The Mother and the Whore.Jean Eustache orbited the world of criticism without ever fully falling into it. His intellectual biographer, Alain Philippon, describes him as a marginal figure at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960s and yet actively involved in the debates unfolding in its offices.1 Though Eustache was close with future Cahiers editor-in-chief Jean-Louis Comolli and the magazine championed his films from the start, his critical output was minuscule. He started contributing to Cahiers only after completing his first short, Bad Company (1963). Even then, he wrote little, publishing a few brief pieces on some early films by Paul Vecchiali, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Costa-Gavras. Luc Moullet would later admit that prior to Bad Company, he thought him the only person at Cahiers “that had absolutely nothing to do with the movies.”2 Indeed, Eustache was often at the offices to pick up his wife, who was employed as a secretary at the magazine.
- 2/26/2024
- MUBI
Kohn’s Corner is a weekly column about the challenges and opportunities of sustaining American film culture.
Chances are that if you care about international cinema, you care about the French New Wave. A loose collective of young directors who came to define their country’s cinema as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the French New Wave gave cinema permission to be audacious and uncompromising while bolstering its style and personality. It was cool with purpose.
Jacques Rozier, the last living member of the Nouvelle Vague, died this week at 96. Rozier was a blind spot for me, but the French New Wave was my guide to grasping what the movies could be.
As a teenager, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” got me excited about the possibilities of the movies like nothing that came before. Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” was a formative encounter with the expansive possibilities of the coming-of-age story.
Chances are that if you care about international cinema, you care about the French New Wave. A loose collective of young directors who came to define their country’s cinema as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the French New Wave gave cinema permission to be audacious and uncompromising while bolstering its style and personality. It was cool with purpose.
Jacques Rozier, the last living member of the Nouvelle Vague, died this week at 96. Rozier was a blind spot for me, but the French New Wave was my guide to grasping what the movies could be.
As a teenager, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” got me excited about the possibilities of the movies like nothing that came before. Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” was a formative encounter with the expansive possibilities of the coming-of-age story.
- 6/17/2023
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
As the leaves crunch underfoot and the wintry chill intensifies, you may realize: it’s time to think of a good gift for that friend of yours who’s already packed their shelves to the gills with Blu-rays and back issues of Cahiers du Cinéma. Have no fear. Covering books, home video, music, posters, and apparel, here are some gift ideas for the dearest cinephiles in your life.Books And MAGAZINESFireflies Press recently published Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper: a beautiful set of two complementary volumes to honor the filmmaker’s centenary. The smaller book includes a revised translation of his poem “Poet of the Ashes,” while the larger volume includes tributes from 20 contemporary artists and critics, including Catherine Breillat, Jia Zhangke, Luc Moullet, Angela Schanelec, and Mike Leigh.Written by Karen Han, Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema is a mid-career monograph covering the Korean auteur’s features,...
- 11/29/2022
- MUBI
In 1940s France, a little 50-seat cinema opened that would launch one revolution on international movie screens...and arguably a second one in the streets of Paris. Host Rico Gagliano delves into the wild history of the Cinémathèque Française and its legendary founder, Henri Langlois.Featuring interviews with directors Barbet Schroeder and Luc Moullet (Brigitte et Brigitte), plus New Yorker writer Louis Menand, Amy Nicholson of the podcast "Unspooled," and many more.The second season of the Mubi Podcast, titled “Only in Theaters,” tells surprising stories of individual cinemas that had huge impacts on film history, and in some cases, history in general.Listen to episode 1 below or wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsStitcherSpotifyGoogle PodcastsMoreAfter listening, check out an extended interview with Barbet Schroeder in the latest “Mubi Podcast: Expanded” piece. The filmmaker dives deeper into memories of the French New Wave, talks about his Oscar-winning film "Reversal of Fortune,...
- 6/29/2022
- MUBI
Despite the pandemic disruption of the film industry around the world, which impacted everything in film from production to simple moviegoing, the vibrancy of cinema culture throughout the year has felt as strong as ever, and fiercely resilient. In our small but passionate way we also have made a show of force. In 2021 alone, Notebook has published over 400 articles. Here are some highlights from the year—and we encourage you to use the "Explore" menu or dive into our archives to find even more excellent work published this year.ARTICLESTikTok meets silent cinema in Caroline Golum's witty essay. Cinematic technology used not for social celebrity but rather for criminal forensics was the focus of an article by Emerson Goo.The French New Wave's Luc Moullet, a guiding light for Notebook, was the subject of two pieces, one about the extraordinary TV show How to with John Wilson, the other...
- 12/31/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSDario Argento's Dark GlassesFollowing his appearance in Gaspar Noé's Vortex, Dario Argento returns to directing with Dark Glasses, his first feature since Dracula 3D (2012). Starring Asia Argento and Andrea Zhang, the thriller follows a serial killer, a blind sex worker, and a 10-year-old Chinese boy in Rome's Chinese community. John Woo is also set to make a return to Hollywood with Silent Night, a "no dialogue" action film about a father (played by Joel Kinnaman) who seeks to avenge his son's death. Film Labs, a "worldwide network of artist-run film laboratories," now has a new website! The website includes more than 500 films made at artist-run film labs from Vancouver to South Korea, as well as technical resources and distribution information. Dancer, choreographer, theatrical director, and filmmaker Wakefield Poole has died. A pioneer of the gay pornography industry,...
