Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Influential author and screenwriter Elmore Leonard has passed away at the age of 87. David Hudson has collected some remembrances for the Daily.
- The 66th Locarno Film Festival may have come to a close, but we're still rolling out coverage. In case you missed the award announcements, click here. If you're looking for a concise summary of the fest, Dennis Lim has you covered over at The Los Angeles Times. Also, make sure to watch this video of Golden Leopard winner Albert Serra (pictured above) being interviewed by...Albert Serra.
Finds.
- Above: just a sampling of the stunning close-ups that comprise this image-piece by Rainer Knepperges that works backward through Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre. (Thanks to David Phelps for the link!).
- When asked about The Day the Clown Cried, Jerry Lewis usually gets grumpy and shrugs off the question, but Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty got a crack at ten questions about the unseen film:
"Will I ever see The Day the Clown Cried?
He writes on a piece of white paper in green ink: NO.Is there more than one copy of the film?
He writes: NO.Is the film in a safe somewhere?
Yes, yeah.Okay, number four: is the reason the film has not been released because you are unhappy with it?
He writes: Yes/No.
Which doesn’t mean that Yes, I’m unhappy with the work that I did. But who am I preserving it for? No one’s ever gonna see it. But the preservation that I believe is that, when I die, I’m in total control of the material now. Nobody can touch it. After I’m gone, who knows what’s going to happen? I think I have the legalese necessary to keep it where it is. So I’m pretty sure that it won’t be seen. The only thing that I do feel, that I always get a giggle out of, some smart young guy like Chris is going to come up with an idea and he’s going to run the f—ing thing. I would love that. Because he’s going to see a hell of a movie!"
- Above: you've probably already run into this, but just in case here's Werner Herzog's new short film From One Second to the Next, a study of the tragic consequences of texting and driving.
- Writing for Keyframe, Tara Judah reports back from the Melbourne International Film Festival about a handful of Giallo classics that screened on film:
"Surprisingly, in the wake of the digital revolution, the program for MIFF 2013 included an impressive total count of twenty-three film prints (two 16mm and twenty-one 35mm). It would seem there are survivors yet on the post-apocalyptic, digital festival circuit landscape. Beyond the two experimental shorts and some new titles produced out of Europe and Asia, the festival combed the far ends of Italy to locate and screen six supremely rare Italian Giallo films from the 1960s, seventies and eighties, curating a curious mini focus on the genre, titled 'Shining Violence: Italian Giallo'."
- Above: every fight in Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster, ranked.
- Celluloid Liberation Front has a piece on Georgian-French filmmaker Otar Iosseliani over at Cinema Scope Online.
From the archives.
- Richard Aidala, longtime projectionist for the Museum of the Moving Image, has passed away at the age of 63. Last year, Daphnée Denis wrote a piece on Aidala for Narratively that is well worth revisiting:
"There was a time when Aidala used to have to watch closely for changeover cues imbedded in the film. The famous image of a countdown on the screen (“10… 9… 8…7…”), for instance, was originally intended for projectionists. The last eleven feet of a film print were marked with two dots on the upper right-hand-corner of the screen so projectionists knew when to change reels. The first dot was a signal to turn on the next reel; the second was a warning that only one foot of film remained. In a matter of minutes, the projectionist was supposed to operate the switch. If he performed well, no one noticed the change. If a white screen interrupted the movie, the audience suddenly remembered there was a man behind the glass in the back of theater.
These days, Aidala would find it difficult, likely impossible, to repeat the same gaffe; his booth doesn’t let him see or hear any of what he shows, so there’s no chance to get lost in a movie. Once he turns on the projector, a loud Hoover-like noise takes over the small space. It gets so loud you can’t hold a conversation with someone standing right next to you. So, most of the time no one talks."