Weekly Rushes: Raoul Coutard, Tsui Hark's "Journey to the West," French Noir Tour, Lynch Soundtrack

This week’s essential news, articles, sounds, videos and more from the film world.
Notebook

NEWS

Raoul Coutard shooting Breathless

  • The great cinematographer Raoul Coutard, legendary for his work shooting Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, and also a collaborator of Philippe Garrel, Nagisa Oshima, Costa-Gavras and François Truffaut, has died at the age of 92.
  • Keep film alive! The New York non-profit film organization Mono No Aware has launched a Kickstarter to fund "the nation's first ever non-profit motion picture lab." An ambitious and worthy goal!
  • Two film projects in the works we're very excited about: Claire Denis' High Life, starring Robert Pattinson and Patricia Arquette and co-written by Zadie Smith, and Leos Carax's Annette, a musical to star Adam Driver (everywhere these days!) and Rooney Mara.
  • The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the first part of its retrospective devoted to exiled Chilean fabulist Raúl Ruiz, which will include new digital restorations of Bérénice (1983) and The Golden Boat (1990), as well as 35mm prints of such masterpieces as The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) and The Territory (1981). Bonus fun: also being shown is Wim Wenders' great The State of Things (1981), whose production is bizarrely intertwined with the shoot of The Territory.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

  • A fabulous and bizarre teaser trailer for Tsui Hark's Journey to the West: Demon Chapter, the sequel to Stephen Chow's amazing mega-hit Journey to the West (2013). At the end we see Tsui himself, somehow looking younger as he gets older. What's his secret?

  • Our favorite film video essayists Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, who just made a video for the Notebook exploring F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, also have a new one for Sight & Sound that takes a tour through French noir.

RECOMMENDED READING

Film Comment November December 2016

What, then, was the New French Extremity: a manifestation of cultural and political impasse, an anxious reaction to fin de siècle and the late capitalist condition the French call précaire; a short-lived resurgence of the violational tradition of French culture, also reflected in contemporaneous literature (e.g., Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Millet, Marie Darrieussecq, Jonathan Littell); the wilful imposition of thematic pattern on a disparate and disconnected group of films? In the waning days of the phenomenon, the answer appears no clearer, but many of its films have quickly come to look like desperate artifacts.

Deadly China Doll (1973). Photo courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn Mayer.

Like many films of the period, not only German but also French and Italian ones, Der Gang in die Nacht exploits the resources of the tableau—the graceful, expressive coordination of actors who perform with their whole bodies—while saving the blunt force of the isolated face for a climactic accent. No wonder that film theorists of the late ‘teens and early 1920s were fascinated by close-ups; they were seeing a great many vivid ones.

RECOMMENDED LISTENS

EXTRAS

 Babette's Feast poster

  • The Japanese poster for Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast

Don't miss our latest features and interviews.

Sign up for the Notebook Weekly Edit newsletter.

Tags

NewsRushesRaoul CoutardClaire DenisLéos CaraxAngela MaoGabriel AxelF.W. MurnauTsui HarkTrailersDavid LynchJafar PanahiAbbas KiarostamiMajid BarzegarVideos
2
Please sign up to add a new comment.

PREVIOUS FEATURES

@mubinotebook
Notebook is a daily, international film publication. Our mission is to guide film lovers searching, lost or adrift in an overwhelming sea of content. We offer text, images, sounds and video as critical maps, passways and illuminations to the worlds of contemporary and classic film. Notebook is a MUBI publication.

Contact

If you're interested in contributing to Notebook, please see our pitching guidelines. For all other inquiries, contact the editorial team.