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NEWS
Jafar Panahi.
- Having been detained last week for protesting the arrest of fellow Iranian filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad, Jafar Panahi has now been ordered to serve six years in prison. Ahead of this development Eric Kohn reported on the broader situation in Indiewire. “Maybe they will come for all of us one by one,” says one anonymous filmmaker who is quoted in the article.
- Martine Marignac, a producer of vital films by Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman, Leos Carax, Jeanne Balibar, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and others, has died aged 75.
- The juries have been announced for the 79th edition of the Venice Film Festival. Julianne Moore will head up the main jury, supported by filmmakers Audrey Diwan, Leonardo di Costanzo, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, and Mariano Cohn, plus actor Leila Hatami and author Kazuo Ishiguro. Meanwhile, Céline Sciamma has been announced as the president of the Giornate degli Autori jury.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Accessible free via registration, hundreds of classic Polish films are now available to watch online as part of a new project funded by the European Union and Poland’s culture ministry. Among the collection are works by Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski.
- A trailer has been released for The Munsters, a new film by singular musician and horror auteur Rob Zombie, which is due to debut on Netflix later in the year.
- Keane, an underseen 2004 film by Lodge Kerrigan (Clean, Shaven) featuring an early performance by Damien Lewis, has received a tidy-up and will be getting a US cinema re-release. Grasshopper Films have shared a trailer showcasing the 4K restoration.
RECOMMENDED READING
Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1986).
- In a new text on Criterion's Current, Beatrice Loayza writes about Delphine Seyrig's performance in "the effervescent and bittersweet shopping-mall romance Golden Eighties," the actor's second collaboration with Chantel Akerman, but the one, Loayza argues, "that truly set her free."
- "Rather than dematerializing the image, as if it were transparent to reality, or the reality, as if the image constituted a realm of its own, Straub and Huillet materialize the commerce between the image and reality peculiar to a medium which is both pictorial and documentary." Along with a contextual introduction from Mia Ruf, Caesura have republished a lengthy, remarkable essay by film scholar Gilberto Perez on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, first published in the pages of Artforum in 1978.
- Commissioned by LUX alongside an online screening of Lucy Clout's film ZZZ, Elena Gorfinkel's article on the artist-filmmaker looks at her particular style of "nocturnal thinking."
- "Ritt’s Paris Blues recasts the social drama of race, turning it into a portrayal of the sacrifices of art, the cost of charting your own destiny." Novelist, playwright, and essayist Darryl Pinckney ruminates on Martin Ritt's Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman–starring Paris Blues for the summer issue of the Paris Review.
- Alongside the new restoration of Fruit Chan's handover-era classic Made in Hong Kong, Metrograph's Journal have published a translation of a 1997 interview by Susanna T. with the filmmaker. "In 1995, the year when cinema turned 100 years old, I felt that having assisted so many directors, it was time I made a film for myself!"
- The Rehearsal, the new series from Nathan for You's Nathan Fielder, recently premiered on HBO. Adam Nayman introduces the first two episodes and Fielder's earlier work in the Toronto Star, stating that "as a meditation on the futility of methodology itself, The Rehearsal may be a masterpiece," whilst Charles Bramesco covers the series as a whole for Hyperallergic. Fielder was also recently profiled by Lila Shapiro for Vulture.
- Lastly, Michael Mann is profiled at length by Jonah Weiner in the New York Times Magazine. "In Modena, I saw firsthand how Mann’s interest in creating uncanny dream worlds rests upon a foundation of extreme nuts-and-bolts authenticity," Weiner writes, visiting the set of Mann's forthcoming feature Ferrari.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Al Pacino and Michael Mann on the set of Heat (1985).
- Speaking of Mann, the director is the guest for the 1349th episode of WTF with Marc Maron. They talk about Heat and Heat 2: A Novel, before working their way through the filmmaker's full oeuvre, plus much, much more.
- Another week, and another new episode of the MUBI Podcast. Episode 3 of the "Only in Theaters" season looks at the Westgate, a second-run neighborhood theater in Minneapolis, exploring how Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude found its audience there and grew into a cult hit.
- Filmmaker, academic, critic, multi-hyphenate, and museum staffer Ayanna Dozier guested on the Screen Slate Podcast to talk to hosts Jon Dieringer, John Klacsmann, and Caroline Golum about the state of museum front-of-house labor, inspired by the recent attack of an employee at the film desk of the MoMA.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1989).
- London: Ongoing at the Southbank Centre and BFI Southbank is "In the Black Fantastic," an exhibition and screening series featuring artists and filmmakers "who draw on science fiction, myth and Afrofuturism to question our knowledge of the world." Chrystel Oloukoï interviewed curator Ekow Eshun about the exhibition for Sight & Sound.
- Sarajevo: The films of Sergei Loznitsa will be the subject of a retrospective at this year's Sarajevo Film Festival. The filmmaker will be present at the festival, where he will also receive an honorary award.
- Los Angeles: Opening August 21 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is "Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971," an expansive exhibition exploring how "how Black performers and filmmakers have helped define cinema in the United States." The exhibition is co-curated by Doris Berger, vice president of curatorial affairs at the Academy Museum, and Rhea L. Combs, director of curatorial affairs at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. An accompanying catalog of essays will also be made available.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
This House (Miryam Charles, 2022).
- "Inspired by her family's history of migration from Haiti to Canada, Miryam Charles' films investigate the liminal spaces between narrative and place." Marius Hrdy speaks with Miryam Charles about her feature debut This House, a standout selection earlier this year in the Berlinale Forum.
- Thomas Quist overviews the life and work of Jean Louis Schefer, "the distinctive writer and nonpareil theorist of art who died in early June of this year."
- Jordan Cronk talks to Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, a duo who, having set "the course for modern experimental documentary filmmaking with the pioneering nautical ethnography Leviathan," recently shared a new work at the Cannes Film Festival, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, "a radical cinematic immersion into the far reaches of the human body."
- "It is easy to get emotional over a film, but it is harder to get emotional over a print of one. Yet the Nitrate Picture Show specializes in inducing just this kind of passion." The latest Notebook State of the Festival dispatch is from Joshua Bogatin, covering highlights of the sixth annual Nitrate Picture Show.
EXTRAS
Steven Spielberg, Kate Crawford, and Marcus Mumford filming the music video for "Cannibal."
- Steven Spielberg has directed his first music video, and it is for Marcus Mumford, formerly of the British folk band Mumford & Sons. The song is called "Cannibal" and Spielberg, assisted by painter and actor Kate Crawford, shot the video in a New York high school gym, filming it on his phone in a single take.
- Jessica Oreck's One Man Dies a Million Times, shot by cult cinematographer Sean Price Williams in a style described as "full Tarkovsky," will come to theaters for a limited run, three years after its initial 2019 festival premiere. The film will never see a release on home entertainment or streaming, according to its distributor, programmer Eric Allen Hatch.
- Instilling a strong sense of jealousy in anyone who wasn't in attendance, various attendees of Il Cinema Ritrovato have shared their festival favorites, including picks from several MUBI staff members.