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NEWS
Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas, 2018).
- The Writers Guild of America went on strike Tuesday; this is the first major Hollywood strike since 2007. Michael Schulman of the New Yorker speaks with several screenwriters about the conditions they are advocating to change, highlighting the ways in which streaming has transformed their livelihoods.
- Olivier Assayas is cooking up a new project with his current muse Vincent Macaigne, titled Hors du temps, per the actor’s Instagram. Macaigne wonderfully held the center of Assayas’s limited-series rewiring of Irma Vep (2022), and brought a similarly melancholy pathos to Non-Fiction (2018).
- The Cannes Film Festival has announced that John C. Reilly will preside over the Un Certain Regard jury—a worthy recognition of his MVP status in Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (2022). Alongside him is filmmaker Alice Winocour; actress Paula Beer, a frequent collaborator of Christian Petzold; Return to Seoul director Davy Chou; and Belgian actress Émilie Dequenne, who won Cannes’s Best Actress prize for leading the Dardennes’ Rosetta.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- After 3.5 years of organizing against the privatization of the La Clef cinema in Paris, the collective La Clef Revival announced that they have reached a sales agreement with the theater’s owners. Martin Scorsese wrote an open letter (linked here) and recorded a brief video message (below) in support of the cinema’s independence, voicing the importance of creating community around the theatrical experience.
- The Deutsche Kinemathek’s quarterly online series, Selects, makes archival selections available to stream for free globally. The nine films in this season’s program share a focus on women behind and in front of the camera: “Sometimes their lives are documented with austere realism, at times provocatively, and at others, tongue in cheek.”
RECOMMENDED READING
A City Called Dragon (Chung Hsun Tu, 1970).
- “As a fiction form, the wuxia has its roots in the shenguai (“Gods and Demons”) literature popular in the Six Dynasties period (222-589 AD) and the chuanqi prose romances of the late Tang Dynasty, though it is a phenomenon of 20th-century mass media, appearing in its contemporary form shortly after Sun Yat-sen’s establishment of the Republic of China in 1912.” For Metrograph, Nick Pinkerton writes about the history of the “wuxia” film in Taiwan, using King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (1975) as a point of departure.
- Vadim Rizov interviews Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta about their sci-fi / western hybrid Dry Ground Burning, now in limited release in the US. Quierós’s films have tackled the history of his hometown in Brazil, Ceilândia, and Dry Ground Burning is “the most expansive and ambitious” of his works so far, a politically incendiary blend of Michael Mann and slow cinema.
- Paul Schrader—“seventy-six years old, compact, pugnacious”—was profiled by the New Yorker’s Alex Abramovich ahead of his new film Master Gardener’s May 19 US release.
- In a new interview, Johnnie To speaks frankly to Daniel Eagan of South China Morning Post about filmmaking in Hong Kong, and mentions he’s about to start work on a new project about “hope.”
- “Dense in both existential inquiry and emotional intensity, [Angelo Madsen] Minax’s films operate as conversations between different facets of his own person: kaleidoscopic portraits of the artist as diarist, storyteller, lover, brother, erotic subject, erotic object, artist again.” For Artforum, Dylan Huw reflects on Minax’s “transdisciplinary documentary practice” on the occasion of a new solo exhibition in the UK.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Also Known As Jihadi (Éric Baudelaire, 2017).
- London: The artist/filmmaker Éric Baudelaire has curated a program of films that resonate with his work at the ICA, running May 5 through 9. Erika Balsom situates Baudelaire's interests in a brief introductory text, citing his determination to “crack open calcified representations through collaborative and reflexive forms that welcome the mess into the frame.”
- San Francisco and New York: Joel Coen has edited a book of Lee Friedlander photographs, Framed, which will be the foundation of two upcoming gallery shows in the US. One is on view at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco from May 6 through June 24; the other will be exhibited at Luhring Augustine in New York from May 13 through June 24. (The New York Times ran a piece about the project.)
- Los Angeles: To mark the premiere of a new restoration of Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Béla Tarr will appear in-person at the Aero Theatre for Q&As in early June. More information on the short retrospective is available on the American Cinematheque’s website.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The MUBI Podcast continues its season-long sweep of cinema’s best needle-drops. The latest episode focuses on Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994), specifically Faye Wong’s Cantonese-language cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams.”
- Sound of Bonello, a new compilation of unreleased scores by Bertrand Bonello, is available to purchase or stream.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Party Girl (Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 1995).
- The Deuce Notebook convenes the cast and crew of Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s Party Girl (1995) for a roundtable about the iconic comedy, a lively time capsule of New York in the ’80s and ’90s. As lead actress Parker Posey tells the Deuce’s Joe Berger, life in the city “wasn't about where you lived but how you lived—your ideas in conversation—spontaneity at the forefront, and making fun out of nothing but ourselves.”
- “I find that as an artist, sometimes when you give yourself a boundary, you're able to unleash within that space.” Ruun Nuur interviews multidisciplinary artist Ja’Tovia Gary about her new short, Quiet as It’s Kept, which premiered in February at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery.
- With Christophe Honoré’s new film Winter Boy now streaming exclusively on MUBI, Caitlin Quinlan writes about the film’s fresh spin on seasonal frost and teenage angst—finding “a new step along a lineage of autobiographical, coming-of-age French cinema.”
EXTRAS
- Don Hertzfeldt (It’s Such a Beautiful Day) is auctioning off some of his sketches and animation art for charity (above)—he shares details via his Twitter account.
- Speaking above of Johnnie To, word is he recently led a karaoke session at Udine Castle in Italy during the city’s East Asian Film Festival. Please email editor@mubi.com if you have additional documentation to share with Notebook’s team.