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NEWS
- We’re excited to share the cover for Issue 3 of Notebook, which features a photograph of pioneering Indian actor-producer Devika Rani. Last week we sneak-previewed what will be the subscribers-only gift: a weatherproof sleeve. Subscriptions for the magazine are always open, but in order to receive Issue 3, you’ll need to subscribe by June 1. So if you haven’t yet, don’t hesitate!
- Some news from the Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan, Armenia. Notebook contributor Leonardo Goi will be organizing their Critics Campus, a four-day workshop for emerging film critics, in early July. Applications are now open: submit yours today.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- How To With John Wilson is returning for its third, and final, season, which will premiere July 28 on "Max," the streamer formerly known as HBO Max. The short teaser includes, among other delights, a very large duck. Wilson will also be honored at New York's Museum of the Moving Image in early June.
RECOMMENDED READING
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954).
- “Few people present a better case for separating the art from the artist than Kenneth Anger.” In Art Review, Juliet Jacques eulogizes the experimental filmmaker, “a man of intense contradictions” who became “a legend long before his death this month aged ninety-six.”
- “I’m the kind of person who plants seeds and sees what comes to fruition, how it grows and matures. Right now I’m living in… where am I now? In my head I’m in 2016. Because you plant seeds, and then in seven years, you see, will they come into blossom, will they fade?” From Cannes, Nicolas Rapold talks to Steve McQueen for Filmmaker about his latest feature Occupied City, a four-hour-long landscape documentary about Amsterdam adapted from an illustrated book written by McQueen’s wife Bianca Stigter.
- “Every day I walk into a theater excited to discover something, seeking out filmmakers and national cinemas about which I've everything to learn, and instead encounter familiar forms and stories.” For the second year running, Reverse Shot’s Edo Choi and Eric Hynes compare their contrasting experiences of Cannes, the “most mythologized of film events.”
- Caitlin Quinlan reports on the cognitive dissonance of Cannes for ArtReview: "Cannes still feels like the cinephile pinnacle, one that critics remain reluctant to give up on, but it’s a festival that seems happy to politically posture, associating its image with the work it programs rather than take any clear progressive stance."
- “The movie’s worried — worried about what we’ll say, about whether they got it right.” Wesley Morris reviews Rob Marshall’s live-action The Little Mermaid for the New York Times, a film he describes as being “everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval.”
- For e-flux’s Criticism vertical, Leo Goldsmith muses on the contemporary avant-garde via the third edition of Prismatic Ground, a festival that is “one manifestation of what one might optimistically describe, to the surprise of jaded experimental film wonks like yours truly, as a new community centered around experimental work.”
- “As the night enveloped the lake in darkness for the last time, Straub stared out at the dimming colours of the landscape, listening to the beginning of the second movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 12.” Speaking to those who knew the radical filmmaker, Christopher Small learns about the last days of Jean-Marie Straub, who “died a couple of months before his 90th birthday in the Swiss town of Rolle,” for Swiss Info.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective, 1986).
- London: The Tate Modern is showing several films by the Black Audio Film Collective, including their seminal work Handsworth Songs (1986), for free, every weekend through June 18.
- Copenhagen: “Disabled Lives, Disabling Forms” is a series of lectures and events exploring the intersection between disability, architecture, and cinema culture. It starts on June 1 with a screening of Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) with an introduction by architect and architectural theorist David Gissen at the Cinemateket. Gissen shared details of the other events in the series via Twitter.
- New York: On June 3, e-flux will host “Once Removed,” a program of works by Parastoo Anoushahpour, Sharlene Bamboat, and Miryam Charles “that explore how geographic, historic, and familial chasms are bridged by acts of translation.”
- Shanghai: The 25th Shanghai International Film Festival takes place from June 9 through 18. Notable among the competition selection is All Ears, Liu Jiayin’s first film since Oxhide II (2009).
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An, 2023).
- Our second phase of Cannes coverage continues with a dispatch from Lawrence Garcia—here writing on Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or–winner Anatomy of a Fall and Todd Haynes’s tabloid-fluent May December, among others. Elsewhere, Leonardo Goi shares parting thoughts on films from Aki Kaurismäki, Víctor Erice, Alice Rohrwacher, and Pham Thien An.
- Speaking of Kaurismäki, you can also peruse the results of our critics’ top ten from the Croisette—thanks very much to everyone who voted. (The festival’s official, Ruben Östlund–approved winners have been dutifully compiled here, for your convenience.)
- "While the wider world is a faraway fantasy, the impact of regional power struggles remains brutally material.” With Kira Kovalenko’s 2021 Un Certain Regard prizewinner Unclenching the Fists now streaming on MUBI in many countries, Carmen Gray writes on the film’s delicate path through fraught geopolitical tensions in the North Caucasus.
- To introduce his new short, The Potemkinists—now streaming on MUBI—Radu Jude shares a few archival materials related to the battleship Potemkin. An under-the-radar 2021 festival treasure, Jude’s short is an absurdist response to Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin; the filmmaker describes it as “a comedy about the layers of history—or, better put, about misunderstandings coming from our relationship with history.”
EXTRAS
- This week in brands: Sofia Coppola directed Keanu Reeves in a commercial for Suntory Whisky’s centenary. The ad—with an appropriately shoegaze-y, sensory montage for Coppola fans—incorporates footage of a Suntory commercial from the 1980s featuring Francis Ford Coppola and Akira Kurosawa.
- Announced alongside the film’s premiere at Cannes, The Film Desk’s DO NOT DETONATE Without Presidential Approval is a collection of original and republished essays on the mid-century American cinema that inspired Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. Co-edited by Anderson and Jake Perlin, the book's contributors include Kent Jones, Durga Chew-Bose, Michael Koresky, Imogen Sara Smith, and Gina Telaroli.
- At Cannes, Hong Sang-soo was spotted on the beach—at midday—alone.