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NEWS
Stanley Kubrick in Filmworker (Tony Zierra, 2017).
- Stanley Kubrick’s long-lost passion project, a biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, may soon be realized. This week at the Berlinale, Steven Spielberg expanded on plans to executive-produce a seven-part series for HBO based on Kubrick’s original script.
- In June, Terence Davies will begin filming an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl. According to a production announcement, the cast includes Sophie Cookson, Richard E. Grant, and Verena Altenberger.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- We’ve been enjoying the “redefining the food film” video-essay series on Vittles, a food and culture newsletter. Below is Andrew Key’s discussion of A Woman Under the Influence, and the ways that food can tear us apart:
- Shellac has shared a first trailer for Angela Schanelec’s Music, which premiered yesterday at the Berlinale. The film follows up Schanelec’s mysterious, emotionally elliptical I Was at Home, But… (2019); around that film’s release, Evan Morgan interviewed her for Notebook.
RECOMMENDED READING
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021).
- Giovanni Marchini Camia interviews Apichatpong Weerasethakul for Metrograph’s Journal, tied to a weeklong run of Memoria at the New York theater. They talk about filming Memoria in Colombia, making projects in VR, and the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang and James Cameron.
- For the third consecutive year, Berlin Critics’ Week has published an online magazine tied to themes and films in the program. “I’ve encouraged writing that is as free and open as possible,” writes guest editor Patrick Holzapfel; contributors and participants include Christoph Huber, Andréa Picard, and Nadine Smith.
- Another interview: S.S. Rajamouli speaks to the New Yorker’s Simon Abrams about the global response to RRR and his cinematic touchstones.
- Andrew Chan writes about labor and the “swole physique” in a review of Magic Mike’s Last Dance in 4Columns. “These films understand that dance confers discipline and structure on the messiness of real-life sex,” writes Chan, “turning the art of being a good lover into something like an acquirable skill.”
- Finally, Sam Anderson travels to Ghibli Park for the New York Times Magazine, and considers what it means to transform Hayao Miyazaki’s filmography into a literal theme park.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- Pamplona: The Punto de Vista Film Festival (running March 27 through April 1) announced that they will dedicate their Artists in Focus retrospective to three undersung filmmakers: Fukuda Katsuhiko, Ana Poliak, and Pascale Bodet. More information is available on their website.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Women in Love (Ken Russell, 1969).
Features:
- Petticoats, nude wrestling, mondo London, and alien seduction: Georgina Guthrie discusses all of the above in her Notebook Primer on British erotica, a survey of works where diverse desires can bloom.
- Elsewhere, Matt Turner reports on International Film Festival Rotterdam. Energized by psychedelic cut-up documentaries, flicker films, and YouTube diaries, Turner pays special attention to “unexpected encounters with the unpolished, imperfect sorts of films that can only find a home within a film festival of this scale and ambition.”
- Jordan Cronk interviews the American photographer Danny Lyon about his transition to filmmaking, especially his films from the ’70s that convey “the post-hippie malaise of his adopted home [in New Mexico], alighting on neglected communities and troubled individuals living on the margins of society.” (Issue 2 of Notebook magazine, now available in select stores, features an original essay by Lyon and a piece about the self-distribution of his works.)
Quick Reads:
- “What do men really want? Do men speak about sex? And if so, how?” Ruth Beckermann explains how her film Mutzenbacher sought to answer these questions through “a kind of field experiment.”
- In another filmmaker introduction, Natalia López Gallardo reflects on interviewing residents of her Mexican village during the preproduction for Robe of Gems.
EXTRAS
- Telluride co-founder Tom Luddy died last week aged 79, and The Guardian has gathered several remembrances from the likes of Adam Curtis, Tilda Swinton, Greil Marcus, and Paul Schrader, who dubs Luddy “the beating heart of ’70s and ’80s film culture.” Laurie Anderson fondly recalls “his obvious satisfaction when he introduced me to a person, a film or a thought and could see it click into place, like he was secretly building a vast worldwide network of people and ideas that would never be complete but that was definitely going to make things better. Human connection was one of his art forms.”