- 11/3/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWe're thrilled to announce Notebook magazine, a new biannual print-only publication dedicated to the art and culture of cinema, with original contributions by film artists, writers, curators, and archivists about a unique and eclectic array of cinematic subjects. Inside our pilot Issue 0 you'll find Apichatpong Weerasethakul reflecting on his personal journey and Wes Anderson on The French Dispatch and The New Yorker; explorations of moviegoing and odes to movie magazines; conversations between the cinema exhibitors of Milan's Cinema Beltrade and Dubai's Cinema Akil, as well as between directors Emma Seligman and Mike Leigh; movie posters from a milestone MoMA exhibition; sheet music handwritten by Nino Rota; new translations of writings by Yasujiro Ozu; and much more. This issue is printed in a limited edition and available for pre-order to Mubi subscribers only—get yours now,...
- 10/27/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Francis Ford Coppola for Wall Street Journal. (Photographed by Austin Hargrave) In a new interview with Deadline, Francis Ford Coppola has announced that he's starting to assemble a cast and prepare financing for his long-gestating passion project, the epic film Megalopolis. "I’m still willing to do the dream picture, even if I have to put up my own money, and I am capable of putting up $100 million if I have to here." Hou Hsiao-hsien and Lee Kang-sheng are currently attached to Twisted Strings, a TV anthology series written and directed by Huang Xi. Hou will be the executive producer of the series, while Lee will star in a role that is "like nothing he had ever portrayed before." Kaycee Moore, the star of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, has died. Throughout her career,...
- 9/1/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Sonny Chiba in Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). Sonny Chiba, the prolific and singular actor, martial artist and choreographer, has died at the age of 82.New York Film Festival has unveiled its Currents section, featuring a strong slate that includes Artavazd Peleshian, Ted Fendt, Shengze Zhu, Christopher Harris, Shireen Seno, Matías Piñeiro and more. NYFF will also be screening seven programs dedicated to the centenary of the late film programmer and festival co-founder Amos Vogel. The retrospective includes works by Glauber Rocher, Oskar Fischinger, and Dušan Makavejev. The Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has announced its lineup. This year's Focus program will showcase the works of Cambodian production company Anti-Archive, Nguyễn Trinh Thí, Rajee Samarasinghe, and Sps Community Media. Organized by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Archival Assembly #1 will take place from...
- 8/25/2021
- MUBI
“Without Franco, I wouldn’t be here, nor this book. Thank you, Francisco. It’s the only good thing you did in your life.” The author behind this characteristic note of thanks is none other than French filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet, whose endearing and very funny autobiography, Mémoires d’une savonnette indocile (“memoirs of an unruly piece of soap”) has just been published by Capricci. In 42 chapters, the “prince of shoestring cinema” walks us through his young years as a critic at Cahiers du cinéma, his filmmaking life, and his stints in various professional and educational bodies. The book was announced in 2012, with the intention for it to be published posthumously. Reading it nine years later, with the author still in the pink of health, one senses that the cause for Moullet’s original reticence may have had to do less with his comments on his peers and collaborators...
- 8/22/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Son of the White Mare (1981)Pioneering Hungarian filmmaker Marcell Jankovics has died. Known for his fantastical and folkloric animations, Jankovics' films like Johnny Corncob (1973) and Son of the White Mare (1981) helped place Hungarian animation on the map. Last year, Jankovics discussed his recently re-released Son of the White Mare with Christopher L. Inoa. Amazon has bought MGM for $8.45 billion. Mike Hopkins, senior VP of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, has announced plans to reimagine MGM's "treasure trove of [intellectual property]," which includes 12 Angry Men, Basic Instinct, and Raging Bull. Cristian Mungiu will be the Jury President for this year's International Critics' Week at Cannes. The festival's lineup is set to be announced on June 7. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese has started production on his next film, supported by the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund.
- 6/2/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSFilmmaker Bertrand Mandico has illustrated the 70th anniversary cover of Cahier du Cinéma, entitled "Gloria, angel of the history of the cinema." The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center have announced the lineup for the 50th edition of New Directors/New Films. Screenings will take place from April 28-May 8 through the MoMA and Flc virtual cinemas, and in-person screenings at Flc through May 13. The lineup of 27 features and 11 shorts includes Theo Anthony's All Light, Everywhere, Andreas Fontana's Azor, Alice Diop's We (Nous), and Jane Schoenbrun's We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Recommended VIEWINGAnother Gaze's free streaming project, Another Screen, has announced two new programmes: Hands Tied, about hands, and Eating the Other, about gendered notions of eating. The first official trailer for Mamoru Hosoda's Belle, which...
- 4/6/2021
- MUBI
Above: How To with John Wilson / Barres (1984) In this neoliberal age of the city, as a gentrified, corporatized landscape, it has become a mounting struggle for the majority of people to find space that is either affordable or meaningful. John Wilson is an artist invested in this ill, as well as the city’s still living potential as a site for subversion and idiosyncrasy, as articulated in his exploration of his home of New York, both in his short films independently released on Vimeo and most recently with an HBO series called How To with John Wilson (2020).The series’ conceit is that Wilson is a New York-based independent filmmaker who compulsively documents his life and the world around him and in the process learns various life lessons. He films his routine and surroundings and records voice over contextualizing the experiences so that the audience can come to understand many of...
- 1/13/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe 49th annual New Directors/New Films (Nd/Nf) has been rescheduled from March to December 9-20, with films slated to premiere in the Film at Lincoln Center Virtual Cinema. The line-up includes Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in Her Room, Maya Da-Rin's The Fever, and Alexander Nanau’s Collective. Lynne Ramsay, who last directed You Were Never Really Here, will be adapting Steven King's psychological horror novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, about a young girl who becomes lost in the woods. Recommended VIEWINGAbel Ferrara's new documentary, Sportin' Life, which premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in August, has gone an unusual premiere route, streaming first through Indiewire (currently unavailable), and now at The Film Stage. Shot by Sean Price Willaims, the documentary follows Ferrara as he...
- 11/18/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Jean-Luc Godard at the 2018 press conference for The Image Book.From longtime collaborator Fabrice Aragno on Facebook comes word of a new Jean-Luc Godard project. We don't know much, but it appears that the movie will be shot on film, perhaps Godard's first since Notre Musique in 2004 and a shift from his 2018 digital essay film, The Image Book. Park Chan-wook's new film will be a romantic murder mystery starring Tang Wei and Park Hae-il (who previously starred in The Host), entitled Decision to Leave. The film is said to be the story of a police officer who suspects a dead man's wife of his murder. Recommended VIEWINGThe Wexner Center for the Arts' series Cinetracts '20 is now available for free online. Artists from around the world including Charles Burnett, Cauleen Smith, Tony Buba,...
- 10/14/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Carl Reiner, Annie Reiner, and Mel Brooks, photographed together at Brooks's 94th birthday celebration.We're saddened by news that actor, comedian, screenwriter and director Carl Reiner has died. Mel Brooks remembers Reiner, his best friend, in a post reflecting upon their famous collaborations together. Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson has unveiled plans for the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, which will take place "live in Utah and in at least 20 independent and community cinemas across the U.S. and beyond." Elsewhere, the Locarno International Film Festival announced its 20 selections for the Films After Tomorrow program, which aims to offer support to productions that were put on hold by the health crisis. These films include films by Lucrecia Martel, Wang Bing, Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Helena Wittmann, and Lisandro Alonso. Recommended VIEWINGArthur Jafa directed...
- 7/1/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.Newshbo Max has announced plans to release the "Snyder Cut," a highly demanded director's cut of Zack Snyder's Justice League. Hollywood Reporter delves into the development of the project and the fan-based movement behind bringing Snyder's vision to life. Venice's governor has announced that the film festival will proceed as planned this September. Meanwhile, Cannes is unveiling plans for its unprecedented "virtual film market," which will have to mediate different time zones and a lack of premiere buzz. Recommended VIEWINGDavid Lynch has released his 2015 short film Fire (Pozar) for free online. The animated film, a collaboration with Polish musician Marek Zebrowski, is a nightmarish vision of formless beings and houses on fire. For Deadline's new series The Film That Lit My Fuse, Francis Ford Coppola discusses Sergei Eisenstein's October (Ten Days That Shook...
- 5/27/2020
- MUBI
One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984) is showing May 15 - June 14, 2020 in many countries in the series "Outlaws and Misfits: Jim Jarmusch's Cinema of Outsiders."“We can bet that this film will be a flop,” blurbed Jean Eustache about his fellow post-New-Wave underachiever and pal Luc Moullet’s Anatomy of a Relationship (1975), an early exercise in self-scrutiny coauthored by Moullet’s partner Antoinetta Pizzorno. “That’s the best for me: I’ll plunder it more easily.” In comparable fashion, a 1964 commercial flop made by one of the masters of both Eustache and Moullet, Jean-Luc Godard—who incidentally had helped to launch the careers of both of these disciples—was successfully plundered by Jim Jarmusch twenty years later in Stranger Than Paradise. More specifically, Jarmusch appropriated a black-on-white principle exploited...
- 5/14/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe on-demand success of Trolls: World Tour, and subsequent comments made by NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell, has led to a significant development in the friction between studios and cinemas: AMC Theatres announced it will no longer play any Universal movies. The ongoing dispute speaks to the many changes likely to take place as response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Recommended VIEWINGThe Walker Art Center has made available more than 60 "in-depth portraits of directors, actors, writers, and producers who were celebrated in the Walker Cinema at pivotal moments in their careers." This abundant archive includes Bong Joon-ho, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Stan Brakhage, Julie Dash, and even Tom Hanks. Grasshopper's official trailer for Dan Sallitt's Fourteen, which stars Tallie Mehdel and Norma Kuhling as two long-time friends in New York. Read our review of the film here.
- 5/6/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSChanges continue to ripple throughout the film industry: Following the cancellation of this year's SXSW, the festival has paired up with Amazon Prime and invited filmmakers of their lineup to take part in a 10-day "online festival," streaming on Prime for users in the U.S. Both Cannes and the Venice Film Festival have announced that neither will be moving forward with a digital festival, committing to plans for physical events for later this year. Recommended Viewingnhk World is offering its four part documentary, 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki, on its website for free. The series offers an exclusive look at the animation auteur's production of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.A new short film by Jean-Marie Straub, France Against Robots, has premiered on the Kino Slang blog. The film's title is...
- 4/8/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSCitizen Kane.After an extended sojourn from filmmaking with canceled productions and the Netflix show Mindhunter, David Fincher has finally locked his next film. Derived from a screenplay written by his father (!), it concerns Citizen Kane's co-writer Herman Mankiewicz, to be played by Gary Oldman and photographed in black and white (!!!).Greta Gerwig will be co-writing a live-action Barbie—yes, the Barbie—movie with Noah Baumbach. The film will star Margot Robbie as the titular doll. Recommended VIEWINGThe long-awaited trailer for Inventing the Future, by Isiah Medina—whose films Semi-Auto Colours, 88:88, and Idizwadidiz previously screened on Mubi. The film is an adaptation of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.The Museum of Modern Art launches its first "online film exhibition highlighting NYC shorts from...
- 7/17/2019
- MUBI
A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Straub-Huillet's History Lessons (1972) is showing on Mubi from June 6 – July 6, 2019.In her autobiography, Toby Talbot of New Yorker Films writes of a party she attended at the apartment of Bernardo Bertolucci in Rome in 1966. She remembers that “everybody was drinking wine and beer, smoking pot, dancing, having a ball.” Shortly thereafter, the doorbell rang. Bertolucci turned to the Talbots and then jumped to his feet. “Shhh-hh,” he hissed at his guests. “Get rid of the pot! Put the drinks away. The Straubs are here!” If there is a single basis upon which both detractors and admirers of Straub-Huillet can agree, it is that the duo were utterly serious in their mission. I’d bet these same people would go so far as to say that, judging from public appearances alone,...
- 6/7/2019
- MUBI
Paolo Moretti to head up Quinzaine from next year.
The programming team for the 2019 edition of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight (May 15-25) has been revealed.
The new Quinzaine delegate general, Italian film programmer Paolo Moretti, replaced previous head Edouard Waintrop after this year’s edition.
The selection committee comprises:
Festival programmer, film writer and producer Paolo Bertolin, who has worked for Venice Film Festival, Rotterdam, Doha Film Institute, Locarno Festival and Cannes’ Critics’ Week, among others.
Anne Delseth, a member of the Directors’ Fortnight selection committee since 2012. She joined the committee for Locarno Festival this year and is also a consultant...
The programming team for the 2019 edition of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight (May 15-25) has been revealed.
The new Quinzaine delegate general, Italian film programmer Paolo Moretti, replaced previous head Edouard Waintrop after this year’s edition.
The selection committee comprises:
Festival programmer, film writer and producer Paolo Bertolin, who has worked for Venice Film Festival, Rotterdam, Doha Film Institute, Locarno Festival and Cannes’ Critics’ Week, among others.
Anne Delseth, a member of the Directors’ Fortnight selection committee since 2012. She joined the committee for Locarno Festival this year and is also a consultant...
- 7/17/2018
- by Orlando Parfitt
- ScreenDaily
Ted Fendt’s fifth film—his second feature—premiered in the Berlinale Forum, rubbing shoulders with all sorts of more outwardly eccentric and ostentatious movies. Dorkiness has always been a central feature of Fendt’s cinema, as it has for his hero Luc Moullet. In his previous films, there was a gulf between the precision of the sounds, images, and edits and the relative formlessness of the dialogues. While the content of these dialogues was rarely involving, it was the de-dramatized nature of the players’ enunciation of them that was so original. Fendt’s actors are marked by a staggering lack of self-consciousness or, rather, a strange sort of freedom to be obtuse, to stand in a unphotogenic fashion, to slink around in a gawky manner reminiscent of the earliest days of the movies, when the relationship between performer and camera was decidedly less developed.But whatever geeky grace existed in the previous four movies,...
- 3/6/2018
- MUBI
Cécile Decugis, one of the key early figures of the French New Wave, passed away June 11, according to El Watan, the French-language newspaper in Algeria. The news only started to spread throughout the film world when fellow editor and protege Mary Stephens paid tribute to the Decugis in a Facebook post.
At the dawn of the New Wave in 1957, Decugis edited a young Francois Truffaut’s short film “Les Mistons,” which is largely credited as being the first film in which Truffaut found his cinematic voice and being a key early short of the film movement that would dominate international cinema in the ’60s.
Read More: Jean-Luc Godard’s Rare, Early Film, ‘Une Femme Coquette,’ Appears on YouTube — Watch
Decugis also edited Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” one the most important pieces of editing in film history and the movie that made Godard a filmmaking sensation. Although the film...
At the dawn of the New Wave in 1957, Decugis edited a young Francois Truffaut’s short film “Les Mistons,” which is largely credited as being the first film in which Truffaut found his cinematic voice and being a key early short of the film movement that would dominate international cinema in the ’60s.
