Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.
NEWS
- The great cinematographer and filmmaker Haskell Wexler (1922 - 2015), the man behind the images of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Medium Cool (which he directed) and Coming Home, has died at the age of 93. Keyframe has a roundup of information and remembrance.
- An unexpected announcement from Film Comment informs us that their Editor of the last 15 years, Gavin Smith, is leaving the magazine after the January/February 2016 issue. The Film Society of Lincoln Center is embarking "upon the search for a new Editor."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Quentin Tarantino discusses the making of The Hateful Eight with Christopher Nolan at the Directors Guild of America.
- Mann Sparks: Many new videos have been added to director and critic Ryland Walker Knight's video project collaborating with other filmmakers to make "cinematic mixtape[s]" from the films of Michael Mann and the new album by Beach House, Depression Cherry.
RECOMMENDED READING
- A new issue of online journal LOLA, "Distances," edited by Girish Shambu and Adrian Martin. Among its entries are Japanese director Aoyama Shinji on how he "became a disciple of Philippe Garrel," and Armenian director Artavazd Pelechian's theory of distance.
Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind
- If you've been reading David Cairns' column The Forgotten here at the Notebook you'll know there is an essential Douglas Sirk retrospective now going on in New York. At Artforum, Tony Pipolo has a beautiful overview:
"Sirk not only survived his critics; he also emerged unscathed from efforts by academics in the ’80s to view his work through the dubious filters of fashionable theories—deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and radical feminism—thereby “justifying” his excesses as a form of Brechtian estrangement. As contemporaries, Sirk was certainly cognizant of Brecht’s theories. But to suggest that the unflinching pathos of his movies is compatible with Brechtian detachment is folly. If there is a “distance” in Sirk’s style, it’s one he shares with fellow émigrés Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Max Ophüls, Fritz Lang, and Robert Siodmak, who, having fled the horrors of Nazism, observed the naïveté of American society with bemused concern."
- Kristen Thompson has highlighted the best films of...1925! Among the honored is Notebook favorite Lazybones by Frank Borzage:
"The film is beautifully shot, and Borzage displays such an easy mastery of constructing a scene, particularly in depth, that it is easy to miss the underlying sophistication... It’s difficult to convey the charms of such an unconventional film, but give it a try and you may be bowled over, too."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- "Last year we were asked to write a tune for Bond movie Spectre... It didn't work out ... but became something of our own which we love very much." That's Radiohead's Thom Yorke, who shared their version of the Spectre theme below:
EXTRAS
- Via New York Times critic Manohla Dargis (now on Twitter!), Michael Bay Avenue at Paramount Studies in Los Angeles.