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NEWS
Spencer Bell, Nobody Knows My Name (Liz Greene, 2022).
- Sight & Sound have shared the eclectic results of their annual video essays poll. The top pieces from 2022 "range from exceptional TikTok content (which doesn’t even take the title for brevity—competing against a 30-second montage) to short or feature-length essay films, documentaries, as well as art museum/gallery installations and live performances in academic contexts."
- The Berlinale has announced their Forum lineup, including world premieres from Claire Simon, Burak Çevik, and more.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A24 have shared a trailer for Ari Aster’s new film Beau is Afraid ahead of an April US release. Joaquin Phoenix will star as the neurotic lead of the surrealist horror comedy from the “ingeniously depraved” mind behind Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019).
- Third World Newsreel have put out a trailer for their Camille Billops and James Hatch retrospective, which will be touring worldwide in coming months. Creating work that exists in a documentary-adjacent space, their films regularly use dramatization and reenactment to illustrate how race, gender, and class shape everyday life in the US.
- A trailer has appeared showing off a new 4K restoration of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), a film that has previously often only been available in a rougher visual condition.
RECOMMENDED READING
No Bears (Jafar Panahi, 2022).
- “The timeless questions about documentation, representation, and filmic truth that every ambitious filmmaker must ask themselves—and must pose to their audiences—surface here in thrilling and consequential ways.” For n+1, Mark Krotov examines No Bears (2022) alongside the four other bold films that the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced last year to six years in prison, managed to make despite being issued with a twenty-year ban from filmmaking in 2010.
- “Much is made of the allowance to speak. Yet speech is never outside of the unequal distribution of power that not only constrains who is allowed to speak but also the terms of what can be said and how it will be heard.” On Africa is a Country, Yasmina Price writes about Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, which dramatizes the “fraught position” of the “collision of language and power” as it surfaces in the law. (Price recently spoke with the filmmaker for Screen Slate, as well.)
- Tying into a series of films programmed by Jordan Peele for New York’s Film at Lincoln Center, Screen Slate have published filmmaker Michael M. Bilandic's idiosyncratic interview with the musician and actor Corey Feldman, who appears in four of the films that Peele selected.
- “Everyone is in agreement that the act of fucking Terence Stamp is utterly transformative, and that having the opportunity to continue to fuck him taken from them is enough to ensure madness.” In the White Review, Phillippa Snow compares Pier Paolo Pasolini’s "elliptical, spiritual-cum-sensual movie” Teorema (1968) with Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2021) and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki, 1966).
- New York: The Japan Society is celebrating the centenary of Japanese New Wave filmmaker Seijun Suzuki with 35mm screenings of six of his films chosen by William Carroll, Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta.
- Los Angeles: The screening series Mezzanine has invited “voracious cinephile and perverse satirist” Daniel Schmidt (Diamantino) to guest-program a “moving-image mixtape” on February 8 at 2220 Arts + Archives. The lineup is as yet unannounced, but will apparently “span from the early talkies era to millennial arthouse cinema to creepypasta and TikTok videos.”
- Berlin: As part of a series of events organized by the filmmaker Burak Çevik, Helena Wittmann will present her acclaimed feature debut Drift (2017) today, January 18, at daadgalerie. The film screens alongside a sound performance by Nika Son and a reading by Theresa George, both of whom worked on the film.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
David Lynch, He Went and He Did Do That Thing (n.d.), © David Lynch, courtesy Pace Gallery.
Features:
- Genevieve Yue explores David Lynch's recent solo exhibition, "Big Bongo Night," in a lovely new essay. "Watching a Lynch film teaches you to notice—and fear—the things that don’t fit, because they often come back later," Yue observes; here, that means Lynch's handcrafted lamps, occupying the center of the gallery.
- In an end-of-year installment of the Current Debate column, Leonardo Goi surveys the best-of lists of 2022, which he finds pleasingly eclectic and surprising. "One does not look at [lists] for consensus," Goi writes, "but for the pleasures of discovery; they are not a final word, but an invitation to seek out more."
- Ruairi McCann turns his attention to Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno's sci-fi film Shin Ultraman, which sculpts a new mythos for the Japanese superhero Ultraman. For McCann, "the spirit of IP recycling and 'cinematic universes' ... can be not just a corporate stratagem, but an adventurous, artist-led endeavor."
Quick Reads:
- "When you make a film with yourself that is, in many ways, about yourself, it becomes both an artifact and a continuation," writes Kit Zauhar to introduce her debut feature Actual People, which premieres today exclusively on MUBI. "I like to think of the film as a metamorphic rock, formed by pressure and heat, shifting and conforming and adapting to a new time. Even as I hold and consider it now, it feels slightly different than the last time I picked it up."
EXTRAS
- Sabzian have shared their regular roundup of the latest film-related books, available internationally. One early highlight of 2023 in reading material is sure to be Nicole Brenez’s 400-page tome, Jean-Luc Godard. Jean Cocteau’s Diary of a Film, published by The Film Desk, also caught our eye; newly translated by Nicholas Elliott, the book covers the period the director spent making Beauty and the Beast.
- We're remembering the music of Yukihiro Takahashi, who died this weekend aged 70. A versatile solo artist, he was the original drummer and vocalist for Yellow Magic Orchestra; he also acted in a few films by Nobuhiko Obayashi. Below is the theme song he composed for one of these films, 1985's Poisson d'avril (April Fish):