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NEWS
- The 95th Academy Awards unveiled their full list of nominees yesterday. Browse the categories and relevant coverage on Notebook to prepare for the ceremony, airing March 12. (Andrea Riseborough made the cut.)
- On Monday, the Berlinale announced their main competition lineup, including new films by Angela Schanelec, Christian Petzold, Margarethe Von Trotta, and Philippe Garrel. Meanwhile, their Encounters section features new films from Hong Sang-soo, Dustin Guy Defa, Tatiana Huezo, and more. Notebook has the full lineup here.
- Last Wednesday, January 18, filmmaker, critic, and producer Paul Vecchiali died at the age of 92. Patrick Preziosi summed up a bit of his impact in his Notebook Primer on Vecchiali’s film company, Diagonale, “a solar system of the utopian possibilities of cinematic community.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Following a successful festival run in 2022, Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh—the much anticipated follow up to her similarly sea-fixated 2017 debut Drift—now has a beautifully blue-tinged official trailer. (From the Notebook archives: following the film’s Locarno premiere, Laura Staab interviewed Wittmann and lead actress Angeliki Papoulia.)
RECOMMENDED READING
- “Don’t take print for granted.” With the announcement of a new issue of Cinema Scope magazine comes news, via the editor’s note, that the magazine is in desperate need of support and subscriptions. Scope’s 93rd issue includes Beatrice Loayza in conversation with Alice Diop, Michael Sicinski on The Kingdom: Exodus, and Saffron Maeve on Graham Foy’s debut The Maiden.
- Also worthy of your attention is the new issue of Blackstar’s Seen, which is now available in part online. The “dreams issue” includes a reflection from Cauleen Smith, a new piece by Rianna Jade Parker, and a roundtable discussion on Afrofuturism by participants Aurella Yussuf, Ifeanyi Awachie, and Kareem Reid.
- “What does the pained animal signify?” Robert Rubsam asks questions of Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (2022) and of “the cinema of animal suffering” in the Baffler.
- “Disruption is one of the few constants in the history of cinema.” In Wired, Joshua Glick explores how “filmmakers are gravitating to AI to expand their craft and create new forms of moving image art,” including the “remarkable if ghoulish” phenomenon of synthetic resurrection, “where a deceased actor or historical figure is brought back to life to play a role in the present.”
- For 4Columns, Erika Balsom examines Alexander Hammid. An artist who is “typically mentioned in the same breath as the emphatically more celebrated Maya Deren, his spouse from 1942 to 1947,” Hammid is currently the focus of a retrospective at New York’s Anthology Film Archives that shows off his “diverse pursuits across forty-six years and multiple genres.”
- In the Distribution Advocates newsletter, Anthony Kaufman analyzes key data surrounding documentary acquisitions at film festivals, finding in the results a ”a very sobering landscape, with all but a sliver of documentary films benefiting from a largely closed and highly competitive ecosystem that is likely only to get worse.”
- “Fists from the past smashed into the present.” In a wide-reaching essay for Parapraxis, Hannah Proctor explores connections between Jean-Luc Godard and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who died around a week apart in September 2022.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- London: The first UK overview of the moving-image work of the photographer, artist, and filmmaker Danny Lyon will be on next month at London’s Close-Up cinema, with screenings running from February 18 through 26. Look out for a special contribution from Danny Lyon in the second issue of the Notebook print magazine, available soon in select stores.
- Berlin: On March 31 and April 1, Digital in Berlin will screen the new 4K restoration of Béla Tarr’s formidable masterpiece Sátántangó along with a live newly reimagined version of the film’s score, created by nine to-be-announced composers working in collaboration with the film’s original composer and lead actor Mihály Víg.
- Locarno: The retrospective at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, taking place August 2 through 12, will offer an in-depth look at Mexican cinema. Titled "Spectacle Every Day – The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema," the season was curated by Olaf Möller and will include gems from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The Film Comment Podcast recently invited filmmakers Sky Hopinka and Adam Piron to discuss their initiative ThousandSuns Cinema, which recently launched an online screening series devoted to Indigenous cinema. Hopinka and Piron also reflect on the origins of their artist-run collective, COUSIN, a co-sponsor of ThousandSuns.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
- In a new essay, Laura Staab explores how “class tensions wrinkle the expensive fabrics of [Joanna] Hogg’s films,” and traces a line from Hogg’s naturalistic early work to her new Gothic psychodrama, The Eternal Daughter.
- "[Becoming Male in the Middle Ages] offered the emotional substratum that I’ve been focusing my films on these days—emotion as an approach to think through politics past and present," Pedro Neves Marques writes in an introduction to their film Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, now showing exclusively on MUBI.
EXTRAS
- Kim Gordon shared on Instagram that she is working on the music for Catherine Breillat’s next film. The post was tagged Body/Head, so it’s possible the score will be a collaboration with Gordon's bandmate, experimental guitarist Bill Nace.