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NEWS
- Much-loved genre filmmaker Albert Pyun (above) has died. Working mostly with low-budgets, and often making films for the direct-to-video market, Pyun’s career spanned five decades and included films such as The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982), Cyborg (1989), and the popular cyberpunk film series Nemesis. Cynthia Curnan, Pyun's wife and producer, had recently requested messages from fans to pass onto the filmmaker, who had been ill for a number of years prior to his passing.
- It seems that Paul Thomas Anderson is planning to start shooting his next feature in July 2023. Little is yet known about the new project, but a casting call has been listed for a “15-to-16-year-old female of mixed ethnicity who is physically athletic and excels at Martial Arts.” Previous reports suggested Anderson’s next film would be a LA-set 1940s Jazz film, so it's enticing to imagine how these two pieces of information may fit together.
- The National Film Archive of India (NFAI) have announced plans to digitize “5,000 priceless classics of Indian cinema,” restoring 2,200 of them in the process. Their new restorations of Satyajit Ray’s The Adversary (1970) and The Chess Players (1977) premiered at Cannes Classics and Venice Classics earlier this year.
- There's still a few more days to secure the next issue of our print-only magazine Notebook—featuring photographs by Park Chan-wook, Michelangelo Antonioni’s previously unpublished travel diaries, Dash Shaw on the island of Fårö, and more. Click here to subscribe by this Friday, December 2, before Issue 2 ships in late January. In the meantime, you can preview both versions of the cover below:
The two cover variants for Issue 2 of Notebook magazine, featuring photography by Park Chan-wook from the ongoing series "Your Faces."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Netflix have shared a trailer for Copenhagen Cowboy, Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest project. Starring Danish actress Angela Bundalovic, the series will arrive on their platform on January 5, 2023, having already premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
RECOMMENDED READING
Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990).
- For their latest issue, Document brought John Carpenter and Nicolas Cage together for a conversation. They talk about each other’s films and their own craft and fascinations, before plotting “a possible cinematic curriculum for the apocryphal Nicolas Cage University.”
- For Verso’s blog, Andrew Key writes about Jean-Marie Straub, who died last week. Working with his wife and lifelong collaborator Danièle Huillet, Straub made films that “challenge or ignore the cinematic conventions that we take for granted, demanding instead a different kind of attention from the viewer.”
- Twenty years after the release of George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002), “the first digitally shot blockbuster to hit cinemas,” Sam Wigley overviews the early digital cinema era for Sight and Sound, hearing thoughts from a range of early adopters including David Lynch, Michael Mann, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhangke, and Miranda July.
- “As a prose stylist, Babitz was pellucid, funny in the aphoristic way that every writer who desires to be funny longs to be, and truly hip. As a person, she was Too Much.” For the food newsletter Vittles, Philippa Snow writes about the eating habits of Eve's Hollywood author Eve Babitz.
- For the Baffler, Yasmina Price describes the qualities of Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of Remembrance (1986). Recently restored by the BFI National Archive, the film has resurfaced, Price notes, “at a time when the poignancy of its political interventions is grimly confirmed, just as the longevity of its daring aesthetics is beautifully asserted.”
- “Movies are an accumulation of mundane tasks that support improbable fables.” For the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik uses Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson’s Hollywood: The Oral History, a new book which is being marketed as “the only comprehensive first-hand history of Hollywood,” as a way of looking into the idea of the oral history. “The significant promise of oral history,” Gopnik proposes, “is that the parade of first-person witnesses, unimpeded by editorial interference, might, at last, tell it like it is.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
My Twentieth Century (Ildikó Enyedi, 1989).
- Madrid: Curated by Dorota Lech, From the East: Women Filmmakers and the Iron Curtain (1943–1993) is a series of eighteen features and eighteen short films made by filmmakers from across the Soviet Union. The lineup includes films by Ildikó Enyedi, Márta Mészáros, Věra Chytilová, and others, and runs throughout January at the Filmoteca Española-Cine Doré and the Museo Reina Sofía, both in the Spanish capital.
- New York City: Inspired by an ongoing exhibition at New York’s MoMA on Linda Goode Bryant’s former gallery Just Above Midtown, “Let’s Just Do It Ourselves” is an one-off screening curated by Alfreda’s Cinema’s Melissa Lyde that pairs rarely seen films by Sandye Wilson with Fronza Woods’s recently restored Killing Time (1979). The event takes place on December 9 at Anthology Film Archives, co-sponsored by the New York African Film Festival.
- Los Angeles: Running December 1 through 19 is “Present Past: A Celebration of Film Preservation,” the Academy Museum's new festival for restored and preserved films. The lineup includes fifty films of various lengths, starting with the world premiere of a new restoration of Sam Newfield’s Harlem on the Prairie (1937), a musical-western with an all-Black cast.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996).
Features:
- With every film by Lars von Trier, Jeremy Carr writes in his Notebook Primer on the director, “there remain certain assumptions, usually based on the inevitably jarring nature of his work, his bold chronicles of despair, sex, and violence, and his inventive, ever-evolving aesthetic.” MUBI is currently premiering episodes of Lars von Trier’s new television series The Kingdom: Exodus (2022) each week, so take this chance to become acquainted with the director’s brand of “devilish provocation” through Carr’s comprehensive survey.
- The Belarusian filmmaker Nikita Lavretski released eight multimedia works in 2022, “an astonishingly prodigious run even for a filmmaker well known—if known at all—for the speed and quantity of his output.” At DocLisboa, Christopher Small spoke with the filmmaker in a back-and-forth dialogue that is “long, breezy, and naturally full of goofing.”
- In a guest piece on the Deuce Notebook column, Jason Bailey looks at the complex history behind John G. Avildsen’s surprise box-office hit Joe (1970), starring Peter Boyle. The film was devised and shot under the title The Gap, before being rethought and retitled by Avildsen and screenwriter Norman Wexler after the Kent State massacre and Hard Hat Riot of the same year “made them rethink what their film was about—and who it was for.”
Quick Reads:
- “Sexual Drive is an experiment to see how erotic movies can be made without direct sexual expressions.” Kôta Yoshida introduces his film Sexual Drive, now showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries.
EXTRAS
Soothing the Bruise (Betzy Bromberg, 1980). Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London.
- The writers at Alt/Kino have shared their highlights of 2022, which include the Open City Documentary Festival’s Betzy Bromberg retrospective Caitlin Quinlan covered for Notebook, and Dry Ground Burning (2022), which Noteboook editor-in-chief Daniel Kasman wrote about when reporting from this year’s Berlinale.
- City Lights have published a memoir by Joyce Chopra (Smooth Talk, Joyce at 34). In the book, the filmmaker describes her experiences forging a career in an industry that has historically been hostile to women, and balancing motherhood and marriage with her creative achievements. IndieWire have shared an extract from the book.