|
Lotte in Italia (Struggle in Italy, 1971) by the Dziga Vertov Group, featured on the cover of Cinema
|
Catherine Grant points us to the new issue of Film Matters, which, as Allison de Fren and Adam Charles Hart explain, “aims to highlight the excellent, innovative video essays being made by undergraduates, and to encourage students—as well as faculty—to create and share their audiovisual scholarship…. The work featured herein has, we believe, achieved a synergistic integration of form and content.” And it includes audiovisual essays on Fritz Lang‘s M (1931), Wes Anderson and Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Dziga Vertov‘s Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
Adrian Martin flags the new, strikingly designed issue of Peephole, which, asSian Mitchell notes, “looks to commemorate not only the launch of theMelbourne Women in Film Festival, but to give some attention to the diversity of women’s filmmaking, the multitude of women’s perspectives evident in its storytelling, and the place of women in criticism.” Included are essays on Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (2011), John Curran’s Tracks (2013), “very much the embodiment of the spirit of three women,” Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989) and more.
MORE READING
Orson Welles‘s The Magnificent Ambersons “had its disastrous first preview screening in Pomona, California, on March 17, 1942, or 75 years ago this past Friday,” writes Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the AV Club. “It was then reworked without his input… The deleted footage was ultimately destroyed, and the only version of Ambersons that survives today is an 88-minute cut that includes a number of reshot scenes that Welles did not direct. His saga of a faded era has itself been partly lost to time, coating its bittersweetness with an additional layer of meta-melancholy. Film history is funny that way, writing its own poetry. And the kicker is that The Magnificent Ambersons is still masterly. It’s the movie that all other films about families in decline are measured against.”
Béla Tarr and Director of Exhibitions Jaap Guldemond discuss the exhibitionTill the End of the World, on view at EYE Filmmuseum through May 7
At the Chiseler, Jim Knipfel argues that the 1959 NBC series Johnny Staccatowith John Cassavetes “worked as a bridge between the fading postwar ennui and paranoia that spawned film noir and the new youthful openness and countercultural energy of the Beats. The connection is locked in place with a jazzy score composed by Elmer Bernstein, who’d fired the first hesitant noir jazz salvo with his score for 1955’s The Man With the Golden Arm.”
“The first time he saw Bruce Baillie, a fiery Peter Kubelka recounted in front of an amused audience at the Austrian Film Museum, the American filmmaker was pulling off a headstand in a classroom before taking his students out on the campus to collect garbage,” writes Patrick Holzapfel in the Notebook. “In the filmmaking of Baillie and his organization Canyon Cinema, which was showcased from January 30 to February 3 in five programs curated by Garbiñe Ortega, ideas of life and community are transformed into sounds, colors and film.”
Critic-turned-filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho tells Little White Lies‘ David Jenkins about the films that have inspired him. “John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 [1976] is something that actually told me, ‘You can do something like this.’ … It’s partly Hollywood, partly western, partly about life in the big city, and it is all tremendous.” John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988) “is one I love. I saw it when I was 19 and was really inspired by it because it was just a fucking really great movie experience. I still remember the screening of that. A supposedly stupid action movie I picked to see turned out to be very strange and special.”
IndieWire‘s posted an editorial in which Tim League, co-founder and CEO of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas, fires back at Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix, who asked last week, “How did distribution innovate in the movie business in the last 30 years? Well, the popcorn tastes better, but that’s about it.” League: “While our industry has not shown the vision and truly game-changing innovation of Netflix, Hastings’s antagonistic approach to cinema inadvertently exposes an underlying disrespect to the creators and auteurs that drive this entire machine.”
David Cairns on the subtle humor of Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979)
For Sarah Marshall, writing for the New Republic, “it’s clear that Girls wasn’t about injecting female-driven sitcom with millennial relevance, but about redefining prestige television and the kinds of lives it can make us care about.”
IN OTHER NEWS
The Cannes Film Festival’s announced that Cristian Mungiu will preside over the Cinéfondation and Short Films Jury and that Monica Bellucci will host the opening and closing ceremonies of the 70th edition running from May 17 through 28.
