Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.
NEWS
- Jan Němec, the Czech director of Diamonds of the Night (1964), has died. Keyframe has an overview of his work. Above: the Czech poster for Němec's 1966 film, A Report on the Party and the Guests, via Adrian Curry's blog Movie Poster of the Day.
- Speculation around the 2016 Cannes Film Festival selection is raging, but Variety is pretty sure it will include several new American films, including new movies directed by Sean Penn, Woody Allen and Jeff Nichols.
- The Criterion Collection has announced its next lineup of releases, which includes Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria, and Michelangelo Antonionio's Le amiche.
- New issues of Cinema Scope and Senses of Cinema are out. Yes, this is not just news but also recommended reading!
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Notebook contributor and MUBI teammate Kurt Walker has released his feature film debut Hit 2 Pass (2014), a completely unconventional documentary, through Vimeo. Highly recommended! Last November, Walker and Gina Telaroli engaged in a dialog on the Notebook about their recent features.
- Vice's new television channel, Viceland, features a A Vice Guide to Film, written by Cinema Scope mates Adam Nayman and Andrew Tracy. The episode dedicated to Werner Herzog is currently streamable for free.
- The trailer for a wild-looking (and all 35mm!) retrospective by New York's Japan Society on lesser known Japanese musicals.
- A cryptic but intriguing video essay by Ashley Perry is dedicated to the landscapes of Denis Villeneuve's Sicario.
RECOMMENDED READING
Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom
- For Sight & Sound the Celluloid Liberation Front has tackled how the current crisis in Ukraine has been explored in cinema:
"What’s curious about Winter on Fire and other documentaries to emerge from Ukraine’s recent turmoil is that they all systematically leave out some certain unpleasantries that are not at all peripheral to the overall narrative."
- Jean-Luc Godard has created a little tribute to fellow New Wave director Jacques Rivette for the Cinémathèque Française. Craig Keller has generously translated the homage:
"power and glory, liberty and fraternity, peace and war, infinity and totality, penury and democracy, terror and virtue, poetry and truth, et cetera,"
- With the cinema release of Ben Wheatley's adaptation of J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, The Quietus has asked the British director to walk us through his favorite films. About Godard's Week End, he says:
"I almost felt like I’d had the stack of cards in my head rearranged and reprogrammed after watching that film. "
- We've featured work about Rivette's epic Out 1 by Jonathan Rosenbaum on the Notebook before, and on his own blog the critic has posted an essential new article:
"Consciously setting out to make a critique of the conspiratorial zeitgeist of his first feature, Paris Nous Appartient, Rivette also used this principle to arrange meetings and confrontations between his actors, each of whom was invited to invent and improvise his or her own character in relation to the overall intrigue."
Midnight Special
- At the Berlin Film Festival we were let down by Jeff Nichols' homage to Spielberg and Carpenter, Midnight Special, but Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's praise for the film in the A.V. Club has us wanting to revisit the movie:
"It has car crashes, shoot-outs, and bursts of digital effects, but is carefully minimized, its mood set and sustained by the score’s piano motif... It is plainspoken in its treatment of the fantastic."
- We've already recommended Dennis Lim's new book on David Lynch, but if you don't believe us, believe A.S. Hamrah in Bookforum:
"Lim points out that these films emerged from the period “of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, the Branch Davidians and Heaven’s Gate cults, the televised trials of O. J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers,” which created “a potent incubator for apocalyptic thoughts.” Lynch’s Los Angeles films, in which identity dissolves and congeals into murder, reflect the California sun back on itself."
- New York's newly minted Metrograph cinema is already proving to be a key Internet destination for writing on film. There, Phillip Lopate writes on the pleasures and memories of film revivals:
"Speaking of Mizoguchi, my wife and I were living in Madrid for a year in 1965, after graduating from college, and were poor as church mice but determined to see Princess Yang Kwei-Fei when it showed at the Cinemateca. We had saved our pesetas, only to discover at the box office that the screening had sold out. We lingered at the entrance, crestfallen, until an usher took pity on us and let us in a side-door for free."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Speaking if High-Rise, Spotify is now streaming the movie's score composed by Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream). FACT magazine is also featuring Mansell in a new interview.
EXTRAS
- In case you missed it: the poster for the 69th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, quoting Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt.