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NEWS
- The Venice Film Festival is moving forward with its plans for a “real red carpet” and theatrical screenings this September.
- The Toronto International Film Festival has also announced its plans for a mix of physical and virtual screenings, with fifty new features set to premiere.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- From June 22-29, watch Bruce Conner's Looking For Mushrooms, a "psychedelic travelogue film" that follows Conner and his wife Jean as they hunt for mushrooms in rural Oaxaca.
- The new trailer for Werner Herzog's latest feature, Family Romance, LLC. MUBI is releasing the film, which premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival, on July 4 in many countries, following a free preview on July 3.
- A teaser trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa's upcoming romance thriller, Wife of a Spy, co-written with Ryusuke Hamaguchi (!) and starring Yu Aoi.
RECOMMENDED READING
- In an interview with Vanity Fair, Cheryl Dunye discusses the legacy of her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman as the first Black lesbian narrative feature, its costume design and Berlinale premiere, and the film’s relationship to Gone with the Wind.
- For The Baffler, Josh Gabert-Doyon investigates the dynamic between Canadian tax credits, unions in the animation and VFX industries, the “streaming wars,” and Tom Hooper’s Cats.
- K. Austin Collins’s survey of Black defiance at the movies continues with a list of feature films since the 1920s, arranged not by chronological order but by common thematic threads, from Alain Gomis’s Felicité to Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.
- Earlier this month, Erika Balsom reflected on the promises of digital distribution during confinement, as well as the potential pitfalls of losing “originally intended display context.”
- Laurie Ouellette places the cancellation of the reality TV series Cops in the context of George Floyd's death and ongoing protests against racialized police violence, and in a cultural lineage of public television documentaries that includes Frederick Wiseman's Law and Order and Alan and Susan Raymond's Police Tapes.
- Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, a new documentary available on Netflix, aims to address issues of trans representation. Critics Willow Maclay and Caden Gardener, however, have thoughtfully critiqued its emphasis on mainstream visibility, and both reviews are essential. Maclay writes that the film omits the “beautiful alchemy in taking something not intended for you and making it your own.” Gardener, in his review, points out that the trans image in fact can be found in and “includes an entire history of cinema.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Spike Lee and Delroy Lindo, the star of Da 5 Bloods, join critic and programmer Ashley Clark to talk about the film’s conception and interactions with the history of African-American Vietnam War veterans and the current advancements made by the Black Lives Matter movement.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- For our One Shot series, Soham Gadre finds the essence of The Seventh Seal in its penultimate scene, the dance in the wind. The Seventh Seal (1957) is showing June 16 - July 16, 2020 on MUBI in many countries in the series The Inner Demons of Ingmar Bergman.
- MUBI and Filmadrid are premiering nine video essays from the 22nd until the 30th of June. The most recent addition, In Memorium by Lucía Alonso Santos, is a "portrait of the information era" explored through the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum writes on the extreme improvisations of Jacques Rivette's Out 1, Noli Me Tangere (1971), which is currently showing on MUBI in the United States.
EXTRAS
- Spike Lee's original draft of the screenplay for Do the Right Thing, written in two weeks.
The first draft of @SpikeLeeJoint's "Do The Right Thing” screenplay was written by hand in March of 1988. pic.twitter.com/0zXfmGFMZU
— Your staff is broken. (@DamoneWilliams_) June 16, 2020
- From the set of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang joins his actors. Back in April, Tash Aw of The Paris Review revisited the film and its images of illness and urban squalor while in lockdown from Kuala Lumpur.
Tsai Ming-liang laying down with the actors after shooting the last scene of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. (from Sleeping on Dark Waters) pic.twitter.com/3qPqMBrBUt
— barbed wire of bruised dead stars (@feminineteeth) June 16, 2020