Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Above: Monica Vitti in Red Desert (1964). (Courtesy of Janus Films)
- One of the most captivating presences in Italian cinema, actress Monica Vitti has died at age 90. She started as a stage and television actor before becoming known for her roles in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), La notte (1960), L'eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964). After the end of her professional and romantic relationship with Antonioni (the two would return for The Mystery of Oberwald in 1980), Vitti turned to lighter fare by international directors, including a small part in Luis Buñuel's surrealist comedy The Phantom of Liberty (1974). In the official announcement of Vitti's death, Italy’s culture minister Dario Franceschini wrote, “Goodbye to the queen of Italian cinema.”
- The groundbreaking artist James Bidgood, whose artistic output spanned from photography and music to films like Pink Narcissus (1971), has also died. Shot on 8mm film over seven years in Bidgood's apartment and released anonymously, Pink Narcissus was an underground hit that remains influential for its highly stylized world of gay erotic fantasy. In an interview with Another Man from 2019, Bidgood states: “Art only stimulated by praise or profit is not art. If it is not born from pain or anguish or pride or shame or desire or overwhelming joy, it is only something of decorative value."
- In its 100th issue, Senses of Cinema has released its 2021 World Poll, which features the ballots of contributors worldwide.
- Sundance has announced its full list of award winners, including Nikyatu Jusu's Nanny and Cooper Raiff's Cha Cha Real Smooth.
- The International Film Festival Rotterdam has also come to a close with today's virtual awards ceremony. Paraguayan filmmaker Paz Encina’s EAMI took home the top Tiger Award, while Morgane Dziurla-Petit's Excess Will Save Us and Gao Linyang's To Love Again won the festival's Tiger Competition Special Jury Awards.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- From the Black Film Archive's newsletter, Maya Cade shares 28 Black films to watch for the 28 days of Black History Month. "The films selected here are constructing worlds that embody pain, joy, love, and laughter to bring the fullness of Black life to us all."
- The trailer for After Yang, Kogonada's follow-up to his 2017 debut, Columbus. An adaptation of the short story by Alexander Weinstein, the film tells the story of a family attempting to repair and revive their robotic "live-in babysitter."
- The first trailer for Rita Azevedo Gomes's The Kagelstatt Trio, which is premiering at the Berlinale Forum 2022. The film follows Jorge, a man trying to make a film around Éric Rohmer’s 1980s theater play of the same name.
- The trailer for Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia's A Night of Knowing Nothing, which blends together archival footage and present-day protests to create a fictional tale about a student at the Film and Television Institute of India. Read our interview with Kapadia here.
- It's the teaser trailer for The Offer, the Paramount+ limited series about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. The story is told from the perspective of producer Albert S. Ruddy (played by Miles Teller), who'd like his opponents to know: "This is not just some gangster film...this is a story about family."
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: LA CLEF REVIVAL.
- We highly recommend reading up on Kino Slang's summary of the situation faced by the community-run cinema La Clef Revival in Paris. La Clef faces eviction this week, and its organizers and supporters are prepared to resist by continuing to occupy the space and using it for pay-what-you-can screenings of "queer, anti-racist, radical films."
- Programmer Farran Smith Nehme guides us through the selections of her MoMA film series Dames, Janes, Dolls, and Canaries: Women Stars of the Pre-Code Era, which showcases the "talented women who burned brightly, then out."
- "Are you alone if you’ve got a camera pointed at you?" To mark thirty years since the Sundance Film Festival panel on contemporary lesbian and gay cinema, Another Gaze has published Octavia Stocker's essay on Sadie Benning's video diaries.
- In a conversation with Kyle Turner, critic B. Ruby Rich, who first described the genre that would come to be known as New Queer Cinema, discusses the institutional and market changes that have shaped queer cinema today.
- In a new profile by novelist Elif Batuman, Céline Sciamma shares stories from the making of Petite Maman, and her own childhood.
- The centennial issue of Senses of Cinema includes Vinzenz Hediger on the role of the dog (named Roxy) in Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au Langage, Richard Sowada on the experimental element of Frank Capra's films, and Krathyn White on filmmaking in Myanmar.
- "Guillermo is certainly speaking from and to his own time, but he’s doing so in the idiom of a time gone by, and the urgency and despair of then overlaps with the urgency and despair of now in a way that’s quite disturbing." In an essay published by the Los Angeles Times, Martin Scorsese makes a strong case for Guillermo Del Toro's Nightmare Alley.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- "We wanted to show that we were more than the traumas around the film, as alive as the environment around us." Tebogo Malebogo introduces his film Heaven Reaches Down to Earth, which is showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries in the series Brief Encounters.
- Jordan Cronk provides an overview on the films of Ricky D'Ambrose, and the artistic trajectory that has culminated in his latest film, The Cathedral.
- Florence Scott-Anderton's Soundtrack Mix #23 is a celebration of music and sound in the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
- For their Under Childhood column, Kelley Dong writes on the blurred line between virtual and IRL childhood experiences in Mamoru Hosoda's Belle.
- Greg Cwik interrogates the strangeness of the new Scream, the latest entry in the self-aware horror franchise and a requel—a reboot-sequel—obsessed with its origins.
- Olympia Kiriakou guides us through the films of the Museum of Modern Art's series dedicated to the actresses of pre-Code cinema.
EXTRAS
- From R. Emmet Sweeney on Twitter, a thread of ads for long-lost John Ford films.
- Meanwhile, at the Boss Baby symposium, nearly five hours of thoughtful discussions on developmental psychology, ancient mythology, and philosophy.