At Cineuropa, Bénédicte Prot has the nominees for the Lolas, Germany’s counterpart to the Oscars: “One title totally outpaces the other movies chosen by secret vote by the 1,800-plus members of the German Film Academy: The Bloom of Yesterday by Chris Kraus (Four Minutes), a film based on his own family history. In the movie, Lars Eidinger plays a renowned researcher, the grandson of a Nazi, who is married but unable to completely satisfy his wife (Hannah Herzsprung), leads conferences on the Holocaust and strikes up an intimate relationship with a young Jewish French colleague (Adèle Haenel). This comedy-drama leads the pack with eight nominations, outpacing Wild by Nicolette Krebitz (seven nominations) and, to everyone’s surprise, Toni Erdmann by Maren Ade (six), which, since its premiere screening in competition at Cannes last May, has become the German film of the past year in the eyes of the whole world.”
GOINGS ON
New York. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s announced the lineup for this year’s Art of the Real, its “showcase for boundary-pushing nonfiction film” running from April 20 through May 2. Opening with the New York premiere of Theo Anthony’s Rat Film, the festival will include new work by Jem Cohen,Heinz Emigholz, Robinson Devor and the late Michael Glawogger. “In addition, there will be a spotlight on Ignacio Agüero and José Luis Torres Leiva, two prominent Chilean documentarians whose works act in conversation.”
The newly revamped Quad Cinema will open on April 14 and, at IndieWire, Kate Erbland has the lineup for First Encounters, a series in which notable New Yorkers select a film they’ve never seen and then take part in a post-screening Q&A. The pairings so far: Sandra Bernhard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘sLola (1981), John Turturro and Satyajit Ray‘s Pather Panchali (1955), Noah Baumbach and Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I (1988), Kenneth Lonergan and Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000) and Jeffrey Deitch and D.A. Pennebaker‘s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973).
As the Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth reports, among those lined up for Tribeca Talks are Scarlett Johansson, Noah Baumbach, Dustin Hoffman, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Tom Hanks. The festival runs from April 19 through 30.
Los Angeles. Blonde Venus (1932) “was the fifth picture out of the sevenDietrich made with her artistic partner, the besotted/bullying genius von Sternberg and it’s largely considered inferior to others,” writes Kim Morgan, but: “I revere the picture, regardless.” It screens on Friday and Saturday with Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939) at the New Beverly.
The lineup for the Los Angeles Conservancy’s series, Last Remaining Seats, running from June 3 through 24, is set.
IN THE WORKS
Following The Lobster and the forthcoming The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Yorgos Lanthimos and Colin Farrell will team up yet again for an untitled limited series for Amazon, reports Variety‘s Justin Kroll. Farrell will star as Oliver North, the NSC operative deeply entrenched in the Iran-Contra affair that tarred Reagan’s second term. At IndieWire, Zack Sharf reminds us that this marks the “second television series Lanthimos has gotten attached to this year. In January, the director signed on to helm AMC’s new dark comedy series starring Kirsten Dunst.”
Houda Benyamina (Divines) and Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Evolution) are among nine French-speaking writer-directors to be selected by Groupe Ouest to take part in “a writing coaching program that includes four group working sessions at a residency in Brittany this year,” reports Fabien Lemercier forCineuropa. Benyamina will be working with “her usual writing partner,” Romain Compingt, on Pour Assia, which focuses on “a young Algerian resistance fighter” saved from execution by the French lawyer in love with her. Hadzihalilovic’s La Reine des Neiges tells of two orphans, Rose, 14, and Lucas, 16, “fascinated by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Snow Queen.” They meet an actress playing the Queen in a film—who then disappears, possibly with Lucas in tow.
“Robert Downey Jr is set to play Doctor Dolittle,” reports the Guardian. “The project will be written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for his Traffic script and most recently directed Matthew McConaughey in Gold.”
“Elizabeth Marvel is joining Connie Britton, Ben Mendelsohn, Edie Falco, and Thomas Mann in Nicole Holofcener’s Netflix dramedy The Land of Steady Habits,” reports Variety‘s Dave McNary. Holofcener will direct her own adaptation of Ted Thompson’s novel, which “follows a man in his 50s who experiences a midlife crisis and leaves his wife.” But he “realizes his mistake” and “tries to redeem his personal and professional missteps.”
