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NEWS
MMXX.
- Cristi Puiu's latest project, titled MMXX, is currently in post-production. The film is one of the selections of FIDLab, FIDMarseille's program for works-in-progress, due to take place next month. The film will run 2 hours and 40 minutes, according to FIDMarseille's project page, and will follow “the wanderings of a bunch of errant souls stuck at the crossroads of history.”
- Aki Kaurismäki has formally announced what will be his 19th feature. Dead Leaves, which will be shot by Kaurismäki's regular cinematographer Timo Salminen and feature popular Finnish actors Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen, will premiere sometime in 2023. Little has been revealed about the film, but when asked about it, Kaurismäki said that “tragicomedy seems to be my genre."
- Later this year, Isabel Sandoval will begin production on Tropical Gothic, the follow-up to her acclaimed 2019 feature Lingua Franca. Sandoval both directs and stars in the film, a drama about the haunting of Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth-century Philippines.
- François Ozon is also currently shooting his next film, though all the details are still tightly under wraps. Madeleine will star Isabelle Huppert, Dany Boon, Fabrice Luchini, and Nadia Tereszkiewicz.
- Eager-eared listeners of the latest episode of Shawn Glinis and Arlin Golden's Wiseman Pod—featuring a conversation with Frederick Wiseman about the early stages of his formidable career—may have noticed a few tidbits of exciting news. Zipporah, the distributor of Wiseman's work, reportedly have new restorations for all of his films on the way, currently being prepared for cinema exhibition and re-release on Blu-ray. Further, The Garden, a documentary Wiseman filmed in 2005 about Madison Square Garden, may finally see the light of day toward the end of this year or early next. The director also mentioned that he has directed a new short fiction film titled The Couple.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Following the film's premiere at Cannes a few weeks back, an international trailer has premiered for Park Chan-wook's forthcoming MUBI release Decision to Leave. The film will opens theatrically in South Korea this month, followed by an October 14 release in the US and UK.
- The final trailer has been released for Jordan Peele's greatly anticipated next film Nope, which will see Daniel Kaluuya, long a favorite of the filmmaker, star alongside Steven Yeun and Keke Palmer.
- A vivid trailer has arrived for Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittá's retrospective "Beware of Dario Argento: A 20-Film Retrospective," which opens this Friday, June 17, in New York. The series includes seventeen brand-new 4K restorations and the North American premiere of Argento's first feature in ten years, Dark Glasses.
- In a new video produced for in-demand fashion brand Aimé Leon Dore, artist JR visits the studio of abstract expressionist painter Robert De Niro, Sr. (1922-1993). He is welcomed by De Niro, Jr., for a lively conversation about the pair's father-son relationship.
RECOMMENDED READING
Philip Baker Hall in 2017.
- Philip Baker Hall, one of Hollywood's most significant and productive character actors, who became known for his "raspy delivery, grizzled hair and doleful face," has died aged 90. Among the tributes and obituaries penned so far is this wide-ranging one by Adam Bernstein for the Washington Post. In it, Bernstein quotes an array of admirers including Paul Thomas Anderson, Larry David, and David Thomson to sketch a biography of an actor with a career so broad that it proves difficult to abbreviate.
- The fourth issue of BlackStar Fest's bi-annual print journal Seen is now available for preorder. This edition is guest-edited by filmmaker Darol Olu Kae, and features Martine Syms on her new film The African Desperate.
- Also on their fourth issue, Open City Documentary Festival's publication Non-Fiction is available to read online. Guest-edited by curator Aily Nash, this issue includes numerous filmmaker contributions, including texts by Morgan Quaintance and Peggy Ahwesh, a screenplay by Basma Alsharif and Jumana Manna, conversations with Joana Pimenta, Adirley Queirós, and Diane Severin Nguyen, and more.
- Alexandra Alter wrote this week about The Twilight World, Werner Herzog's first foray into fiction writing, for the New York Times. On becoming a novelist for the first time at 80, Herzog says that “it’s odd, but I can explain it easily in a sort of dictum: My films are my voyage, and my writing is home.”
- James Wham reports from the roof of the Cannes Palais for the Baffler, writing evocatively about all the "palm trees, terracotta tiles, the jostling mast-phalli of super-white yachts, superyachts in oil-black" found at the festival, considering how the films are couched in "Cannes mythmaking."
- "Filmmaking today, especially that which is made at the front lines of revolt against state power, elaborates on the contingency of cinema such that the afterlives of images, circulated broadly or leaked, make their capture potentially incriminating. The images they convey serve as evidence, as incriminating snares, as open wounds and spilled secrets." In a lengthy and tremendously well-informed article for Film Quarterly, Tiffany Sia provides an essential perspective on two films made about the Hong Kong protests by anonymous filmmakers.
- Finally, Jen Yamato of the L.A. Times profiles the prolific character actor James Hong, recently honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Now 93 years old, Hong revisits a career that took him from Blade Runner to Seinfeld to this year's Everything Everywhere All At Once — to name a scant three of almost 700 credits — and even included a brief stint as a sales rep for Roger Corman.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Julee Cruise, touchingly described by David Lynch in his farewell video as a "great musician, great singer, and great human being," has died. A "dinner music" staple in the Bowie household, Pitchfork shared five essential tracks from the artist known for her Lynch collaborations and her melancholic dream pop.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Sonhos de Vida (1979).
- Lisbon: In October, Doclisboa will host a complete retrospective of Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Reichenbach, a figurehead of the Brazilian Marginal Cinema movement who created work that could be situated somewhere between "thriller, porn, and experimental cinema."
- Hong Kong: The M+ museum has opened the doors to its brand-new cinema. You can read more about the space in an article dedicated to venue openings that is found in the first issue of Notebook magazine, which will be shipping out to subscribers soon.
- New York City: A retrospective of the recently departed painter and experimental filmmaker Dore O. is running from June 14-17 at Anthology Film Archives. Notebook contributor Dana Reinoos overviewed the series in Hyperallergic.
- London: The Barbican Centre have initiated a new bi-monthly series focusing on showcasing new restorations of under-seen works of global art cinema. The first screening will be of Brazilian-Mozambican director Ruy Guerra's Mueda, Memoria e Massacre.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Crimes of the Future.
- Leonardo Goi's latest The Current Debate column explores reactions to David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future, which has followed its Cannes premiere with a June 3 US release and select international cinema screenings. He wonders whether the film seeks to satiate "our hunger for outrageous and gratifying bodily violations" or make us question why we have such an appetite for this sort of grotesquerie in the first place.
- Dan Schindel looks at Benediction, seeing how Terence Davies's moving new film uses literary techniques to tell the story of the life of English war poet Siegfried Sassoon.
- “If you can’t have any fun don’t make a movie.” The 1960s low-budget cult films of Ray Dennis Steckler are the subject of Chris Shields's lovely survey, a world wherein "drifters, rock ‘n’ rollers, killers, dropouts, superheroes, and struggling actors" burst out of a "pulp comic come to life".
- Four more video essays published on Notebook this week complete our collaboration with FILMADRID International Film Festival for this year's edition of The Video Essay. These are: "Everyday Portabella," "The French New Wave: A Free Woman Under the Male Gaze," "Helmut's Triumph," and "My Place."
EXTRAS
- Now, in the intersection between cinema and sports news...a lifelong motor-racing enthusiast who has in recent years been increasingly active as an amateur driver, Michael Fassbender has, like Paul Newman before him, competed in the 24-hour-long endurance race Le Mans, placing 16th while driving a Porsche 911 RSR-19.