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We're mourning the loss of Peter von Bagh along with countless others in the world cinema community. Many are sharing past articles on or by von Bagh. Here's Jonathan Rosenbaum's piece on the man, and his extraordinary film Helsinki, Forever:
"We’ve met at various times in Paris, London, New York, Southern California, Chicago, Helsinki, Sodankylä, and Bologna — and probably in other places as well, although these are the ones I currently remember. The first times were in Paris in the early 1970s, when he looked me up, and it must have been either in San Diego in 1977 or 1978 or in Santa Barbara between 1983 and 1987 that he convinced me to buy a multiregional VCR. Most likely it was the latter, where I was mainly bored out of my wits apart from my pastime of taping movies from cable TV, and Peter maintained that if we started swapping films through the mail, a multiregional VCR would allow me to play some of the treasures he could send me. The first treasures he sent included Fritz Lang’s Indian films, several films by Carl Dreyer, Jean Renoir’s La Nuit de Carrefour, Josef von Sternberg’s The Saga of Anatahan, Jacques Tati’s Parade, Tay Garnett’s Her Man, and several more that would otherwise have been completely inaccessible to me then even if I’ve been living at the time in New York rather than Santa Barbara. So, to borrow a simile from another friend, Edgardo Cozarinsky, you might say we were like medieval monks copying illuminated manuscripts for one another, trying to keep culture alive during the Dark Ages, in two 'remote' outposts."
- The latest issue of Cinema Scope is available now, with several articles available online in addition to print, including an interview with Pedro Costa by editor Mark Peranson, and Jordan Cronk on Twin Peaks. Also available: an invaluable conversation between the late Peter von Bagh, Boris Nelepo, and Celluloid Liberation Front.
- Above: the trailer for this year's Viennale, directed by Manoel de Oliveira.
- Doclisboa has unveiled its outstanding lineup for their edition next month, including an 11-feature film International Competition that has new works from Wang Bing, Eric Baudelaire, Edgar Pêra, and more.
- Above: one of four tracks off of Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross's score for David Fincher's Gone Girl available to listen to right now.
- Richard Brody on John M. Stahl's When Tomorrow Comes:
"Sometimes the near-great delineates the great in the way shadow does light, as John M. Stahl’s surprisingly rare (and just plain surprising) film When Tomorrow Comes reminds us. Though not exactly a work of genius, the movie—which is playing tomorrow through Sunday at I.F.C. Center, as part of the series “1939: Hollywood’s Golden Year”—is a marvel and, ultimately, a terror. If Stahl’s name endures in the history books, he will be known as a provider of raw (or, rather, parboiled) material for Douglas Sirk. The latter master of melodrama, whose career was already in full swing but modest flight in the nineteen-fifties, became a sort of directorial star with his 1954 film Magnificent Obsession, which was a remake of Stahl’s 1935 film of the same name. Sirk’s final Hollywood feature, Imitation of Life, from 1959, was also a remake of a film by Stahl, this one from 1934."
- Above: erotic drawings by Federico Fellini. Check out more here on Hossein Eidizadeh's blog, close-up.
- Here's a must read: J. Hoberman shares his 1968 NYFF report for Film Comment's blog:
"Yes, I know. I was a teenaged know-it-all, as well as a rabid soixante-huitard, a serious pothead, occasional speed freak, and fanatical cinephile. I spent the summer of 1968, between my sophomore and junior years at Harpur College (aka SUNY Binghamton), in Berkeley, crashing on people’s couches, and hitchhiking when I felt like it to North Beach where I had a menial job in the Ramparts magazine mailroom. My “supervisor” was an ex-Digger who didn’t believe in paying for anything and had a scam for everything.
When I got back to New York, I came up with my own scam, writing to the Film Society of Lincoln Center on behalf of a non-existent film magazine (the “Harpur Film Journal” or some such) and securing press credentials to cover the 1968 New York Film Festival. Incredibly, this ruse worked three times, even though I never bothered to furnish the festival press office with anything even resembling clippings. At least once, however, I wrote a festival report—a 10-page single-spaced screed run off on a mimeograph machine, and distributed at one of the Harpur Film Society’s fall presentations, where it most likely wound up on the floor beneath the auditorium seats."
- For Movie Morlocks, R. Emmet Sweeney joins John Waters in defending Final Destination.
- Above: one of, um, several recreations of famous historical photographs featuring John Malkovich...
- Darren Hughes and Michael Leary are publishing a four part conversation on "Materiality and Abstraction" in the work of Claire Denis for To Be Cont'd—check out part one and two.
- Above: the new poster for Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip.