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NEWS
Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper (2016).
- The next film directed by Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson and Dick Johnson is Dead) will star Kristen Stewart as…Susan Sontag. Based on Ben Moser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Sontag: Her Life, the project will have some hybrid-doc elements, as we might expect from Johnson: according to Screen Daily, Johnson will film an interview with the actress about her preparation for the role at the Berlinale, where Stewart is jury president.
- Richard Ayoade will direct and star in an adaptation of George Saunders’s The Semplica Girl Diaries, with casting currently underway.
- New Spanish Cinema luminary Carlos Saura died last week aged 91. His best-known films depicted and critiqued life under the Franco dictatorship, like La Caza (1966) and Peppermint Frappé (1967), which bears the influence of his mentor Luis Buñuel. Writing on Saura’s 2016 documentary J: Beyond Flamenco, Fernando F. Croce characterized the filmmaker as a “seasoned archeologist of dances: Blood Wedding, El Amor Brujo, Flamenco and Fados are sinuous laboratory films, studio distillations of history and folklore via figures in motion.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Christian Petzold’s latest, Afire, has a trailer ahead of an imminent Berlinale premiere. The film will be the second in an informal trilogy about the elements from Petzold, following 2020’s water-related Undine (2020) and preceding a forthcoming film about earth.
RECOMMENDED READING
America (Garrett Bradley, 2019).
- “Cultural relics, once lost, are generally assumed to be lost forever, which is perhaps why they are so often said to be lost “to time”—as if the objects themselves had come face-to-face with eternity and chosen to dissipate.” In the New York Review of Books, Maya Binyam writes about how the filmmaker Garrett Bradley reworks, remixes, and reinterprets archival material through her moving-image projects.
- “Everyone who is trying to think about contemporary Hollywood as a business these days eventually asks what will replace superhero movies as its core franchises.” J.D. Connor unpacks the complex set of business considerations that led to Netflix acquiring the rights to the Knives Out franchise for “roughly $450 million,” speculating as to why such a large investment was deemed agreeable.
- “What Cannibal Holocaust and Snuff had in common, beyond their hucksterism, was a desire to remove the typical boogeyman from their horrors and instead turn the camera, figuratively and literally, on us.” On Screen Slate, Justin LaLiberty writes about snuff films, found footage, and the 1980s home video market, in a piece tied to the Metrograph’s “Film Bites Man” series.
- Also on Screen Slate, Madelyn Sutton interviews some of the many individuals behind The Deuce, “a monthly, 35mm-only series” (and Notebook column) “celebrating the 12 theaters on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues and the grindhouse fare they pumped out daily in the 1970s and ‘80s.”
- “It is a sunny day across all the three timelines I am currently experiencing—the film itself, my memories of childhood and the day I am watching this film in London—which again collapses the spaces into one another.” Laura Bivolaru’s Michael O’Pray Prize-winning essay in Art Monthly beautifully narrates her experience watching Alice Diop’s We (2021) on a train on her phone on MUBI.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Allensworth (James Benning, 2022).
- Two documentary-oriented film festivals announced their lineups recently. True/False returns for a 20th edition, running from March 2 through 5 in Columbia, Missouri with 58 films, eight of which, such as Terra Long’s Feet in Water, Head on Fire (2023), are world premieres. And French documentary festival Cinéma du Réel runs from March 24 through April 4, whose international competition includes new work from James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, and Alain Kassanda, among many others.
- New York: Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival runs from March 15 through 19 in Queens, featuring new work by Lucrecia Martel, Gastón Solnicki, and Koji Fukada.
- Melbourne: A focus on Tonino Guerra runs at the Melbourne Cinématèque until February 22. It showcases just a few of the 96 films that the Italian screenwriter worked on over his illustrious career, but the lineup does include 35mm prints of Elio Petri’s The Assassin (1961) and Theo Angelopoulos’s The Beekeeper (1986), among other treats.
- Missoula: The inventive documentary filmmaker Penny Lane is the subject of a retrospective at this year’s Big Sky Film Festival, taking place from February 15 through 26. The selection includes Nuts (2013), an all-archive film about Richard Nixon, and Hail Satan (2019), Lane’s wry portrait of the oft-misunderstood Satanic Temple.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson, 2023), part of this year's Sundance slate.
- Reflecting on this year’s fiction slate at Sundance, Matthew Eng praises filmmakers who offered characters room to breathe. New films by Ira Sachs and Raven Jackson “informed our perception of the outside world, rather than relying on the outside world to lend them added import.”
- On the experimental front, Jordan Cronk brings together the filmmakers from Sundance’s New Frontier section—Mary Helena Clark, Mike Gibisser, Fox Maxy, and Deborah Stratman—for a conversation about the festival circuit, and how it treats boundary-pushing work.
- “About an hour into Avatar: The Way of Water,” writes Evan Calder Williams in a new essay, “I was struck slowly by the recognition that I felt almost nothing.” Diving boldly into the depths of these murky feelings, Williams reflects on the forced awe and wonderless photorealism of the modern blockbuster.
- “The movie’s upended familiarity had given me a chance to perceive change in myself, to be surprised by myself, one of life’s best feelings.” Actor and filmmaker Connor Jessup recalls a fateful rewatch of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love in a tender, reflective piece.
- “I wanted the film to archive the intensity of bodies in motion that only a good party can offer.” Érica Sarnet introduces their film A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here, now showing on MUBI.
EXTRAS
- The cinematic event of the year aired last Friday on TCM. Dick Tracy: Tracy Zooms In is a sequel to the cult 2010 half-hour Dick Tracy Special, in which Leonard Maltin interviews Warren Beatty in character as Dick Tracy. This time, Tracy and Beatty end up on a Zoom call with Maltin and TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz. Many rationalize this as merely a way for Beatty to cling to the IP, but the special is a much stranger work of oddball artistry. Words won't suffice, and rules don't apply. Below, the first special:
...and the new one:
- Rest in peace, Burt Bacharach. Here, Bacharach enters fashionably late to perform “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” with Tom Jones on vocals and Big Jim Sullivan on guitar: