Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria.
- The lineup for this year's Venice Film Festival has been announced. In-competition titles include Carlos Reygadas' open-relationship romance Where Life is Born (the auteur's first feature in 5 years), Shinya Tsukamoto's much-anticipated samurai film Killing, and Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale, a Gothic revenge story set in Tasmania. The Venice Documentaries section joins an eclectic range of heavy-hitters, from Gastón Solnicki (Kékszakállú) and once-retiree Tsai Ming-liang, to Errol Morris and Frederick Wiseman, whose Ex-Libris: The New York Public Library screened in competition at the festival last year.
- Meanwhile, the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival has followed suit, releasing the names of the films set to premiere at its Special Presentations and Galas. Notably, this edition reunites the festival with Barry Jenkins, whose James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk will have its world premiere. Noteworthy world premieres also include: Steve McQueen's crime-noir Widows—his first film since 2013's 12 Years a Slave—Maya by Mia Hansen-Løve, Claire Denis's High Life, and Amma Asante's controversial—but nonetheless intriguing—Where Hands Touch, about a budding romance between a black German girl and a member of the Hitler Youth.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Ahead of its Venice premiere, here's the trailer for Mike Leigh's rendition of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre as historical film.
- We are great fans of both M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable and Split for their complex interrogation of heroes, villains, and trauma. Thus we're thrilled by this nearly unclassifiable trailer for the auteur's latest entry to this saga, Glass.
- The new film distribution and restoration company Arbelos Films has shared a stunning trailer for their forthcoming restoration of Dennis Hopper's maligned masterpiece The Last Movie. Arbelos is also working on a 4k restoration of Béla Tarr's Sátántangó.
- We interviewed Blake Williams about his 3D experiment PROTOTYPE, and the many cinematic possibilities it conjures and fulfills, earlier this year. Here's the first (2D!) trailer for this entrancing film.
- Filmmaker Magazine has also shared the trailer for Ricky D'Ambrose's minimalist, Bressonian' Notes on an Appearance, which we reviewed earlier this year.
RECOMMENDED READING
- Manohla Dargis provides a sweeping overview of “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers,” an ongoing series at BAMcinématek, in The New York Times. From history's first female filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché to Marion E. Wong—whose comparatively obscure Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles With the West is widely considered the first feature by a Chinese-American filmmaker—the weeklong survey acts as, in Dargis's words, a "corrective to our collective amnesia" of "cinema’s mysteriously missing and forgotten women — its real gone girls."
- Further on the subject of women filmmakers, Janus Films' release of a restored version of Barbara Loden's singular film Wanda has started its tour in New York last week. Criterion has collected the thoughts and experiences from various artists and writers, including Molly Haskell and Illeana Douglas, on the film and its many truths.
- At Filmmaker Magazine, Graham Carter briefly interviewed the great New York auteur Joan Micklin Silver regarding her underrated romantic comedy, Crossing Delancey. We are hopeful this resplendent film soon gets the restoration it too deserves.
- For TIFF's The Review, Durga Chew-Bose paints a portrait of Italian icon Monica Vitti's "mask," through which we see how "her capacity to express desire is rationed." In Vitti's Giuliana, from Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert, Chew-Bose identifies an "interior commotion" seen beneath and within "a face that hardly moves."
- Guided by the films of Fritz Lang, Nick Pinkerton investigates the genesis of surveillance and proto-surveillance in cinema for The Baffler.
- New York's Quad Cinema has launched the second half of its Hammer retrospective, entitled "Hammer’s House of Horror, Part II: The Decadent Years (1968-1976)," focusing on a period of waning success for the studio. For the Village Voice, Notebook contributor Willow Maclay points to the boldness and boundary-pushing nature of late-Hammer features like Freddie Francis's Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968) and the lesbian vampire Karnstein trilogy—The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), Twins of Evil (1971).
- In an interview with Lauren O'Neill-Butler, John Akomfrah discusses the "utopian dimension of migration" and his "fondness for collage." Akomfrah's largest US survey to date, "Signs of Empire," will be on view at the New Museum in New York until September 2, 2018, along with two additional solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Nasher Museum of Art.
- For The Atlantic David Denby has penned a lovingly witty profile of the comic and film director Mel Brooks. (It's also not too late to catch Brooks' The Producers, now playing on MUBI in the United States!)
- For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alex Wermer-Colan reflects upon Alain Guiraudie's 2014—and, in the United States, newly translated and available at MIT Press—novel Now the Night Begins. The story of a young man who steals an elderly man's soiled underwear and later starts an intimate relationship with him, the experimental but still-disturbing novel is "just the sort of queer decadence that the Trump era had coming"; and against the backdrop of such films like Stranger By The Lake and Staying Vertical, Wermer-Colan claims that "it’s clear this 50-year-old filmmaker has found in writing a liberation from certain limitations inherent in moving images."
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- MUBI's new film series Canada's Next Generation has begun, and with it participating directors Ashley McKenzie, Kazik Radwanski, and Sophie Goyette have generously introduced their respective films.
- Three critics attending Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna have provided reports of their experiences of this rare festival devoted to cinema history.
- Two singular but disparate icons, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Barbara Loden, are the topics of two (1, 2) pieces partly focused on the artistry of performance.
EXTRAS AND RE-DISCOVERIES
- A gorgeous new poster for the aforementioned restoration of Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie.
- Twin Peaks inspires some of the greatest fan art around—here's a pleasingly smooth animation of the key totemic items from the original series.
"This must be where pies go when they die." Awesome Twin Peaks animation by @buck_tv pic.twitter.com/SLlJbGYKyg
— Black Lodge Cult (@BlackLCult) July 19, 2018
- Paul Schrader looks to have had a great weekend. In other news, we recently sat down with the director to discuss his incredible new film First Reformed.
Paul Schrader took himself to a Taylor Swift concert for his 72nd birthday and posted a selfie on Facebook. pic.twitter.com/CMJ5u9Jx9x
— Jeff (@DenverCinephile) July 23, 2018