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NEWS
Will-o'-the-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrígues, 2022).
- The New York Film Festival has revealed the lineup for their Currents section, dedicated to films "testing and stretching the possibilities of the medium." The program includes new films from João Pedro Rodrígues, Ashley McKenzie, Bertrand Bonello, Helena Wittmann, and more. This year's crop of Revivals was also unveiled, featuring the highly anticipated restoration of Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore.
- 61 films will be preserved through funding from The National Film Preservation Foundation. Grant recipients include the 1921 mystery-western Trailin’—starring Tom Mix, considered the first on-screen cowboy—and The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980), one of two feature films Kathleen Collins completed before her premature death.
- Cinema company Cineworld, owner of the Picturehouse chain in the UK and Regal Cinemas in the US, could be facing imminent bankruptcy, per recent reports.
- A "reorganization" of Ukraine's Dovzhenko Center may mean that the country's National Film Archive is at risk of liquidation, according to e-flux.
- An upcoming dossier in Australian online film publication Senses of Cinema will focus on CGI in film. The section will be edited by Luise Mörke and Jack Seibert, who are seeking pitches now.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A firm favorite of this year's Cannes Competition, Albert Serra's Pacifiction has a short trailer courtesy of Elástica Films, the film's distributor in Spain.
- Jafar Panahi's next feature, No Bears, has a trailer ahead of festival screenings at Venice, TIFF, and NYFF. Panahi completed the film prior to his recent sentencing to six years in prison by the Iranian government, which was widely condemned by international film organizations.
- The Inspection, Elegance Bratton's (Pier Kids) first fiction feature, was recently announced as the Opening Night selection for TIFF and the Closing Night film for NYFF. Inspired by Bratton’s own life, the film follows a young, gay Black man who joins the Marines.
- Last but not least, a heartstring-tugging trailer for the Cinémathèque Française's upcoming Douglas Sirk retrospective, running August 31 through October 26.
RECOMMENDED READING
Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022).
- "What do we mean when we speak of the “Cronenbergian”?" Writing for Art Papers, Nathan Lee contextualizes David Cronenberg's latest film, Crimes of the Future, within the filmmaker's full oeuvre.
- “You know that old bromide of Emerson, ‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’? I don’t see why I need to be only categorized as a documentary filmmaker.” Ahead of the premiere of the filmmaker's newest work A Couple, Eric Kohn speaks to Frederick Wiseman about his turn towards fiction.
- "Netflix’s in-house produced television shows and movies tend to all have the same look and feel, to the point that it’s sometimes really distracting." Writing for VICE, Gita Jackson examines "the so-called 'Netflix Look.'"
- "In a world of instant gratification, it’s easy to overlook the inconspicuous workers who help facilitate cinematic experiences." For SwissInfo, Andrew Northrop meets Jean Michel Gabarra, projectionist at the Locarno Film Festival's GranRex venue, and talks to him about keeping 35mm projection alive.
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021).
- "A sudden bang erupts in the opening moments of Memoria, as if volleyed from the edge of a dream." In the New York Review of Books, Phoebe Chen shares an evocative contemplation of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria, looking at the film's treatment of sound.
- For Vulture, on the film's 25th anniversary, Bilge Ebiri speaks with Paul W.S. Anderson about Event Horizon, "one of the gnarliest, most unforgettable science-fiction horror films ever made."
- For Another Gaze, Kathryn Scanlan pens 28 portraits of Linda Manz, an actor best known as the young star of Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue.
- In a 1958 text newly translated by Nicholas Elliott for Lithub, Marguerite Duras describes writing the screenplay for Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Human Flowers of Flesh (Helena Wittmann, 2022).
- Upcoming episodes of the Film Comment Podcast will include excerpts from the Locarno Film Festival's recent 24-hour-long talk, "The Future of Attention." This week's guests are filmmakers Helena Wittmann and Kamal Aljafari, while upcoming episodes will feature Hito Steyerl, Kevin B. Lee, and Julia Murat.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Raid (Hugo Fregonese, 1954).
- New York: Hot on the tails of a popular focus at this year's Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, the Museum of Modern Art will host a series of films by "history’s most restless filmmaker" Hugo Fregonese. The season runs from September 1-14.
- Los Angeles: From September 2-26, the American Cinematheque will present twelve films by French auteur Robert Bresson, including rare prints of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and The Devil, Probably.
- Paris: Between August 26 and October 8, Institut Lumière will host a small retrospective of the films of Kenji Mizoguchi, plus a lecture by journalist Virginie Apiou.
- Melbourne: Fireflies Press is hosting a launch event for Dennis Lim's new book on Hong Sang-soo's Tale of Cinema. The film will screen at ACMI on Thursday, September 1, followed by a pre-recorded conversation between Lim and Giovanni Marchini Camia.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
A Woman Escapes (Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, 2022).
- Öykü Sofuoğlu chats with Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, co-directors of A Woman Escapes, "an unclassifiable filmic object that sprang out of a long-distance creative partnership."
- "For better or for worse, movies can make history digestible by distilling it into fiction." Soham Gadre's new Notebook Primer, inspired by the popularity of S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR, surveys a variety of films telling stories about India's struggle for independence.
- Focusing on the films in contention for prizes and the festival's Douglas Sirk retrospective, Jordan Cronk assesses the state of the recent Locarno Film Festival, the "second edition under director Giona A. Nazzaro and the first fully physical iteration since 2019."
- "Through the mystery of faith, death becomes life. And what is faith, but an act of submission; a letting go of the self and all its accumulated associations?" Georgina Guthrie looks at one pivotal shot in Sally Potter's Orlando.
EXTRAS
- "Pronti, via!" Michael Mann shared an image of himself at work on the set of his forthcoming film Ferrari, a biopic about the life story of Italian sports car entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari.
- This week, we lost Leon Vitali, a vital collaborator of Stanley Kubrick's. Scott Tobias tenderly distilled his legacy in a 2017 Rolling Stone profile, occasioned by Tony Zierra's documentary portrait of Vitali, Filmworker.
- "1 Down, A24 across." A24 is releasing 99 Movie Crosswords, a collection of cinema-themed puzzles edited by Anna Schectman, a Klarman Fellow at Cornell. The book includes puzzles constructed by critics K. Austin Collins and Max Carpenter, and themed grids come courtesy of Ashley Clark, Tim Heidecker, Lulu Wang, and David Lowery, among others.