Rushes: NYFF Main Slate, "Triangle of Sadness" Trailer, AI Film Posters

This week’s essential news, articles, sounds, videos and more from the film world.
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NEWS

Enys Men (Mark Jenkin).

  • The New York Film Festival announced its Main Slate. Highlights include new films from Park Chan-wook, Claire Denis, and Kelly Reichardt; a fiction feature from Frederick Wiseman; Mark Jenkin's Bait follow-up Enys Men; and much more.
  • Hong Kong action director John Woo will reimagine his 1989 crime classic The Killer in a new remake due out in 2023. French actor Omar Sy (The Intouchables) will play the lead.
  • Lars Von Trier has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, his production company Zoetrope has confirmed. The director is doing well, and is currently being treated for symptoms whilst continuing to work on The Kingdom Exodus.
  • Artist and El Planeta filmmaker Amalia Ulman's visa is expiring, meaning she may have to leave the United States, where she is currently working on her next feature film. Her friend Joe Apollonio has started a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to cover her immigration-related expenses.
  • Canyon Cinema shared news of the passing of Takahiko Iimura. A pioneering figure in Japanese experimental media and expanded cinema, he made his first works in the 1960s and has remained active in the decades since.

Observer/Observed (Takahiko Iimura, 1999).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

  • The official trailer has arrived for Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund's second Palme d'Or winner, ahead of fall festival screenings at TIFF and NYFF.

  • IFC have shared a trailer for the fourth season of their series Documentary Now!. It features Alexander Skarsgård, who will play Werner Herzog in an episode riffing on Les Blank’s famous Fitzcarraldo documentary Burden Of Dreams.

RECOMMENDED READING

The Afterlight (Charlie Shackleton, 2021).

  • "Rare indeed is the reel that dies with dignity." Pamela Hutchinson writes for Sight & Sound about the lifespan of a film print, touching on Charlie Shackleton's The Afterlight, a digital film made to exist only on one 35mm print.
  • After stepping back from teaching film, Peter Labuza muses for Filmmaker Magazine on what he learned about teaching film students during an era in which the "traditional narrative feature is hardly the dominant form of media."
  • On WePresent, Simran Hans shares a short tract on the state of contemporary cultural criticism and the emergence of the critic-turned-influencer.
  • Following recent revelations that, prior to his retirement, Bruce Willis had been struggling on set with aphasia, a brain disorder that affects speech and cognition, Matt Zoller Seitz profiles the actor's career in a touching story for Vulture, showing how "his man-of-few-words mode [...] made it difficult for audiences to see that he wasn’t fully there anymore."

The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002).

  • "No individual has had a greater impact on Australian cinema than Yolŋu actor and dancer David Gulpilil," says Steven Morgan in a well-informed BFI article advising where to begin with an actor whose death last year "brought an untimely end to a miraculous but tumultuous career."
  • "Don’t call it the Black Sundance," writes Salamishah Tillet in her New York Times report on the 11th edition of BlackStar Film Festival, an event with an "ambitious bridging of cultural specificity, social justice and the avant-garde."
  • Also in the New York Times, Adam Nayman looks back on the summer of 1982, a time "when blockbusters felt like events rather than obligations", during which "five authentic genre classics premiered within a one-month span."
  • Alongside recent restoration screenings in New York, Edinburgh, and London, James Balmont spotlights five films directed by Japanese actor and director Kinuyo Tanaka. "Vital tales of female agency and desire," Tanaka's films "were essential to the cinematic development of one of the world’s great filmmaking nations."

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

  • This week's episode of MUBI Podcast: Encuentros is a special one, focusing on the friendship and creative partnership of Tilda Swinton and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, realized recently through their collaboration on Memoria.
  • MUBI Podcast host Rico Gagliano joined the most recent episode of The Last Thing I Saw, chatting with host Nicolas Rapold and guest Eric Hynes.
  • Ethan Hawke guested on Sam Fragaso's Talk Easy podcast for a chat about his early life and career, plus his admiration for Elia Kazan, Robin Williams, and Paul Newman. (Newman is the co-subject, alongside partner/actor Joanne Woodward, of Hawke's new documentary series The Last Movie Stars.)
  • On the newly-launched Video Archives Podcast, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary share recommendations from their days as video-store coworkers. The latest episode covers the James Bond film Moonraker.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955)

  • New York: For a series at Film at Lincoln Center, Owen Kline has handpicked films that inspired his new film Funny Pages. Among the selection, which runs from August 19-25, are films by Frank Tashlin, Ralph Bakshi, and George Axelrod, plus "an hour-long, evolving 35mm print of film clips, commercials, trailers, and other surprising miscellany" assembled by Kline.
  • Bloomington: This September at the Indiana University Cinema, Maya Cade, creator and curator of the Black Film Archive, is the guest programmer-in-residence. Her series "Home Is Where the Heart Is: Black Cinema's Exploration of Home" and includes films by Martina Attille, Charles Burnett, Ayoka Chenzira, and others.
  • London: "Artistic Differences," assembled by UnionDocs in collaboration with Cíntia Gil, is a monthly series of documentary-related screening programs and study groups, taking place both online and at film festivals around the world. The next stop is London's Open City Documentary Festival in early September.
  • Los Angeles: Actor Dakota Johnson is collaborating with intimacy brand Maude for a program of films centered around love and sex, screening at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles. The series kicks off with Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Mustang.

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

Whistle Stop (Boris Barnet, 1963)

  • In a longform essay taken from the pages of the newly launched Outskirts magazine, Boris Nelapo writes about Whistle Stop, the last film made by Soviet filmmaker Boris Barnet. Nelapo writes that the film is "not only a valediction but an attempt to capture its maker’s already thinning connection to a certain lived reality."
  • “It’s all about feeling.” Lukasz Mankowski talks to Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the Thai cinematographer best known for his collaborations with Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
  • Adrian Curry's new "Movie Poster of the Week" column collects four decades' worth of King Vidor posters, tying into Film at Lincoln Center's ongoing retrospective.
  • "As female-driven body horror stipples its way into the mainstream, Hadžihalilović’s work feels all the more resonant and, perhaps most crucially, misprized." Saffron Maeve's Primer column elegantly covers the career of Lucile Hadžihalilović, from La première mort de Nono (1987) to Earwig (2021).
  • Lastly, two directors introduce films of theirs now playing on MUBI. Tulapop Saenjaroen introduces his short Squish, and Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah introduces his work Public Toilet Africa.

EXTRAS

  • Described as a "digital dream machine," Robomojo is an uncanny collection of film posters reimagined for the AI epoch. A project from Samoan/German artist Vincenzi, the site takes imagery generated using the Midjourney and Dall-E 2 toolsets, and combines them with the original poster font treatments and taglines.
  • Run by film students in Hong Kong, Throw Back HK Film Story is an Instagram account showing how quickly the city's architecture is changing by placing stills from film scenes against the backdrop of their original filming location.
  • "What does termite art look like when the white elephants have all but taken over?" asks Dennis Lim, updating Manny Farber's 1962 manifesto “Termite Art Vs. White Elephant Art” via a list of five "small films" for Le Cinéma Club.
  • Coming soon from Semiotext(e), The Cinema House & the World is a new collection of translated writings by French film critic Serge Daney. The inimitable A.S. Hamrah has provided the book's introduction.

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