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NEWS
- The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will hosting what we believe—and correct us if we'r wrong—is the first significant retrospective in the United States of the great Hong Kong genre director Johnnie To.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- For one more day only Gabe Klinger's Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater, a 2013 documentary about two directors on different ends of American independent cinema, will be available to watch for free on Vimeo.
- A lovely collaboration between Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) and Japanese composer (and sometimes actor) Ryuichi Sakamoto on the video for a track on his new album, async. Related: the director and composer are holding a short film competition stemming from the album.
- Critics Christopher Small and James Corning have lately been contributing excellent video essays to the Notebook on such directors as William Friedkin, John Carpenter, and Ernst Lubitsch. For Fandor, they've made another excellent directorial dive, in this case into the contradictory cinema of Hollywood comedy director Leo McCarey.
- Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning shoot "Girls Gone Wild 1863" behind the scenes of Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled. Warning: risqué ankle footage!
RECOMMENDED READING
- The new issues of Cahiers du cinéma (out now) and Cinema Scope (coming soon) both focus on the just-completely Cannes Film Festival and have Robert Pattinson in the Safdie brothers' Good Time on the cover. Cahiers editor Stéphane Delorme has written a scathing, and to our eyes accurate, assessment of the festival, which we're reading in (please excuse us) adapted Google translation:
The program of the Official is truly a program, in the programmatic sense: it has encouraged a certain type of hateful, hollow and pretentious cinema which is becoming sadly the cinema of our time.... In this context, two small wonders emerged: Good Time by the Safdies and The Day After by Hong Sang-soo... Dumont, Garrel, Claire Denis, everyone would have deserved the Palme. Authors in an insolent form that are renewed (musical comedy, sex, comedy) and who still know what it means to stage, edit, plan.
- This week the great American actress Gina Rowlands celebrated her 85th birthday, and Sheila O'Malley has written an excellent article on her and some of her key performances for RogerEbert.com:
Rowlands' work has a way of creating anxiety in viewers. The boundary line between character and actress is obliterated; or, it was never there in the first place. Her work is so unlike what we see from most other actresses (even very good ones) that it's unnerving to watch.
- American Cinematographer has republished an essential 1967 interview with "The Cameraman's Director," Alfred Hitchcock:
Q: Do you feel that lighting is perhaps the most important single element in the creation of cinematic mood? A: Motion picture mood is often thought of as almost exclusively a matter of lighting, dark lighting. It isn’t. Mood is apprehension. That’s what you’ve got in that crop-duster scene. In other words, as I said years and years ago, I prefer “murder by the babbling brook.” you’ve got some of that in The Trouble With Harry. Where did I lay the dead body? Among the most beautiful colors I could find. Autumn in Vermont. Went up there and waited for the leaves to turn. We did it in counterpoint. I wanted to take a nasty taste away by making the setting beautiful. I have sometimes been accused of building a film around an effect, but in my sort of film you often have to do that if you want to get something other than the cliche.
- We think it's safe to say that Twin Peaks: The Return, despite being 7 episodes and nearly as many hours in, remains a mystery. We're hosting on-going and in-depth recaps of the episodes as they premiere, and at Filmmaker magazine Michael Sicinski has proposed five ideas about David Lynch and Mark Frost's new...thing:
This transfer of violent energy is connected to the Black Lodge [...] but more significantly it is related to the program before us. Lynch is warning us that Twin Peaks is not background TV, and that in certain respects it is dangerous stuff. Sorry, young lovers. You need to watch that glass box carefully, because you’re strapping in for the long haul.
EXTRAS
- Some jaw-dropping analysis by Jean-Luc Godard on the relationship between film and television, courtesy of critic Max Nelson.
- From the Filmadrid festival, a meeting of two great figures in the film world: scholar Laura Mulvey and filmmaker Jonas Mekas.
- Confirming the sense of humor of Robert Bresson (he who put Chaplin's The Gold Rush and City Lights as his favorite films) is this photo of the perhaps the greatest of all filmmakers riding the donkey that appeared in his masterpiece Au hazard Balthazar.