Read More: Jean-Luc Godard’s Rare, Early Film, ‘Une Femme Coquette,’ Appears on YouTube — Watch
Decugis also edited Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” one the most important pieces of editing in film history and the movie that made Godard a filmmaking sensation. Although the film...
- 7/25/2017
- by Chris O'Falt
- Indiewire
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveriesNEWSRadley Metzger's The Lickerish QuartetRadley Metzger, whose groundbreaking erotic films helped set standards of style for both mainstream and arthouse cinema, has died at 88. His classics Camille 2000 (1969) and The Lickerish Quartet (1970) were featured on Mubi last year. Critic and programmer Steve Macfarlane interviewed the director at Slant Magazine for the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 2014 retrospective devoted to Metzger.Recommended VIEWINGThe Cinémathèque française has been on a roll uploading video discussions that have taken place at their Paris cinema. This 34 minute talk is between Wes Anderson and director/producer Barbet Schroeder.The Criterion Collection has recently released a new edition of Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece Blow-Up, and has uploaded this stellar clip of actor David Hemmings speaking on a talk show about making the film.Recommended READINGHoward Hawks' ScarfaceHow does Chicago intertwine itself with crime and the culture created in the mix of the two?...
- 4/5/2017
- MUBI
“1st film watched in 1st freshman film class was ’72’s History Lessons. It was a great ‘Welcome to boot camp, motherfuckers’ moment.” – Nick Pinkerton
Parsing the embarrassment of riches amongst ’60s French cinema, the annals of Official Film History tends to split us into the New Wave (Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, etc.), the left-bank (Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda), and the successive “ Second New Wave” (Maurice Pialat, Jean Eustache, Luc Moullet). Bouncing between realism and the avant-garde, these filmmakers, to varying degrees of mainstream acceptance, left an undeniable mark on post-war art cinema. Yet provided you’re hip enough to know, there’s two particular names that seem to instantly dwarf the aforementioned, at least in the terms of uncompromised Film Art: the husband-wife duo of Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet — or, if you prefer, the synthesized, punchier Straub/Huillet.
The mystique that has emerged around this duo is not...
Parsing the embarrassment of riches amongst ’60s French cinema, the annals of Official Film History tends to split us into the New Wave (Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, etc.), the left-bank (Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda), and the successive “ Second New Wave” (Maurice Pialat, Jean Eustache, Luc Moullet). Bouncing between realism and the avant-garde, these filmmakers, to varying degrees of mainstream acceptance, left an undeniable mark on post-war art cinema. Yet provided you’re hip enough to know, there’s two particular names that seem to instantly dwarf the aforementioned, at least in the terms of uncompromised Film Art: the husband-wife duo of Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet — or, if you prefer, the synthesized, punchier Straub/Huillet.
The mystique that has emerged around this duo is not...
- 3/3/2017
- by Ethan Vestby
- The Film Stage
I'm drawn to Straub-Huillet’s usage of direct quotations rather than adapting or interpreting original material for a film. To me this is, among other things, a very straightforward and concrete way of highlighting that people are much less original than they are often assumed to be. (I think that Danièle Huillet once said this, but she was certainly not the first one.) It might be worth being reminded of this, especially today, in a time where we see and seek constant innovation and renewal everywhere while nothing really changes at the core. But for Straub-Huillet, quotation is also about something else. Every film of theirs is a documentation of their loving relationship to a preexisting text, artwork, or artist. The films are more genuinely about the work of the other and less about the couple's so-called vision. Quotation, to Straub-Huillet, is an act of respect, one...
- 2/7/2017
- MUBI
Above: Soviet poster for The Ghost That Never Returns (Abram Room, Soviet Union, 1929). Designed by the Sternberg Brothers.Have you seen what’s playing on Mubi lately? Many of you who read my column may not often partake of the best of what Mubi has to offer, which is a beautifully curated, constantly changing selection of films which amounts to a top-notch repertory cinema on your laptop and in your living room. Now that Mubi is on the Roku app too there is even more reason to subscribe to the best film streaming deal on the internet. I know, I know, there is always too much to see and too little time, but for me what elevates Mubi over other streaming services—and I’m not just saying this because I write for them—is the 30-day model which offers you a new surprise every morning as well as the...
- 1/27/2017
- MUBI
“We used to go to the movies. Now we want the movies to come to us, on our televisions, tablets and phones, as streams running into an increasingly unnavigable ocean of media. The dispersal of movie watching across technologies and contexts follows the multiplexing of movie theaters, itself a fragmenting of the single screen theater where movie love was first concentrated and consecrated. (But even in the “good old days,” movies were often only part of an evening’s entertainment that came complete with vaudeville acts and bank nights). For all this, moviegoing still means what it always meant, joining a community, forming an audience and participating in a collective dream.” –
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
- 6/11/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
In partnership with New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, Mubi will be hosting four films recently shown at Art of the Real, the Film Society's annual showcase for boundary-pushing nonfiction films. Poet on a Business Trip will be showing April 24 - May 23, 2016 on Mubi in the United States.Director Ju Anqi. Photo by Ma Liang“Poet on a Business Trip”: I do not know how this title reads in Chinese, but in English its matter-of-fact anomaly, a title suggestive of silent film actualities and Luc Moullet’s drollness, serves well this curiously blasé, marvelously unusual film by Ju Anqi.Poet on a Business Trip looks and feels like the time capsule it in fact is: the director took Shu, a young Chinese poet, on a road trip to the barren western (and Uygur) province of Xinjiang back in 2002, during which Shu composed poems. For reasons discussed below in an interview with the filmmaker,...
