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RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Wes Anderson's latest experimentation in stop-motion, Isle of Dogs, gets its disturbing yet droll first trailer.
- Valentine, above, is a selection of intimate videos directed by Paul Thomas Anderson of HAIM's live sessions of cuts from their latest album, Something to Tell You.
- We adore Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's most recent film, The Assassin, and highly anticipate this new restoration for his difficult to see 1987 film drama, Daughter of the Nile.
- Grasshopper Film has bravely made Jean-Marie Straub's 2-minute masterpiece The Algerian War! available for free on their website.
RECOMMENDED READING
"I began thinking that Mothlight must begin with the unraveling of a cocoon and end with some simulation of candle flame or electric heat (as all moths whose wings were being used in the film had been collected from enclosed light boxes and lamp bowls) and, while it bothered me to think of painting on an otherwise purely collage film, I began to plan to create a black flame (to literally emphasize “if black were white”) at the end of the film. Well, to make a long story short, no matter how hard both Jane and I tried we could not find a single cocoon (let alone the twenty to thirty I had thought I needed) and the search touched off violent quarrels between Jane and I and dramatic statements of outrage at “nature’s stinginess,” etc., and other nonesenses and none-suches so totally out of key with the spirit of all our working together on the rest of the film that I am amazed and ashamed at my stupidity in retrospect."
- In the event of the republication of Stan Brakhage's revelatory book Metaphors on Vision, BOMB magazine has shared a letter Brakhage wrote to the poet Robert Kelly regarding his film Mothlight.
- Twin Peaks: The Return concluded nearly a month ago, and yet the discourse around it shows no signs of slowing down. At Indiewire, cinematographer Peter Deming goes in depth into his process with David Lynch on the new series (or is it a movie?):
“He’s very specific about what shots he wants and what shots he thinks he needs, and whether we need to cover something or not,” said Deming. “He’s very much in control of that process and sometimes we say, well we could get this piece of coverage or that, and a majority of the time he’s pretty decided he doesn’t need it. He also sticks very close to the script. I know that he and Mark [Frost] invested a lot of time in writing this and that it was very much a fine polish, which is very rare these days.”
- Meanwhile, the discussion around the many complexities of Lucrecia Martel's latest has only just begun, and Film Comment has a great conversation with the director:
"This movie, for me, has to do with something that women are very familiar with but that the masculine world doesn’t know so much about, and that’s failure. The world of women knows failure much more than that of men. And so it was like I was sharing this with Zama. I think that an important part of the film is a man wanting to hold onto this masculine culture and later accepting something that is more from feminine understanding, which is failure and the liberty that failure brings."
"[...] Every Friday after our morning class, we raced to the student center to snatch a copy of the Chicago Reader to read what Dave Kehr had to say about the movies opening that weekend. More than the dusty tomes of those academic thinkers, Kehr’s lengthy reviews in the Reader had an immediate influence on our tastes and ideas. Kehr applied the theories and ideas we were learning in our classes to his popular reviews but without the pretentious jargon associated with academia. We learned more about the auteur theory and genre analysis from Kehr, who was using it in practice, than from any text book."
- Ahead of the forthcoming release of Dave Kehr’s latest anthology of film criticism, Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Susan Doll has penned a celebratory review of the text for FilmStruck.
- Back over at BOMB, Shambhavi Kaul, whose extraordinary short film Night Noon (2014) MUBI showed in 2015, interviews Indian independent filmmaker Amit Dutta regarding his genre-traversing dreamscapes.
EXTRAS
- Lois Patiño (Night without Distance) location scouting in Azores. Photo by Matías Piñeiro. (Via @WVLNGTHS)
- Finally, Reddit user URDVine has put together the ultimate cartographic analysis of the events of Twin Peaks: The Return for those who still find themselves as obsessed as we are.