Jonathan Levine will direct Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen in Flarsky, which, according to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Rebecca Ford, “centers on an unemployed journalist (Rogen), battered by his own misfortune and self-destructive ways, who endeavors to pursue his childhood crush and babysitter who now happens to be one of the most powerful and unattainable women in the world (Theron).”
“Penélope Cruz has signed on to play Donatella Versace in FX’s Versace: American Crime Story, the third installment of the anthology series from Ryan Murphy,” reports Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister. The series “will explore the murder of Gianni Versace, who was killed on the steps of his home in Miami Beach by serial murderer Andrew Cunanan, who killed five people that year and then killed himself on a house boat, eight days after killing Versace.”
Timothy Spall “has been tapped to star in the first installment of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, a 10-episode sci-fi anthology series,” reports Deadline‘sDenise Petski. In The Commuter, “the first of 10 stand-alone episodes,” Spall will play Ed Jacobson, “an unassuming employee at a train station who is alarmed to discover that a number of daily commuters are taking the train to a town that shouldn’t exist.”
Chris Hanley and Fernando Sulichin, producers of Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers (2012), are developing a series based on the film for Blackpills, “a soon-to-launch digital platform,” reports Deadline‘s Erik Pedersen. “Korine is not involved in the new project, for which casting is in the works.”
OBITS
The New York Review of Books has announced the passing of its co-founding editor, Robert B. Silvers, at the age of 87.
“The originality of the paper’s format shouldn’t be underestimated,” writesChristian Lorentzen for Vulture. “Yes, there was the Times Book Review, whose absence during the New York typographers’ strike provided the occasion for the NYRB’s launch, and, yes, in England there was the Times Literary Supplement, where the reviews were many and short and the reviewers were anonymous, but it was the New York Review that liberated the review-essay from the back pages of the Nation, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Commentary, etc., and showed that a proper magazine could float on the energy of criticism, adorned with a stand-alone essay or two, perhaps a piece of reportage, a couple of poems, and of course, a combative letters page.”
“When called upon, the New York Review was like a news magazine and a think tank rolled into one,” writes Paris Review editor Lorin Stein. “Its reporting on Vietnam and Iraq, for example, helped turn the tide of opinion against those wars. Yet it was open to essays, poems, and even the odd short story. For half a century, it has remained authoritative, lively, surprising, and utterly personal. Notoriously modest and discreet in manner, Silvers had supreme confidence in his editorial judgment, as did his readers—and his writers. ‘He’s the person I trust more than anybody,’ Joan Didion told us in her Art of Nonfiction interview. Whoever assumes the job of editing the New York Reviewwill have the highest standard to live up to.”
More from William Grimes (New York Times), Laura Miller (Slate) and contributors to the New Yorker.
“Fierce, committed and above all, tough—these are the words that collaborators use to describe producer Robin O’Hara…, who died suddenly last week after complications from cancer treatment,” writes Anthony Kaufmanfor IndieWire. “O’Hara, together with [business and life partner Scott Macaulayof Forensic Films], was crucial to the burgeoning New York indie film scene in the early 90s… Over her decades of producing, she continued to launch important new talents, helping to produce an early short film by Michael Almereyda, and then with Macaulay, a short film by Tamara Jenkins as well as debut features by Tom Noonan, Harmony Korine, Jesse Peretz, John Leguizamo, Peter Sollett, James Ponsoldt, and others.” Kaufman gathers remembrances from James Schamus (“It would not be an understatement to say that Robin O’Hara launched my career”), Alice Wu, Sollett, Ponsoldt, Korine, Leguizamo and many more.
“Chinese actress Li Li-hua, who starred in more than 120 movies between the 1940s and 1970s, including the Hollywood romance China Doll, died in Hong Kong on Sunday,” reports Patrick Frater for Variety. “She was 92.”
ENDNOTE
Entries that’ve been updated both recently and substantially: New Directors/New Films 2017, Terrence Malick’s Song to Song and Danny Boyle’sT2: Trainspotting. And SXSW has announced its Audience Awards.
HUSHTRUTH....... 