- 4/25/2016
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
BAMcinématek
“Chantal Akerman: Images Between the Images” continues with Night and Day on Friday, News from Home this Saturday, and, on Sunday, Golden Eighties and The Meetings of Anna.
Metrograph
“Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z” offers The Eight-Diagram Pole Fighter on Friday, Deux Fois on Saturday, and, this Sunday, three short films by Julie Dash.
BAMcinématek
“Chantal Akerman: Images Between the Images” continues with Night and Day on Friday, News from Home this Saturday, and, on Sunday, Golden Eighties and The Meetings of Anna.
Metrograph
“Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z” offers The Eight-Diagram Pole Fighter on Friday, Deux Fois on Saturday, and, this Sunday, three short films by Julie Dash.
- 4/15/2016
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
A friend and a contributor to the Notebook has taken a deep breath of air and expanded his droll short films—which we’ve featured on Mubi—into a modest feature that received a decidedly impressive premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February and will next show at the New Directors/New Films collaboration between New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.Short Stay does not feel like a bigger film than director Ted Fendt's charmingly ill-fitting shorts, but rather is more robust, fuller in passing detail and commonplace incident. In other words: unassuming, but charged. This new movie very much resembles Fendt’s wonderful shorts, which feature young people of unenunciated dissatisfaction and nearly inscrutable psychology living small scale lives full of long-time acquaintances, a few friendships, over-visited family homes, and well-trod suburban and small town strolls. Fendt is also...
- 3/19/2016
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Sex GameWith so much gentility and desire for respect and accolades to be found in a random scan of any film festival program, the audacity of highlighting the films of someone with as checkered a history—to say the least—as Japanese director Masao Adachi might seem a provocation if this filmmaker was not in his venerable 70s, yet even so his home country wouldn't allow him to travel to Rotterdam for a spotlight on his career. Infamous first as a collaborator with prolific Japanese art-exploitation master Koji Wakamatsu—for whom he wrote a number of screenplays before then directing for Wakamatsu's production company—then for going with Wakamatsu to shoot 1971’s Red Army / Pflp: Declaration of World War in Lebanon, then for joining the Japanese Red Army and remaining in Lebanon for twenty years (an idea even more shameful in Japan than it might be considered elsewhere), Adachi was then arrested for passport violations,...
- 2/3/2016
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
FrancofoniaIt seems slightly off-kilter to term a film by Alexander Sokurov, everyone’s favorite Slavophile modernist, a “mash-up.” Yet Francofonia, which opened the Museum of the Moving Image’s fifth annual First Look festival, brings to mind an idiosyncratic synthesis of motifs derived from Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma and Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomacy. With more than a passing resemblance to the ever-popular fiction/non-fiction hybrid film, Sokurov’s rambling meditation on the aesthetic imperatives of authoritarianism was an appropriate choice to open a festival that specializes in experimental hybridism. New work by such disparate filmmakers as Dominic Gagnon, Léa Rinaldi, and Louis Skorecki traverses generic boundaries—even though, for seasoned festival audiences, this sort of genre-bending is now more of a routine occurrence than a transgressive event. First Look’s desire to showcase subversive hybridity was evident in Quebecois filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s double bill—Pieces and Love...
- 1/15/2016
- by Richard Porton
- MUBI
Chis Marker's Chat écoutant la musiqueThere are dog people and there are cat people, this we know, and there are even people who claim to be of both—though latent sympathies remain unspoken, like with a parent and which child is their favorite. With the Vienna Film Festival welcoming me with a tumbling collection of dog and cat short films spanning cinema's history—the Austrian Film Museum, an essential destination each year collaborating with the Viennale, is hosting a “a brief zoology of cinema” throughout the festivities—it is clear that filmmakers, too, have their preference. Silent cinema decidedly prefers the more easily trained and exhibited canine, with 1907’s surreal favorite Les chiens savants as a certain kind of cruel pinnacle. For the cats, Chris Marker, already the presiding figure over so much in 20th century art, I think we can easily claim is the cine-laureate. One need not know...
- 11/8/2015
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
The new issue of Theory & Event features a symposium on Lars von Trier. Also in today's roundup: Glauber Rocha on Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet on Samuel Fuller, Peter Bogdanovich on Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind, Fernando F. Croce on Luchino Visconti's La terra trema, Dennis Cooper on Karen Black, plus news: Alfonso Cuarón will head the jury in Venice, Spike Lee's lined up Samuel L. Jackson, John Cusack, Kanye West and Jennifer Hudson for Chiraq, and we have notes the passing of Chris Burden and Elizabeth Wilson. » - David Hudson...
- 5/11/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
The new issue of Theory & Event features a symposium on Lars von Trier. Also in today's roundup: Glauber Rocha on Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet on Samuel Fuller, Peter Bogdanovich on Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind, Fernando F. Croce on Luchino Visconti's La terra trema, Dennis Cooper on Karen Black, plus news: Alfonso Cuarón will head the jury in Venice, Spike Lee's lined up Samuel L. Jackson, John Cusack, Kanye West and Jennifer Hudson for Chiraq, and we have notes the passing of Chris Burden and Elizabeth Wilson. » - David Hudson...
