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NEWS
- Light Industry, a much-loved venue for film and electronic art in New York, is creating a beautiful new space to host their talks and screenings. They are seeking donations to cover the costs of construction.
- Almost 40 years after first meeting as employees of California's Video Archives, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, co-writers on Pulp Fiction, will be making a new podcast together, watching and discussing movies that they first discovered in the library of the former video rental store.
- Apple have landed Steve McQueen's next feature, Blitz, a film set during World War II which will tell the wartime stories of a selection of Londoners.
- In what is yet another high-profile exit at a major film festival, Tabitha Jackson will be departing from her role as director of the Sundance Film Festival. As IndieWire note in their article, "Jackson was the first woman, the first person of color, and the first person from outside the United States to hold the position at the festival."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Available to watch on AEMI's site until July 26, Dissolving beyond the worm moon is a surreal and singular CGI-based work from moving image artist Bassam Al-Sabah.
- HBO shared a trailer for Olivier Assayas’ eight-episode reinterpretation of his 1996 masterpiece Irma Vep, which began airing this week:
- The trailer for Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s Cannes prizewinning debut feature Murina, in U.S. theaters on July 8. A slow-burning coming-of-age tale set on the Adriatic coast, the film features stunning underwater cinematography from Hélène Louvart:
- Exploring Hong Kong's history from the 1940s through to the present day, Septet: The Story of Hong Kong, a long anticipated omnibus film featuring short films directed by seven of the territory's most renowned directors, has a trailer and a Hong Kong release on the way:
28/7, the day Septet: The Story of Hong Kong finally gets a wide release (in Hong Kong at least). To give some perspective on how long it's been, Ringo Lam passed away three a half years ago. Anyway, there's a new trailer too. pic.twitter.com/CjDYbqyFEe
— Dylan Cheung (@Futurhythm) June 6, 2022
- Finally, no smartphone is safe in this trailer by David Lynch, a teaser for Janus Films's 4K restoration of Lost Highway:
RECOMMENDED READING
RRR.
- One of this year’s most spectacular blockbusters is S.S. Rajamouli’s historical epic RRR, which was theatrically re-released in the U.S. on June 1. For the New Yorker, Richard Brody praises how the film “thrusts its imaginative artistry thrillingly and gleefully to the fore.” (It’s also a welcome occasion to revisit our piece on RRR by Ruairi McCann, who situates it alongside Rajamouli’s two-part fantasy saga Baahubali [2015, 2017].)
- Also in the New Yorker, Hua Hsu interviews Wayne Wang—director of the groundbreaking Chan Is Missing (1982)—about crafting an authentic depiction of San Francisco’s Chinatown, as well as his experiences making studio films like Maid in Manhattan.
- “If the original [Top Gun] looked a lot like the coolest military recruitment ad, the sequel could easily be mistaken for an age-defiant Viagra commercial.” Writing with panache on Top Gun: Maverick for 4Columns, Ed Halter connects the dots between American imperialism and the Hollywood blockbuster.
- Gabe Klinger, the director of 2013’s intimate Venice prizewinner Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater, opens up about the zig-zagging path to his second feature in a candid diary for Filmmaker Magazine, with tales of fraught Hollywood fundraising and his experiences as an actor in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island.
- “I’ll stipulate that the people who make movies may skew progressive in their beliefs, commitments, and voting patterns. The movies themselves tell another story.” In a thoughtful essay, A.O. Scott digs into the political mythologies at the heart of mainstream American cinema.
- Durga Chew-Bose writes evocatively on flowers in cinema for This Long Century, summoning the specters of Meryl Streep in The Hours and Kim Novak in Vertigo. Also on the same site, a poetic photo essay from Payal Kapadia, director of the Cannes prizewinner A Night of Knowing Nothing.
- Adam Nayman delves into Olivier Assayas’ limited-series take on Irma Vep for The Ringer, elucidating how the filmmaker “deconstructs the terrain [of 'Peak TV']—and its implications—with light-fingered finesse.” (This week, Nayman also published an excellent New Yorker profile of David Cronenberg.)
- In Reverse Shot, Museum of the Moving Image’s film curators Edo Choi and Eric Hynes discuss their time attending the Cannes Film Festival, focusing more on their experience of the event than on specific film titles.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- Marseille: In addition to the previously announced Albert Serra retrospective and the curated selection from Mathieu Amalric, the full program for French festival FIDMarseille has now been unveiled. For their 33rd edition, running July 5–11, the festival will screen 123 films, 49 of which will be world premieres.
- Philadelphia: Also newly out is the program for the 2022 edition of BlackStar Film Festival, which celebrates visionary Black, Brown, and Indigenous film and media artists. The festival's 11th edition will take place August 3–7 in a hybrid format.
- Online: Taking place free and online on June 17, Electronic Arts Intermix and NYU Center for Disability Studies are hosting a roundtable on audiovisual accessibility in moving-image art distribution.
- London: Currently touring London's East End boozers ahead of an installation in the foyer of the Barbican Centre, Stanley Schtinter's The Lock-In is a 100-hour video stitching together every scene situated in the pub of long-running UK soap opera EastEnders.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Peppered with embedded aural accompaniments, in this Artforum article, Eiko Ishibashi, internationally renowned experimental musician and the composer of the soundtrack for Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car, guides Sasha Frere-Jones through her work and process.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
Vladimir et Rosa (1971).
- Our newest Notebook Primer looks at the wide-ranging career of Juliet Berto, a key collaborator of the French New Wave filmmakers who then later directed a number of excellent films herself. Dana Reinoos surveys the life and work of this fascinating, underappreciated figure.
- Cassiane Pfund speaks with the idiosyncratic and transgressive Bertrand Mandico, discussing his sophomore feature, the comedy-Western-fantasy After Blue (Dirty Paradise).
- Andrew Ondrejcak introduces The Actress, his hypnotic Isabel Sandoval–starring short film.
- Last but not least, The Video Essay is again underway. A joint project of MUBI and FILMADRID International Film Festival, between June 6 - 12, 2022, seven original video essays selected by programmers from MUBI and the festival will premiere online on MUBI's Notebook. Published to date are: Hands of the Future, Back to Theaters, and Chantal Akerman: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
EXTRAS
- On June 10, the excellent home-video label Re:Voir is releasing a region-free Blu-ray box set of Jonas Mekas's diary films, which includes a book of texts by Mekas, a set of postcards, and an original filmstrip of one of his prints.
- Halter's Top Gun piece nods to NOT TOP GUN, a 1986 short by Chip Lord, co-founder of the Bay Area art collective Ant Farm. Paper Tiger Television, its original distributor, has made Lord's 30-minute close-reading available on YouTube, which kicks off in the parking lot of a Carl's Jr. across the street from Miramar Naval Air Station: