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NEWS
Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Merhige, 2000).
- Willem Dafoe will join Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu film, news that comes 23 years after he played a fictitious version of Murnau's lead actor, Max Schreck, in Shadow of the Vampire. Dafoe’s supporting role is currently “unknown,” according to Deadline, though Eggers's vampire will be Bill Skarsgard.
- Sight & Sound continues their rollout of the Greatest Films of All Time, now unveiling the critics’ top 250.
- The great cinematographer Caroline Champetier will be honored with the Berlinale Camera award at this year’s festival, marking a career of beautifully lensed films for Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Margarethe von Trotta, Claude Lanzmann, and Leos Carax, among many others.
- Following Sundance’s closing awards ceremony, we’ve compiled the full list of winners here on Notebook.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Super 8 Years (Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot, 2022).
- The “world’s little magazine” The Dial launched online this week. One of its marquee features is a roundtable that pairs up Céline Sciamma and Annie Ernaux to discuss “feminisms past and present.”
- Speaking of Annie Ernaux, Anna Shechtman writes about Ernaux’s collaboration with her son David Ernaux-Briot, The Super 8 Years, for the Film Comment Letter. The documentary “feels like a work by Annie Ernaux proper [...] a translation of her writing from text to speech, by way of the author’s voiceover, and (if, like me, you watched the film with English-language subtitles) back to text again.”
- The Metrograph Journal published a new interview with Jia Zhangke, conducted by Dennis Zhou; they speak about “the sounds of Chinese cities, his turn toward genre, and his love of pop songs, among other subjects.”
- Scott Macaulay reports for Filmmaker Magazine on Sundance’s new practice of charging filmmakers a fee for tech checks prior to their screenings, an increasingly common practice that's coming under scrutiny.
- “Wells’ narrative of parental love becomes a prism for the rarely seen, almost unprecedented spectacle that is created as a result: that of a decent man striving to become a better person under conditions that would seem to have made it difficult, if not impossible,” writes Nathalie Olah about Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun in Another Gaze.
- A pair of pieces on Christine Pichini’s new translation of Serge Daney’s The Cinema House and the World: Greg Gerke maps Daney onto present-day viewing contexts in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Max Nelson turns to Daney’s politics in The Nation.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- Berlin: Wim Wenders’s 3D installation Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper is on view through March 4 at the Galerie Bastian. The installation premiered in 2020 in Basel; this year's exhibition will feature three new photographs by Wenders.
- Berwick-upon-Tweed: The Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, running March 3 through 5, has announced their program, including new gems from Deborah Stratman, Fox Maxy, Angelo Madsen Minax, Soda Jerk, and many others.
- Brooklyn: “True to Life” is an exploration of “life writing” running February 17 through 23 at BAM. A collaboration with the literary magazine Triple Canopy, the program covers exciting contemporary filmmakers—like James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Andrew Norman Wilson, Fox Maxy, and Miko Revereza—and repertory selections, like a double bill of Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967) and George Kuchar’s Weather Diary 3 (1988).
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Soigne ta droite (Jean-Luc Godard, 1987).
- At the end of 2022, we invited seven writers and filmmakers to reflect on Jean-Luc Godard's memory. Their pieces are gathered here—thanks to Ephraim Asili, Richard Brody, A.S. Hamrah, Rachel Kushner, Miguel Marías, Andréa Picard, and Lucía Salas.
- In a joint effort with Fantômas, the Belgian film quarterly, we’re pleased to publish the English version of “The Ghosts of Rotterdam”: an essay by Open City Documentary Festival director María Palacios Cruz about labor and film programming.
- Coinciding with Lav Diaz's current post on the Tiger Competition jury at IFFR, Lukasz Mankowski interviews the titan of slow cinema—or, as Diaz has dismissed that shorthand, “it’s just fucking cinema.” Their discussion centers around Diaz's latest film When the Waves Are Gone, currently screening at the festival.
EXTRAS
- Grandfilm and Filmgarten are seeking to crowdfund a German-language Hong Sang-soo box set, featuring a book by Sulgi Lie. Support the project here.