- 5/11/2015
- Keyframe
The poster for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour, bound for Cannes.Great news for fans of Louis Ck the actor and the director: the comedian-auteur is gearing up to make a new feature film, titled I'm a Cop.Producer Bero Beyer has been appointed the new General and Artistic Director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam Above: A vintage nitrate release print of John M. Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven. The print screened at the first ever Nitrate Picture Show at the George Eastman House last weekend. You'll hear more about this wonderful festival soon on the Notebook.A new issue of Film Comment is out, with many articles available online.That's Stanley Kubrick, above, talking to Jeremy Bernstein in 1965.At Reverse Shot, Nick Pinkerton considers under-appreciated French New Waver Luc Moullet's A Girl Is a Gun.Author F.X. Feeney has not one but two videos celebrating...
- 5/6/2015
- by Notebook
- MUBI
In today's roundup of news and views: Revisiting Luc Moullet’s Une Aventure de Billy le Kid and René Clément’s Forbidden Games, interviews with Jonas Mekas and George Armitage, another new book on Orson Welles, ranking 52 films by Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou as a video game, Andy Warhol's Screen Tests in Time Square, a Bertrand Bonello retrospective, remembering René Féret, photographs by Wim Wenders and an outstanding cast for Xavier Dolan's next film: Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel, Nathalie Baye and Gaspard Ulliel. » - David Hudson...
- 4/29/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
In today's roundup of news and views: Revisiting Luc Moullet’s Une Aventure de Billy le Kid and René Clément’s Forbidden Games, interviews with Jonas Mekas and George Armitage, another new book on Orson Welles, ranking 52 films by Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou as a video game, Andy Warhol's Screen Tests in Time Square, a Bertrand Bonello retrospective, remembering René Féret, photographs by Wim Wenders and an outstanding cast for Xavier Dolan's next film: Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel, Nathalie Baye and Gaspard Ulliel. » - David Hudson...
- 4/29/2015
- Keyframe
Now, out in cinema's theatres, and certainly back in the Cannes Film Festival where the Argentine film Jauja premiered, there is a distinct, complacent absence of adventuresome cinema. After a six year wait for director Lisandro Alonso to follow-up his masterpiece 2008 Liverpool, we finally have a new adventure.A fan of Alonso's work knows that his films are literally adventures, travels that are physical, bodily travails pushing through landscape. Jauja, his 19th century tale of a Danish military engineer who sets off into barren Patagonia to search for his runaway daughter, is more of the same, but still radical.Radical for getting Viggo Mortensen to play that engineer, to speak good Danish and stilted Spanish, and to become a body to press upon Alonso's prehistoric landscapes. Radical for its old fashionedness, shot in curved-edge 1.33 on film with sky and ground in frame, with that frame bisected by the horizon, like John Ford compositions.
- 3/20/2015
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Broken SpecsReaders of online criticism probably know the name Ted Fendt for his invaluable French translation work—on this site alone he’s published English-language versions of interviews (with director Jean Eustache and cinematographer Caroline Champetier) and pieces on Straub-Huillet, Bresson, Grémillon, and others. He’s also offered his own perceptive analysis of Paris Goes Away, Rivette’s half-hour Le Pont du Nord rehearsal, and compiled theauthoritative bibliography to Godard’s Goodbye to Language. Less visible, though, has been Fendt’s own work behind the camera—he currently has five narrative shorts to his name, works at once delightfully shaggy dog and rigorously formalist, and they look and feel like little else happening in American independent cinema right now. We’re thrilled to finally present the online premiere of his films Broken Specs (2012) and Travel Plans (2013) on Mubi.Reviewing Fendt’s choice of translation work, you can trace the seeds...
- 3/16/2015
- by C. Mason Wells
- MUBI
Edited by Adam Cook
The lineup for this year's New Directors/New Films, "presented jointly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art," has been announced. "For the Birds": Richard Brody picks on the Academy Awards. There's an intriguing new film journal on the scene: "The Completist," authored by Rumsey Taylor. Head over to the site to read his "Statement of Intentions". Described as being "roughly quarterly", we're looking forward to future instalments. In Film Comment, Tanner Tafelski writes on the films of John Korty:
"Carroll Ballard, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Philip Kaufman, and Michael Ritchie all are, or were, San Francisco–based filmmakers. Yet none of these people seem to be Bay Area filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara, or Spike Lee are New York filmmakers. Avant-garde cinema, on the other hand, has a rich history with the West Coast in general,...
The lineup for this year's New Directors/New Films, "presented jointly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art," has been announced. "For the Birds": Richard Brody picks on the Academy Awards. There's an intriguing new film journal on the scene: "The Completist," authored by Rumsey Taylor. Head over to the site to read his "Statement of Intentions". Described as being "roughly quarterly", we're looking forward to future instalments. In Film Comment, Tanner Tafelski writes on the films of John Korty:
"Carroll Ballard, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Philip Kaufman, and Michael Ritchie all are, or were, San Francisco–based filmmakers. Yet none of these people seem to be Bay Area filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara, or Spike Lee are New York filmmakers. Avant-garde cinema, on the other hand, has a rich history with the West Coast in general,...
