The Noteworthy: 15 April 2015

The history of Orson Welles's last film, the "Vertigo Effect", Hollywood adaptations then & now, and more.
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  • For the first time since 1987 (Diane Kurys's A Man in Love), a female director will open the Cannes Film Festival: Emmanuelle Bercot's La Tête haute.

  • Above: Josh Karp has written a book on Orson Welles's last film, The Other Side of the Wind, and has penned an article for Vanity Fair that traces the history of this infamous lost and found movie:

"The story behind the making of The Other Side of the Wind begins at Schwab’s drugstore, the Hollywood soda fountain where: Charlie Chaplin played pinball, F. Scott Fitzgerald had his first heart attack, and, according to some versions of the story, Lana Turner was discovered while cutting school to grab a Coke."

  • More on Orson Welles: David Bordwell writes on his personal history with the filmmaker (and his hometown) occasioned by a retrospective in Madison, Wisconsin:

"So I had good luck coming here in 1973. As a teenager getting interested in film, I focused most avidly on Welles. I watched Kane and Ambersons on late-night TV, and as a good omen, there was a 16mm screening of Kane during my first week as a college freshman. With pals I traveled to New York to see the newly released Chimes at Midnight (twice) and wrote a review for our student newspaper. A few years after that Film Comment published my first serious piece of film criticism, an essay on Kane. That movie has been a leitmotif of my life—a centerpiece of our textbook Film Art since its publication in 1979, important in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, and still stubbornly facing me down in my current struggles with 1940s Hollywood narrative."

  • Watch the French (sorry, no subtitles yet!) trailer for Philippe Garrel's In the Shadow of Women.
  • In Brad Stevens's "Bradlands" column, he writes on the shifting landscape of Hollywood adaptations and looks back at Vincente Minnelli's expert examples:

"This phenomenon is a relatively recent one. The standard complaint of novelists used to be that Hollywood cretins had taken their visions and distorted them beyond recognition. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule. David O. Selznick respected authors’ intentions, and prevented Alfred Hitchcock making some fairly radical changes to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1940). But generally speaking, American directors felt free to alter literary works in whatever ways they wished"

 

  • Above: BAMcinématek has put together an amazing program entitled "The Vertigo Effect" that traces Vertigo's influence through seven decades of cinema. 
  • Seven philosophers dig into movies to explore some big questions for The Guardian.
  • PubX, a pop-up film festival, will be taking place May 15th-17th in Florence, MA. Head to their website to find this year's lineup featuring Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's Ellie Lumme, Amy Seimetz's Sun Don't Shine, and Kurt Walker's Hit 2 Pass
  • Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry has his eyes on adapting Don DeLillo's The Names.
  • Animator Bill Plympton is turning to Kickstarter to crowdfund his next film, Revengeance.
  • Lastly, via our Tumblr, behold the amazing cover of Esquire Españafeaturing Jerry Lewis:


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The NoteworthyNewsPhilippe GarrelVincente MinnelliAlfred HitchcockOrson WellesEmmanuelle BercotCannesCannes 2015Jerry LewisBill PlymptonAlex Ross Perry
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