Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- The lineup for the 66th Locarno Film Festival has been announced. Sections include the Concorso internazionale, (highlights which include premieres from Hong Sang-soo and Albert Serra and the long desired extended cut of Jacques Rivette's Va savoir), special Piazza Grande presentations, Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Fuori Concorso, and more. The various Jury members have also been announced, and heading the Concorso internazionale is Lav Diaz. David Hudson has more details for you over at Keyframe.
- New issues now available on physical and digital shelves: Film Comment & Brooklyn Rail.
- Pitchfork's new film criticism sister site, The Dissolve, has opened its doors.
Finds.
- Above: via Jonathan Rosenbaum, his introduction to Erich von Stroheim's Greed at the 2013 Greater St. Louis Humanities Festival.
- For Cinema Scope Online, Celluloid Liberation Front writes on Il Cinema Ritrovato XXVII:
"Were we to emulate the Biblical terminology Il Cinema Ritrovato employs to describe one of its sections and apply it to the festival experience as a whole, rather than a Paradise the Bologna festival is more like a guilt-free Purgatory, a place of “sinful” indulgence bar the punishment. From the Judaeo-Christian Eden mankind was thrown out due to Eve’s lascivious apple-picking; at Il Cinema Ritrovato apples are plentiful and lustful ingestions of forbidden fruits are welcome. If access to Paradise is granted via chastity and repentance, this festival’s bounty of tempting offerings calls for an unrestricted libido of the imagination, the boundless ecstasy of feminine eros rather than masculine haste."
- Above: Mondo's new poster art (designed by Jay Shaw) for The Act of Killing.
- Andrew Bujalski takes a look at "a few samples of adventures in early video" for Film Comment.
- Above: we're not exactly sure when this came to be, but no one seemed to notice, so here's an ad Michael Mann shot for Rolex in Hong Kong, perhaps during production there on his new film.
- Above: via the Walker Art Center, Claire Denis in conversation with Eric Hynes.
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Are you following Asia Argento on Vine? If you're not, you should be. Here are a couple reasons why:
- An invaluable find from Dan Sallitt: "Notes on the Extant Films of Mikio Naruse", a collection of short reviews spanning Naruse's entire career, downloadable in PDF.
- Above: after a rather awful clip of the film went up some time ago, this great trailer is worthy of rekindling your interest in Paul Schrader's The Canyons.
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Above: We tweeted about this audiovisual essay by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin a while back but forgot to give it its due here.
From the archives.
- Speaking of Mikio Naruse, here's Michael Koresky's essay that accompanied Criterion's Eclipse release of "Silent Naruse":
"The cinema of Mikio Naruse is one of heartbreak but also one of indomitable poise. Melodrama is the director’s stock-in-trade. His stories are inhabited by people, generally women, imprisoned in their domestic and professional circumstances by the status quo, and hinge on tragic accidents and other twists of fate. But despite these dramatic trappings, his films are infused with a remarkable realism and pragmatism—they are not simply portraits of ordinary folks in extraordinary emotional situations but reflections of everyday life, with vivid material presence and indelible figures who remain outwardly serene even as battles rage within. Naruse’s characters’ acquiescence to the way things are exemplifies the Japanese term mono no aware, which describes a resignation to life’s sadness. Akira Kurosawa once characterized Naruse’s style as 'like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths.'”