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NEWS
Sacheen Littlefeather: Breaking the Silence (Peter Spirer, 2019).
- Sacheen Littlefeather, Native American actress and activist, has died at 75. At the 1973 Academy Awards, she declined Marlon Brando’s Oscar for The Godfather on his behalf to condemn the treatment of Native Americans by the film industry and bring attention to the Wounded Knee protests.
- After five years in charge of BFI Flare and the London Film Festival, Tricia Tuttle has stepped down from her role as Festivals Director at the British Film Institute.
- Feminist film journal Another Gaze has announced a publishing imprint. Another Gaze Editions launches in late 2022 with My Cinema, a collection of writings by and interviews with Marguerite Duras, and a new translation of The Sky Is Falling, Lorenza Mazzetti's first novel.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Hunt, the directorial debut from popular South Korean actor Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game), has a trailer. Lee stars in the spy thriller, while also serving as producer, writer, and director of the film, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year.
- The first trailer has arrived for Connect, a Disney+ series with episodes directed by Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer). It’s set to premiere at the Busan International Film Festival this month.
RECOMMENDED READING
Safe (Garrett Bradley, 2022).
- At London’s Lisson Gallery, Garrett Bradley is premiering a new three-channel short, Safe (2022): “the second in a trilogy of short films that explore the nuanced overlap between women’s interior and exterior lives.” To mark this solo show, open until October 29, Allie Biswas profiles the artist for Frieze.
- For Metrograph, James Lattimer examines Ode (1999), a mid-length film that is “one of Kelly Reichardt’s least known works, mainly accessible via the poor VHS transfer from German television that’s been bouncing around the internet for a while now.”
- In the New York Times, Jazmine Hughes profiles the “perennially cuddly” Whoopi Goldberg at her New Jersey home, looking back across a multifaceted, singular career “stacked with weighty achievements but even more blunders.”
- For Vox, Alissa Wilkinson considers the "Avengers: Endgame-ification" of films designed around A-list casts, like David O. Russell's Amsterdam and Rian Johnson's Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
- "I think the biggest trick is to still be here." Walter Hill tells Mitchell Beaupre of The Film Stage about his new western Dead for a Dollar (2022), and shares a great story about Sam Fuller along the way.
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2022).
- For Cinema Scope, Beatrice Loayza speaks with Olivier Assayas about Irma Vep (2022), “an eight-part HBO remake of his masterpiece about a failed remake.” In the same issue, Adam Nayman interviews Kelly Reichardt, whose film Showing Up (2022) is on the cover.
- “For the first time while watching a Claire Denis film, I wondered if ambivalence sufficed, if it was enough to show white characters running before a Global South reduced to a rear-projection screen.” Courtney Duckworth carefully interrogates Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (2022) for Screen Slate.
- In Filmmaker Magazine, Jordan Cronk interviews Ashley McKenzie, whose second feature Queens of the Qing Dynasty (2022) screened recently at TIFF and is next at NYFF.
- “The kind of films I find most engaging are films where you get disoriented and you’re not quite sure what it is you’re looking at.” Alongside a large retrospective of his work ongoing in London, Sukhdev Sandhu writes about John Smith, “one of Britain’s most revered artist film-makers.”
- We share a few more pieces on Jean-Luc Godard this week, with Fredric Jameson offering a brief tribute for the New Left Review, Hilton Als writing about “Godard’s Women” for the New York Review of Books, and the Film Comment Podcast’s roundtable remembrance (featuring guests Richard Brody and Blair McClendon).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Bodies in Dissent (Ufuoma Essi, 2021).
- London: Ufuoma Essi’s newest short Is My Living in Vain (2022), “a meditation on the continuing history and emancipatory potential of the Black church as a space of diasporic belonging, affirmation and community organising,” is on view at Gasworks until December 18.
- Los Angeles: Running from November 4-27 at the Academy Museum, "Hollywood Chinese" is a series curated by Arthur Dong that aims “to both critique and celebrate Hollywood’s depictions of the Chinese, as well as spotlight groundbreaking Chinese and Chinese American artists who have navigated an industry often ignorant of race.”
- Pordenone: The 41st edition of the Giornate del Cinema Muto, a long-running, much-loved festival for silent film in Northern Italy, is currently underway. A selection of films from the program is also available to watch online via a paid subscription.
- London: A new season of horror films about “the vampire, the ghost, the zombie, the witch and the beast,” "In Dreams Are Monsters" runs from October to December at the BFI Southbank, programmed by Anna Bogutskaya, Kelli Weston, and Michael Blyth.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, 1956).
- Arun A.K. explores Satyajit Ray: Miscellany, “a new book that “gathers Ray’s generous introductions to other people's works—such as books on film, photography, painting, translations, and LP liner notes—which indicate his reverence toward the exponents of these diverse art forms.”
- Alongside the New York Film Festival (September 30-October 16), peruse our Festival Guide, an overview of all of Notebook's coverage of the selection to date, or read a special edition of Adrian Curry’s Movie Poster of the Week column that gathers posters for “21 of the 24 features shown in the main slate of the 10th New York Film Festival.”
- “We face a glowing screen, and behind the screen is an old church that spends its summer hosting a children’s camp, and behind that, a stripe of orange sky that presses up against the flash of Aegean Sea, turning the color blue electric, like a fish you’d need a special type of light to see.” Hannah Kofman reports from her experience volunteering at the Syros International Film Festival, a small film festival on a remote Greek island.
- "Sometimes, nothing happens: nothing happens but waiting, saving and making do in the meantime. How do we make stories from these passages of time?" ask Laura Staab and Christopher Small, who recently sat down with Kelly Reichardt to discuss her latest film Showing Up (2022)
EXTRAS
- In a neat thread, filmmaker Will Ross examines, with impressive precision, the use of eye tracing and spatial orientation in a single scene in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).
- During a recent Q&A in Chicago, Tsai Ming-liang mentioned that he’s wrapped an edit on another Walker film, this time set at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. (For US readers, this handy website compiles a schedule of Tsai's touring career retrospective, which also takes him to Boston, New York, and Washington, DC.)