Edited by Adam Cook
News.
-
Marcel Hanoun, the great, underrated, French filmmaker has passed away at the age of 82. David Hudson has collected some words over at the Keyframe Daily.
- La Furia Umana, one of our favorite publications, plans to publish a print version of their journal in the future. Editor Toni D'Angela is looking to see if there would be reader interest in subscriptions, so please contact him (la_furia_umana@lafuriaumana.it) and let him know you'd like to subscribe when LFU goes to print.
Finds.
-
Heaven's Gate has been re-cut and restored thanks to Michael Cimino and The Criterion Collection. In The New York Times, Dennis Lim writes about the film's notoriety and resurgence, as well as Cimino's take on things after its recent screening in Manhattan:
"Onstage here Mr. Cimino was candid about the psychic toll of Heaven’s Gate. 'I’ve had enough rejection for 33 years,' he said. 'I don’t need more. Being infamous is not fun. It becomes a weird kind of occupation in and of itself.'
But there was nothing resembling rejection at the screening, which concluded with a long standing ovation. Speaking at the Excelsior Hotel the next day Mr. Cimino said it was the first time he had watched the movie all the way through since its New York premiere in 1980. He summed up the experience in a single word: 'Strange.'"
- Above: The annual Cinema Scope TIFF Roundtable is now online for your viewing pleasure, featuring Robert Koehler, John Semley, Adam Nayman, Kiva Reardon, Jason Anderson and Mark Peranson. Topics of discussion include mixed reactions to Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, unanimous reactions to PTA's The Master and thoughts on the new approach to programming Wavelengths.
- Last week, animation filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt did an endearing Q&A on Reddit. where he mentions, among other things, that he would like to make a live-action documentary.
- Above: As a prelude to the concert webcast we mentioned a couple weeks back, Werner Herzog made a brief documentary short with The Killers, which is unsurprisingly fun and odd.
- The brilliant third season of Louie concludes this week and the Los Angeles Review of Books has published a piece by Adam Wilson on "Louis C.K. and the Rise of the 'Laptop Loners'":
"It is a show that, more than any other, both caters to this new kind of audience — the Laptop Loners — and has, as its creator, a member of the club. C.K. doesn’t just star in Louie, he also writes every episode, directs, produces, and oversees the music. Until recently, he even edited the show on his personal laptop. What’s more, C.K. is his own subject, a single father whose particular brand of post-millennial loneliness feels of a piece with Louie’s auteur production style and the solitudinous way in which we currently watch television."
- It's no secret that we're kind of fond of James Gray, so excuse our excitement over his forthcoming feature Nightingale. The photo below of Gray and Jeremy Renner comes from the set of the film:
- In Moving Image Source, Phil Coldiron tries to make sense of the use 16mm film in the digital age:
"...As someone who grew up digital, the turn back to 16mm seems not at all a matter of wishing to return to an idyllic past I never knew, but of exploring its options, of revisiting what hasn’t yet been exhausted and seeing what work is left to be done. If the best of the mumblecore films succeeded at exploring the cultural process of reckoning with our new mediated lives, then this wave of 16mm filmmaking really does the work that a tool like Instagram only feigns: it brings artifice back to life in the full depth of its expressive possibilities."
- Above: via David Phelps, a video from Luisa Greenfield, that "retraces and compares fine details in one of the driving scenes from Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s 1972 film, Geschichtsunterricht. Because I had lived in the neighborhood where this driving scene was shot, personal history and the lessons of film history intersect and cross over."
From the archives.
- Above: Gérard Courant's silent portrait of Marcel Hanoun from Cinematon.