Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Starting this week, filmmaker, editor, critic and Notebook contributor Gina Telaroli will be seeing the premiere of her exquisite short feature Traveling Light, "a small-scale silent (aesthetically “silent”, but with a dense sound mix) charting a trip among friends from New York to Pittsburgh carefully constructed as a string of tiny moments" (Christopher Small), around the world in a variety of venues. The most ambitious on the ground presentation will be at New York's Anthology Film Archives, in whose series "Closely Watched Trains" Traveling Light is showing alongside such other brilliant train cinema as Shanghai Express, Emperor of the North, and The Narrow Margin. For those not in New York, stay tuned for news of the film's online premiere.
- As Dave Kehr prepares to take on his new position as Adjunct Curator at MoMA, it has been announced that J. Hoberman will be taking over his video column in The New York Times in January. Kehr bows out with one last piece on TCM's new Ford/Columbia box set (Ford pictured above).
- Robert Pattinson will be joining Benedict Cumberbatch in James Gray's Lost City of Z, which is likely to begin shooting next year. It's worth mentioning that Pattinson has long been an admirer of Gray's cinema.
- Hayao Miyazaki is set to kick off his retirement from filmmaking with a new manga project.
Finds.
- Above: Isiah Medina posts "some reflections on 12 Years a Slave":
"In 12 Years A Slave, there is the scene when Epps tells Solomon to whip Patsey. The shot moves in continuous motion from Patsey being unrobed and tied to the pole and finally there is a moment when there are five people on screen, Patsey is not on screen, and the framing somewhat reminds me of Démolition d’un mur in a vague way. Of course there is no reverse in this film, this history is irreversible. But there is a curious instance of framing where the whip is hitting Patsey off-screen but a for a couple seconds it made me think that Solomon is whipping the frame itself. An attack against the price of the frame, populated by famous actors etc. I asked my friend who is an actor, what does it mean to ‘play’ a racist in a movie? There is something perfect and disgusting about seeing these actors as slave owners, perfect in that it immediately made me think of the frame, and yes, in the frame I live in, who is instantly recognizable but profiting from the frame of the world, a world that hides the void that haunts it, a constant work of forcing the world to appear continuous and without cut in the 180 degree rule. Whipping the frame because the cuts that appear on the inexistent make the frame possible. Yet we give all glory to the frame, to the possibilities of the visible, but without a thought of the impossible, change can only be an extension of the possible and will be necessary, there is no cut."
- Above: via David Jenkins, an, um, interesting poster for Rivette's Le Pont du Nord. I wonder if it'll ever make Adrian Curry's column?
- Occasioned by Dave Kehr's departure from writing, Aaron Cutler has an analysis of Kehr's review of Days of Heaven, a piece included in the book When Movies Mattered which Cutler claims is "the most useful guide to writing film criticism that I have ever read."
- Above: if you've been following Asia Argento's Twitter & Vine accounts, you'll know that she and Abel Ferrara have been hanging out in Rome (at a Bob Dylan concert at one point, no less).
- "If La Cava is an attractive case for reclamation today, it’s because he has something of the rogue, maverick character about him." At Artforum Nick Pinkerton has an excellent piece on Gregory La Cava, the subject of a fourteen-film retrospective at the UCLA Film & Television Archive running through December.
From the archives.
- Above: River Phoenix, Ethan Hawke, Joe Dante, and Jason Presson on the set of Explorers. The pic comes via Dante's Twitter in celebration of the film being added to the Warner Archive.