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Closeup of Fay Wray from Doctor X after restoration work. Image from https://www.cinema.ucla.edu
NEWS
- After working together in the film Rojo (2018), director Benjamin Naishtat and actor Alfredo Castro reunite to talk about the terror, pleasure and mystery involved in the process of creating a film. They agree that for both director and actor, the seed of creation is the irrationality of madness, and that uncertainty is an essential factor in filmmaking. Castro and Naishtat call for a subversive cinema that cannot be domesticated by current narrative paradigms and that is also capable of using the imagination as a means and a catalyst to reinterpret our history. To listen to this episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast app, click here.
- The great French film director Jacques Rozier is being evicted from his home at age 94, according to a new article in Le Figaro that references a Facebook post from his collaborator Michèle Berson. This sad news comes months before La Cinémathèque Française is set to host a retrospective of his films.
- Pennsylvania's beloved Mahoning Drive-In Theater is in danger of closing after the land on which the theater rests was optioned by a company that has plans to remove them. They've started a "Save The Mahoning Drive-In" campaign and have listed multiple ways to help.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, the official Olympics website has made Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad available for free, with English subtitles.
- NEON has released the official trailer for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's long-awaited English-language debut, Memoria. The film follows Tilda Swinton as a Scottish woman who experiences a "mysterious sensory syndrome" during a trip through Colombia.
- The official trailer for Dash Shaw's Cryptozoo, which won the NEXT Innovator Award at Sundance. The film is about a group of "cryptozookeepers" who grapple with the question of whether or not to confine a rare and mythical creature in a zoo.
- In this new clip from Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, Frances McDormand and Timothée Chalamet have a chat in the bathroom. Read our Cannes review of The French Dispatch here.
- The trailer for Justin Kurzel's Cannes title Nitram, which follows the events leading to the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre in Tasmania.
- HBO Max has released an official teaser for Scenes from A Marriage, a mini-series remake of the series by Ingmar Bergman, starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain as the couple originally played by Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann.
- From Janus Films, a trailer for Eyimofe (This is My Desire) from twin co-directors Arie and Chuko Esiri. The Lagos-set film follows two distantly connected strangers who pursue their dreams of moving to Europe. The film opens on July 23 at Film Forum in New York.
- Throughout the month of July, Le Cinéma Club is celebrating all the concerts we've missed with a Summer Music Festival, starting with Jim Jarmusch's "love letter" to Neil Young and his band, the rarely-screened 1997 documentary Year of the Horse.
RECOMMENDED READING
My Brother's Wedding. Image from Le Cinema Club
- In a new interview with Variety, filmmaker and frequent Godard collaborator Fabrice Aragno discusses his upcoming feature debut, Le lac, and working on Jean-Luc Godard's final two films. Aragno's short film Lakeside Suite (2019) is also streaming on MUBI.
- The UCLA Film & Television Archive interviews preservationist Scott MacQueen about the restoration process of the long-lost Doctor X (1932), the first all-Technicolor horror feature.
- Bassist and co-founder of Sonic Youth Kim Gordon gives her list of five films she loves to Le Cinéma Club, from Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert to Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding.
- For the Criterion Current, Molly Haskell opens up the career of Carole Lombard, the "First Lady of Screwball," and her very particular knack for comedy.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Our Cannes correspondent Leonardo Goi is continuing to report on the latest by Hamaguchi, Hansen-Løve, Verhoeven, and more.
- The latest entry in Patrick Holzapfel's Full Bloom series looks at the author's experience with olive trees as a way to explore Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees.
- Aaron E. Hunt selects one shot from Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall that encapsulates how the auteur uses shapes and lines to draw a kind of violence that considers political and moral justifications.
EXTRAS
- Arrow Video has announced Shaw Scope Volume 1, a box set containing 12 Shaw Brothers classics on Blu-ray. The boxset will be released on December 6.
