Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Above: Sonny Chiba in Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003).
- Sonny Chiba, the prolific and singular actor, martial artist and choreographer, has died at the age of 82.
- New York Film Festival has unveiled its Currents section, featuring a strong slate that includes Artavazd Peleshian, Ted Fendt, Shengze Zhu, Christopher Harris, Shireen Seno, Matías Piñeiro and more. NYFF will also be screening seven programs dedicated to the centenary of the late film programmer and festival co-founder Amos Vogel. The retrospective includes works by Glauber Rocher, Oskar Fischinger, and Dušan Makavejev.
- The Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has announced its lineup. This year's Focus program will showcase the works of Cambodian production company Anti-Archive, Nguyễn Trinh Thí, Rajee Samarasinghe, and SPS Community Media.
- Organized by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Archival Assembly #1 will take place from September 1–8 both in-person in Berlin and online. Many titles from the festival's selection will also be available in its online cinema and accessible worldwide.
- Pietro Marcello has started production on his first French-language feature, Scarlet. The film is a period drama with "musical and fantasy elements" starring Louis Garrel, Noémie Lvovsky, and newcomer Juliette Jouan.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The official trailer for Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers, which will premiere at the 78th Venice International Film Festival.
- The Wolf House directors Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña have joined forces with Ari Aster to create Los Huesos, a 14-minute short that contains "a fictitious account of the world’s first stop-motion animated film." The Wolf House received its online premiere on MUBI in 2018.
- An official teaser from Netflix for Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God, which will premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The film is a particularly personal one, inspired by the death of Sorrentino's parents when he was 17. In the film, a young man similarly deals with sudden orphanhood and discovers a passion for filmmaking.
- Utopia Movies presents the official trailer for Amalia Ulman's feature debut El Planeta, in theaters September 24. The comedy stars the director and her mother as an impoverished mother-daughter pair living in the Spanish seaside town of Gijón.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time (2021)
- Eric Vilas-Boas's review of Hideaki Anno's Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time delves into how the film shifts animation styles, and the significance of these shifts in the history of the Evangelion franchise.
- In a new interview with Reverse Shot, director Dash Shaw discusses the blending of comics and films in the work of Winsor McCay, placing his film Cryptozoo during the late 1960s, and working with actors.
- Vanity Fair has published an in-depth first look at Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, Campion's first film in over a decade, and her first film that focuses on a male lead.
- For Film Quarterly, Brian Hu investigates the message behind the "Asian American hero documentary," which focuses on individual perseverance and hope.
- You can now pre-order Anatomy of the Devil: Short Stories by Walerian Borowczyk from Rotland Press. Only 500 copies are available of this new printing of Borowczyk's stories, which also includes 35 unique illustrations created using a color photocopying process Borowczyk referred to as "dustography."
Above: The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) (Courtesy of Janus Films)
- For Animus Magazine, Daniel Bird writes on the fate of films from former Soviet countries, such as Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates.
- The Seventh Art blog has completed its translation of Luc Moullet’s book on Cecil B. DeMille, The Emperor of Mauve. Read the translated book in its entirety here.
- "Poe essentially owns motion pictures via ongoing necrophilic obsession, since celluloid preserves the dead better than any embalming fluid." The Chiseler's Daniel Riccuito traces the influence of Edgar Allen Poe in the Giallo genre, and in works like Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return.
- David Stromberg reviews Marguerite Duras' newly-translated The Darkroom, a "cinematic work" that contains a screenplay for her 1977 film Le Camion and an outline for its theoretical framework.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Jordan Cronk reports on FIDMarseille 2021, including the films awarded by Lav Diaz's jury and how this year's festival points towards the future of cinema.
- Alan Mattli and Babos Anna interview the Indonesian director Edwin, who discusses the action, actress, and politics of his genre-bending, Golden Leopard-winning feature Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash.
- Florence Scott-Anderton's latest Soundtrack Mix is dedicated to some of the swimming pools' richest moments in sonic cinema history.
- Soham Gadre examines how new technology and the internet are influencing how we watch and remember Indian Cinema.
- In his latest entry for The Action Scene, Jonah Jeng focuses on the striking communal spirit and cultural specificity of Isaac Nabwana’s micro-budget actioners, created by the Ugandan film studio Wakaliwood.
- Srikanth Srinivasan takes a look at the newly published memoirs of critic and filmmaker Luc Moullet.
EXTRAS
- The poster for Pablo Larraín's Princess Diana biopic Spencer, which will premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival.
- The trailer for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, the game, is out now. Despite its title, the game is not a direct adaptation of the 1958 film, instead following a man who loses his wife and daughter in a car accident and has a serious case of...vertigo.