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NEWS
Leos Carax in Holy Motors (2012).
- On Monday, SAG-AFTRA members voted 97.9 percent in favor of a strike if their contract negotiations stall. This sets the stage for an industry-wide work stoppage in solidarity with the Writers Guild, even after the weekend’s news that the Directors Guild had reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. (For more on the streaming-era shifts that are at stake in these work stoppages, read Josef Adalian and Lane Brown's Vulture piece.)
- Away from Hollywood, CG Cinema have confirmed that Leos Carax has wrapped production on a new film, C’est pas moi, set to release in 2024. This is a "free format" self-portrait, spanning the "major stations" of Carax's four-decade career amid "the political tremors of the time." The images shared by CG Cinema feature Denis Lavant in character as Monsieur Merde, made infamous in Holy Motors (2012) and the omnibus film Tokyo! (2008), alongside Carax with a matching red goatee.
- Jia Zhangke is also readying a new film, called We Shall Be All—with the goal of “dismantling dystopia.” The film focuses on a woman (Zhao Tao) who “lives to herself in silence, celebrating the prosperous Belle Epoque with songs and dance,” per Variety. The report also notes that Jia shot fragments of this film as early as 2001.
- Rule of threes: Arnaud Desplechin is back behind the camera, too, working on a film set in the ’70s and ’80s called Spectateurs.
REMEMBERING
Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1962).
- The last surviving French New Wave luminary, Jacques Rozier, died last week at the age of 96. “A still from his debut feature, Adieu Philippine (1962)—which Jean-Luc Godard called “the youngest film of the New Wave”—should tip one off towards his style,” wrote Patrick Preziosi for Notebook last September. “In his movies, narrative is gleefully charged with the immediate possibilities of location shooting, improvisation, natural light [...] Time is an all too multifaceted entity, and Rozier latches onto its various manifestations, its speediness, its lumpiness, its strange, unpredictable vacillation between ephemeral moments and molasses-like boredom.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- We’ve partnered with FILMADRID for our annual collaborative series, “The Video Essay.” Throughout the week, we’ll be premiering seven brand-new video essays by innovators of the form. Catch up with the first three: VR: Mysteries of the Horizon, Sound & Sight & Time, and Where Is Little Trixie? Be sure to follow along as we continue the series.
RECOMMENDED READING
- A new issue of Outskirts, a print magazine edited by Notebook contributors Sofie Cato Maas, Diego Cepeda, Nathan Letoré, and Christopher Small, has been announced. The second edition will include a dossier on the Japanese filmmaker Kinuyo Tanaka.
- “Few filmmakers have done as much to redress cinema’s historical neglect of labor as the Chinese documentarian Wang Bing.” Dennis Lim interviews Wang Bing for the Film Comment Letter, speaking with him about his factory-focused documentary Youth (Spring), and touching also on his other new film, Man in Black, both of which premiered recently at Cannes.
- In Artforum, J. Hoberman remembers Kenneth Anger, “an audacious filmmaker, a self-proclaimed magus, a never-closeted queer, a shameless scandalmonger, a sometime Satanist, a difficult person, and, as P. Adams Sitney put it, the ‘conscious artificer of his own myth.’”
- “The seventy-sixth iteration of the event known simply as ‘Cannes’ was a twenty-million-euro festival of retirement, the long-rumoured death of cinema pre-empted by a fortnight of curtain calls for the biggest stars and directors of the last half century.” The New Left Review’s Caitlin Doherty goes to Cannes, writing, for the Sidecar vertical, about the festival’s “bonanza of industry trading and red carpet photocalls.” Elsewhere, James Wham writes up the festival for the Baffler, offering “a brief history of Cannes” by way of its ”cannibals, fishmongers, aristocrats, and cannibals again.”
- “‘When I’m in a theater that’s Cinemascope ratio, I like to be right near the front, middle of the third row [...] When I’m in a stadium, IMAX 1.43:1, then I actually like to be a little behind the center line right up at the middle. So, a little further back.’” Ahead of his next film Oppenheimer, Lindsay Bahr interviews Christopher Nolan for Associated Press, drawing from him a “a guide to his favorite formats” and assorted musings on large-format screens.
- “Throughout the film, sound and image reach a limit of transmission, producing cleavages.” For Documentary Magazine, Jordan Lord (Shared Resources) pens an essay on Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves, a noteworthy doc premiere from Sundance and MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight. Lord looks specifically at the film’s consideration of captioning, translation, and sound, the result of eleven years’ work on production.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- Bologna: “What does it mean to revisit the works of the great masters in their original splendor?” asks Il Cinema Ritrovato, the world-renowned festival of retrospective and restored film which returns from June 24 through July 2. “It means renewing the love of cinema, reading the passion of the author between the lines, amplifying the pleasure of being a spectator in the darkness of the theatre.” The lineup for the festival’s 37th edition is now online.
- Ghent: Starting soon at the Cinematek Brussels is a series of 13 screenings curated by Mark Webber and Simon Field, each inspired by an issue of the British film magazine Afterimage (1970-87). The series runs until June 22 and is organized by Courtisane.
- Berlin: Running at Arsenal, silent green, and SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, “Archival Assemblies #2” is a festival, exhibition, and symposium that “considers international film archives as a shape-shifting space for the future of cinema.” It includes a tribute to Congolese filmmaker Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, plus screenings of new restorations including Lindsey Merrison’s Friends in High Places (2001), and Korhan Yurtsever’s Kara Kafa (1979). The festival runs June 8 through 15, with the symposium on June 9 and 10, and the exhibition continuing until July 2.
- Berkeley: Ongoing through July 15 at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is a tribute to Tom Luddy, “the celebrated film producer, curator, and festival director who led BAMPFA’s film program during its formative years.” The varied selection includes work by Andrei Konchalovsky, Chantal Akerman, Kenneth Anger, and more.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
S1M0NE (Andrew Niccol, 2002).
- “We might be inclined to ask why the narratives that emerge from this context consistently dredge artificial intelligence in anthropomorphism and doom—though a sharper question might be, who profits from these kinds of narratives?” Kim Hew-Low writes on recent depictions of AI in cinema, from S1M0NE’s idealized screen icon to M3GAN’s TikTok choreo.
- “In 2023, we find Lifetime movies in an odd place,” observes Ryan Coleman, who argues that the cable network’s woman-in-peril flicks deserve a closer, serious look. An ideal case study? Doug Campbell’s Stalked By My Doctor series, which “represents as complete a rebuke of Lifetime’s prestige pivot as any film that has since aired.”
- We wrapped our Cannes dispatches last week with Lawrence Garcia’s piece on Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer…, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, and Hong Sang-soo’s In Our Day. Browse the full archive of Cannes coverage here—including the results of our critics’ top ten poll—and keep an eye out for more interviews from the south of France in the coming weeks.
EXTRAS
- If you want to buy a wearable gift for a cinephile in your life, after fifteen years of operation, the Brooklyn microcinema Light Industry is now selling T-shirts with an Eisenstein-inspired design by Little Joe editor Sam Ashby. They look very nice indeed.