Weekly Rushes: 30 March 2016

Quinzaine poster, Cannes’ Opening Night, Whit Stillman’s Jane Austen, Nick Cave’s script notes, “The Terminator” soundtrack, and more.
Notebook

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.


NEWS

"Once upon a time, two people met.
A woman, a man… Their memory has almost been erased.
All that’s left is a picture… torn, faded, almost gone.
Cinema is not  eternal but it does sometimes escape oblivion. And it is possible to restore a picture.
And what will there be then between these two characters who perhaps stepped out of an English or Italian comedy or an Éric Rohmer film?
When you see a poster like this, your imagination fills in the blanks, just like it does at the movies."

—Édouard Waintrop, Artistic Director of the Directors’ Fortnight, about its 2016 poster

  • Speaking of Cannes, the festival has revealed its Opening Night Film, Woody Allen's Café Society, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, and shot by the great Vittorio Storaro.
  • The online film world is overrun by lists, but sometimes we take note and pleasure in them, like when The Guardian presents "50 documentaries you need to see," as selected by such doc filmmakers as Joshua Oppenheimer, James Marsh and Alex Gibney.
  • The great American animator Don Hertzfeldt, recently nominated for an Academy Award for his brilliant The World of Tomorrow, has announced a gorgeous Blu-ray collection of his short films.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

  • The trailer for Whit Stillman's Jane Austen adaptation, Love & Friendship. We caught it at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and were tickled throughout.

  • Another trailer, this time a delightful tease by the Cinémathèque française for their retrospective on Chilean master Raúl Ruiz, to whom we devoted a dossier in 2011.

RECOMMENDED READING

Tinted film frames from of Dr. Caligari. Photograph by Barbara Flueckiger.

  • A wonderful behind-the-scenes reminiscence on the making of All the President's Men by its associate producer, Jon Boorstin, at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
"Still, Warner Bros. wasn’t convinced. Everybody not only knew how this trauma ended, they’d lived every twist and turn, a tangled mess that studio lawyers insisted must be scrupulously accurate. Warners confirmed its worries with market research. They learned that half the audience expected a hatchet job and was primed to hate the picture, and everyone in America was fed up with the story and eager to move on. Imagine where they’d be when it finally came out a year from now. 

But Redford was Redford, after all, and to sweeten the deal he threw in Dustin Hoffman..."
  • Another behind-the-scenes jewel: musician and screenwriter Nick Cave's script notes for John Hillcoat's Aussie western, The Proposition:

  • We're always eager for Notebook contributor Fernando F. Croce's next "Movie of the Day" writing at his blog Cinepassion, and this week we've been rewarded with another tautly condensed masterpiece of criticism, this time on Fritz Lang's Spies:
  • "New terrors for new technologies, the double-edged sword of surveillance holds sway in Fritz Lang's espionage Möbius strip."
  • Finally, if you've always wondered, as we have whenever we're at retrospectives or revival screenings, about the challenges in determining the colors of old films, Peter Monaghan at the Moving Image Archive News has a wonderful profile exploring the issue:
"Even when restoring black-and-white classics, technicians have to deal with color complications. Early films had visual qualities that depended not only on the lighting used during the filming, but also on what film technicians — directors, art directors, film processers… – did to the original camera negatives: how they tinted and toned them, or in some cases colored them by hand."

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

"...if the soundtrack still feels special, perhaps it’s because of this unlikely collision: an intermingling of theatric sensibility and emergent technology. The tools Fiedel used were cutting-edge for the period—a Prophet 10, an Oberheim, a drum machine and a sequencer—but still primitive in their workings. This was, just, a pre-MIDI age, so he would synch up his instruments by hand, and you can hear the occasional sense of slip and slide. The film’s majestically dark “Main Title” is a perfect mix of haunting melody and remorseless, mechanical rhythm, the latter in part the result of human error. While looping his Prophet 10, Fiedel missed the complete measure by a split second, but liking the result, kept it."
  • That's Pitchfork reviewing a newly remastered reissue of Brad Fiedel's score to James Cameron's original The Terminator.

EXTRAS

  • After the unexpected success of Bruno Dumont's equally unexpected detective tragicomedy Li'l Quinquin, we can't wait to see what he has in store for us next. And so, of course, he throws us another curve ball in the downright wacky poster for his next movie, Ma Loute, which is rumored to be in Cannes this year.

  • Posters more in line with what we used to expect from Bruno Dumont come instead from Midnight Maurader's fan art for László Nemes' controversial Son of Saul. You can see more of these austere designs on MM's Tumblr.

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RushespostersNewsspotlightNewsletterTrailersWhit StillmanDirectors' FortnightDon HertzfeldtRaúl RuizBruno DumontVideos
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