Edited by Adam Cook
- Above: a first look at Willem Dafoe in Abel Ferrara's Pasolini.
- In Film Comment, Kent Jones has published an incredible piece entitled "Critical Condition", in which he examines our limited critical views on cinema:
"The point is not to claim that film criticism took a wrong turn in the Fifties and Sixties. The auteurist idea at its most basic (that movies are primarily the creation of one governing author behind the camera who thinks in images and sounds rather than words and sentences) is now the default setting in most considerations of moviemaking, and for that we should all be thankful. We’d be nowhere without auteurism, which boasts a proud history: the lovers of cinema didn’t just argue for its inclusion among the fine arts, but actually stood up, waved its flag, and proclaimed its glory without shame. In that sense, it stands as a truly remarkable occurrence in the history of art. The consciousness of cinema has indeed been raised on a general level, and people are now far less comfortable dismissing it than they once were. That may sound paltry to those of us who won’t rest until Douglas Sirk replaces Lincoln on the five-dollar bill, but in terms of art historical time it’s astonishing."
- Annie Atkins, the lead graphic designer of Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, talks to Creative Review.
- In response to Steven Soderbergh's Psychos mash-up and a piece published about it in The New Yorker, Richard Brody offers his take on "Why It's Impossible to Recreate a Film Shot by Shot":
"That’s why Van Sant’s attempt to remake “Psycho” is more or less beside the point, an experiment that proves only its own inadequacy. What it doesn’t represent is the only point of interest in the project: the nostalgia, the search for lost times and lost ways, that prompts it. Filmmakers with a profound and self-conscious sense of the cinema as a time capsule have made use of that nostalgia, have made it their subject for some of their greatest films. The art of filming what no longer is—as in Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” Max Ophuls’s “Lola Montès,” Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad,” or Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (which opens today)—is also the art of showing the way things are, profoundly, in the present day."
- Above: via the wonderful Film History in Pics Twitter account, "a teenage Spielberg at the premiere of his first film Firelight at Phoenix Theatre, 1964."
- Adam Nayman, Kiva Reardon, and Michael Sicinski discuss the 2014 True/False Film Festival for Cinema Scope Online.
- Katie Bradshaw interviews Raya Martin for BOMB Magazine:
"KB: Do you feel like you’ve been making films for yourself, or for other people? Not as in, are you just an aesthete or self-indulgent—but is your motivation more of an internal self-exploration or maybe intentionally socially-conscious?
RM: That's a difficult question to answer. Let me pull off some new age cosmic bullshit on this. I make films for myself. But it’s also like, when you’ve figured yourself out, people understand. It’s a kind of language, not cinema as language, but classically, a form of being. I love making films because afterwards I understand certain questions in my head, not through the movie but through the process. Why do I feel white sometimes when I’m not? Why do I always keep talking about history in my works? What is the point of making films? It’s all different for everyone, but this process works for me, and I’m getting answers making something. It’s not an either/or thing, it’s not this stupid 'where-is-your-audience' dilemma. That’s another thing, an industry thing, and if someone wants me to deal with that, then I deal with that. But I treat this filmmaking as something else. One can pull off a stoner answer and be like, 'This is my drug,' or whatever. It's that thing that keeps you 'til the end."
- Above: this is just one incredible photo from Vivian Kubrick's Twitter, which you should take a look at immediately.
- Films by Alexander Kluge, via UbuWeb.