Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.
- The news that has resounded with us above and beyond all others is the tragic death of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, truly one of the great artists of our era. We cannot encapsulate how much we'll miss her and her work.
- Above: John Byrne's "Portrait of Tilda" (1990), in honor of...
- ...The trailer for the Tilda Swinton-starring A Big Splash, director Luca Guadagnino's follow-up to I Am Love.
"Progress renders all technologies obsolete, but no medium is anachronistic to an artist. The intentional mischaracterization of film as merely technology has been extremely damaging, as it belies the truth about a medium’s many artistic differences and puts those invested in film in the unsympathetic position of being on the wrong side of progress and castigated as Luddites. However, film, unlike other artistic mediums, relies on industrial rather than artisanal manufacture. This might be the first time that a technology and a medium have been industrially, and therefore economically, conflated in such a way that the one brings the other down."
- That's Tacita Dean, above, at Artforum in an essential piece on the value of film as a medium.
- Above: A swoony, woozy series of new "Brand Identity | Idents" for Channel 4 directed by Under the Skin's Jonathan Glazer.
- "Film Snob? Is That So Wrong?" asks A.O. Scott at the New York Times.
- David Bordwell's long-in-the-making study of American film criticism in the 1940s, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture, is finally officially announced.
- Above: The trailer for Vinyl, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger's new show for HBO. Scorsese directed the pilot.
- Also at the Times, a particularly beautiful piece by Manohla Dargis on The Martian:
- "The Distributor as Auteur": Slate has profiled the ambitious American distributor A24 (Spring Breakers, Ex Machina).
"But Mr. Scott is very much his own artist, one whose reputation as a visual stylist has at times obscured that his great, persistent theme is what it means to be human."
- You saw the trailer last week. This week, the new poster for the release of a restoration of Jacques Rivette's Out 1: noli me tangere.
- For Reverse Shot, Adam Nayman digs into the darkly sleek ambivalence of Denis Villeneuve's Sicario:
"This is also what is so obscene about Sicario, which not only matches Prisoners in terms of bogus dramaturgy and basic disregard for the laws of cinematic plausibility but also tops it as far as the ugliness of what’s being put across with such immaculate skill."
- Above: the full length trailer for Alejandro González Iñárritu's next film, The Revenant, reveals more of its vengeance plotline.
- Above: Lilian Gish photographed in 1934 by Edward Steichen. Below: Hou Hsiao-hsien armed with a Bolex at the Busan International Film Festival.