- 2/25/2015
- by Notebook
- MUBI
Following their first collaboration with last spring's French Cinema's Secret Trove, legendary French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and the French Institute Alliance Française (Fiaf), New York's premiere French cultural center, have partnered again to present the CinéSalon film series Eccentrics of French Comedy. Running from January 6 to February 24, the series features a selection of rarely screened French comedies selected by Fiaf's Delphine Selles-Alvarez and Cahiers du Cinéma's Jean-Philippe Tessé and Nicholas Elliott. Indiewire is pleased to be partnering with Fiaf and Cahiers du Cinéma to present reviews of films in the series originally published in the magazine and available here in English for the first time with translations by Nicholas Elliott, the magazine's New York correspondent. This review of Luc Moullet’s "Land of Madness" was originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma no. 652 in January 2010. It was...
- 2/24/2015
- by Serge Bozon
- Indiewire
In today's roundup of news and views: Philippe Garrel and Luc Moullet at DC's. Peter Bogdanovich has opened up his file on Jean Renoir. Christoph Huber tells us how he rediscovered Vittorio De Sica. 3:am's posted two short pieces by Clément Rosset, one on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), the other on Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983). Two very fine career surveys: Steven Hyden on Gene Hackman at Grantland and Nathan Rabin on Philip Seymour Hoffman at the Dissolve. Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted his 1998 review of James Benning's Utopia. Plus Adam Cook on Michael Mann and more. » - David Hudson...
- 2/5/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
In today's roundup of news and views: Philippe Garrel and Luc Moullet at DC's. Peter Bogdanovich has opened up his file on Jean Renoir. Christoph Huber tells us how he rediscovered Vittorio De Sica. 3:am's posted two short pieces by Clément Rosset, one on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), the other on Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983). Two very fine career surveys: Steven Hyden on Gene Hackman at Grantland and Nathan Rabin on Philip Seymour Hoffman at the Dissolve. Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted his 1998 review of James Benning's Utopia. Plus Adam Cook on Michael Mann and more. » - David Hudson...
- 2/5/2015
- Keyframe
I had a plan, I swear. In the days leading up to November 28th, a friend and I had negotiated the logistics of seeing a movie at one of the theatres listed on J.J.’s announcement—what to do if they’re sold out, what to do if for some reason we picked a movie that had no trailer in front of it (Plan B: sneak into the beginning of a different movie after ours ended)—all in the name of the purity of experiencing the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer as it was meant to be experienced. As a spectacle, as a special event, as a collective moment of excitement and anticipation.
My resolve lasted about five minutes. At 10:05am on Friday, I was holed up in the office bathroom with my iPhone and earbuds, frantically trying to tap into the spotty wi-fi of the hotel next door.
My resolve lasted about five minutes. At 10:05am on Friday, I was holed up in the office bathroom with my iPhone and earbuds, frantically trying to tap into the spotty wi-fi of the hotel next door.
- 11/29/2014
- by Mallory Andrews
- SoundOnSight
This year's poster for the Vienna International Film Festival is of a flame, and while around the world in other cinema-loving cities and at other cinema-loving festivals one might that that as a cue for a celluloid immolation and a move forever to digital, here in Austria cinema and film as film aren't burning up but rather are burning brightly.
The tributes and special programs in artistic director Hans Hurch's 2014 edition make this position clear: John Ford, Harun Farocki and 16mm, with new films by Tariq Teguia, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Marie Straub accompanying older ones by the same directors. These aren't just retrospectives, they are revitalizing redoubts, inexhaustible fountains of flame, of sensitivity, of consciousness, and of intervention. With such a profound retrospective program, I hope you'll forgive me telling you very little of anything new at the festival; unless, that is, you like me count cinema revived as something always new.
The tributes and special programs in artistic director Hans Hurch's 2014 edition make this position clear: John Ford, Harun Farocki and 16mm, with new films by Tariq Teguia, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Marie Straub accompanying older ones by the same directors. These aren't just retrospectives, they are revitalizing redoubts, inexhaustible fountains of flame, of sensitivity, of consciousness, and of intervention. With such a profound retrospective program, I hope you'll forgive me telling you very little of anything new at the festival; unless, that is, you like me count cinema revived as something always new.
- 11/12/2014
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now turns 35 this month and James Gray (The Immigrant) has written an amazing appreciation for Rolling Stone. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Michael Ventura on John Cassavetes's Love Streams (1984), Luc Moullet on Luis Buñuel's Death in the Garden (1956), New York Times profiles of Sam Taylor-Johnson, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Ava DuVernay, Sarah Polley, Lisa Cholodenko and Lana Wachowski, Grady Hendrix on Lee Myung-Se, Glenn Kenny and Ben Sachs on Richard Linklater, Sean Nortz on Michael Wadleigh's Wolfen (1981), Steven Shaviro on Bobcat Goldthwaite's Willow Creek (2013) and much, much more. » - David Hudson...
- 8/15/2014
- Fandor: Keyframe
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.