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NEWS
- For Vogue France, portraits of a stylish Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss home by Hedi Slimane.
- The full program for the 2020 Venice Film Festival, now revealed, includes films from Lav Diaz, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ann Hui, and Chloé Zhao. This year's impressive jury (selected in light of travel restrictions) will include Cate Blanchett, Christian Petzold, Joanna Hogg, and Cristi Puiu.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Presented by the Maysles Documentary Center, "After Civilization" is a series featuring documentaries that "employ speculative techniques to reckon with ecological crisis and the ongoing material violences of dispossession." The films, from John Akomfrah's Afrofuturist essay film The Last Angel of History to Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil's INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./], are available for free until August 15.
- Madrid-based La Casa Encendida also has an ongoing screening series, entitled "Some Letters Make the Night Last a Moment Longer." The collection consists of short epistolary films exchanged between three pairs of filmmakers: Rita Azevedo Gomes and Antonio Menchen; Valentina Alvarado and Nazli Dincel; and Mariano Llinás and Matías Piñeiro.
RECOMMENDED READING
- "What does it mean as a sick girl to learn again and again that sick girls deserve to be punished?" In a powerful essay for The Offing, Zefyr Lisowski reflects on sickness coded as punishment in horror films like The Ring and Pet Semetary, and the possibility of moving beyond the idea of monstrosity constructed by a "supremacist culture."
- For its July 2020 issue, Senses of Cinema fixes its lens on filmmakers and filmmaking in isolation, Sergei Eisenstein as a curator of exhibitions and objects, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as it lives on in the form of conspiracy theories and memes.
- Online publication Interiors (which focuses on architecture and film) has released its first book, called The Architecture of Cinematic Spaces by Interiors, which examines 10 different films with critical essays accompanied by original architectural floor plan drawings.
- For the new issue of Crisis and Critique, Tom Gunning considers the role played by the hand—and the grasp—in Alfred Hitchcock's "haptic" cinema.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- A recent edition of Sounds on Screen at NTS Radio features the iconic tunes of the Hong Kong New Wave, from Tsui Hark and Patrick Tam to Wong Kar-wai.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Alejandra Márquez Abella's The Good Girls is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on MUBI, is showing from July 23 – August 21, 2020 in most countries in MUBI's Viewfinder series. Read Abella's introduction of the film, as well as Leonardo Goi's Close-Up of the film's vivid social commentary.
- For the Current Debate, Leonardo Goi provides an overview of the discussion surrounding Kelly Reichardt's First Cow.
- The latest of the Notebook Soundtrack Mixes by Florence Scott-Anderton is a deep dive into the "black belly of giallo."
- "The purpose of cinema is not reformation." In an interview with Sumeet Kaur, Arun Karthick discusses his path into filmmaking and his latest feature, Nasir.
- Romina Paula introduces the themes of motherhood and the first-person in her film Again Once Again. The film is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on MUBI, showing from July 29 – August 27, 2020 in MUBI's Debuts series.
EXTRAS
- "I was told that the young man who made the picture was present, but when I said I wish to meet him... he ran away through the corridor without a word." Akira Kurosawa on seeing (and being very impressed by) John Cassavetes's Shadows.