of ten of the mixed-media works were made by Costa specifically for the exhibition.
- New York: On November 1, Light Industry will host Jean Ma for a special lecture titled A Little History of Sleeping at the Movies. Ma will explore the role of the “somnambulant spectator” in cinema history, asking whether snoozes in the theater space can be considered “cinematic experiences in their own right.”
- Online: From October 27 through November 29, Collaborative Cataloging Japan will present Stepping Out of Politics: Films by Masao Adachi. They will stream two hard-to-see films—Adachi's Female Student Guerilla (1969) and Koji Wakamatsu’s Sex Jack (1970), which Adachi wrote—and host an online conversation with the filmmaker on October 29. (Haden Guest of the Harvard Film Archive encapsulates how Adachi's cinema grapples with "sexuality, politics and the always forestalled but ever urgent promise of revolution.")
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (Michael Carreras, 1964).
- “In Hammer’s horror subdivision could be found Technicolor horror (and its subgenres), often sexually and socially provocative, taking classical source material and turning it on its head.” Florence Scott-Anderton brings together spooky sounds from the Hammer Horror catalog in her latest Soundtrack Mix.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
You Have to Come and See It (Jonás Trueba, 2022).
- “For any true connoisseur of modern poésie maudit, the prospect of Claire Denis adapting Denis Johnson comes with its own ineluctable gravity.” Ryan Meehan scrutinizes Claire Denis’s newest film Stars at Noon (2022).
- “Past midnight, everything seemed like a fever dream.” Dini Adanurani attended 18 hours of the Locarno Film Festival’s 24-hour-long talk, “The Future of Attention,” and reports on the experience.
- In his latest Movie Poster of the Week column, Adrian Martin surveys “astonishing” linocut posters from Sweden around 100 years ago that “to today’s eyes seem both retro and modern at the same time.”
- “We were prompted to tease out of these apparent non-events a deeper reflection on the human condition.” Doug Dibbern expounds on the pleasures of three narrative features from Currents, the New York Film Festival’s experimental sidebar.
- For this month’s Full Bloom column, Patrick Holzapfel writes on dormant greenery in Marguerite Duras’s Agatha and the Limitless Readings, drawing parallels between the plants’ life cycles and Duras’s unclassifiable filmmaking.
EXTRAS
LOVER, LOVERS, LOVING, LOVE (Jodie Mack, 2023), excerpted in Caligari #5.
- Caligari have shared a new Halloween-themed issue of their online magazine, which includes a feature by Maggie Hennenfeld on hypnosis, hallucination, and hysteria in the cinema of the silent era; a piece on the widescreen projection technology phenomenon Cinerama; an excerpt from a forthcoming 2023 short film by Jodie Mack; and an audiovisual essay by Chloé Galibert-Laîné, made in response to horror-related writings by Serge Daney.
- JW Anderson have released a womenswear capsule collection “inspired by the spine-tingling American supernatural horror film Carrie.” The Sissy Spacek print shirt is particularly striking, especially with matching pants; if you have a spare 2,000 GBP, you can purchase the full ensemble. (Not including express shipping to receive this in time for Halloween.)