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
Le chinoise.Most serious writing about Jean-Luc Godard tends to be both high-flown and forbidding, rather like the films it’s discussing. Translations from French to English or vice versa can make things even dicier. But according to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard—a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 50 writers from a dozen countries, announced as the first in a series—launches “a new form” and “a new genre.”The brevity of each entry tends to confirm Jameson’s claim. The book can be described as an audience-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by Notebook while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading—a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry,...
- 1/30/2024
- MUBI
NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.
Film at Lincoln Center
“Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s” brings films by Kurosawa, Bresson, Tati, Godard and more.
IFC Center
As Francis Ford Coppola’s latest recut, One from the Heart: Reprise, continues, Bertrand Bonello’s masterpiece Coma gets a New York premiere; Ken Russell’s Whore, Saw III, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome also have late showings.
Roxy Cinema
A Ryan O’Neal retrospective brings The Driver on 35mm and Partners, while Cronenberg’s Crash shows on a print; City Dudes returns on Saturday and Sunday brings a puppet program and the Iranian feature Downpour plays on Sunday.
Film Forum
A 4K restoration of The Pianist begins a run while I Heard It Through the Grapevine and The Third Man continue; The Sunshine Boys plays on Sunday.
Museum of the Moving Image
A retrospective of snubbed performances brings films by Howard Hawks,...
Film at Lincoln Center
“Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s” brings films by Kurosawa, Bresson, Tati, Godard and more.
IFC Center
As Francis Ford Coppola’s latest recut, One from the Heart: Reprise, continues, Bertrand Bonello’s masterpiece Coma gets a New York premiere; Ken Russell’s Whore, Saw III, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome also have late showings.
Roxy Cinema
A Ryan O’Neal retrospective brings The Driver on 35mm and Partners, while Cronenberg’s Crash shows on a print; City Dudes returns on Saturday and Sunday brings a puppet program and the Iranian feature Downpour plays on Sunday.
Film Forum
A 4K restoration of The Pianist begins a run while I Heard It Through the Grapevine and The Third Man continue; The Sunshine Boys plays on Sunday.
Museum of the Moving Image
A retrospective of snubbed performances brings films by Howard Hawks,...
- 1/26/2024
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSBreathless.The Mubi Podcast returns on January 25. Titled “Tailor Made,” the fifth season will consider landmark movies that captured major fashions of their times—from Jean Seberg in Breathless to Sofia Coppola’s body of work to date—with insights from leading costume designers, fashion designers, cinematographers, and directors.Alongside the announcement of the Competition and Encounters sections, with the addition of new films by Abderrahmane Sissako, Mati Diop, Hong Sang-soo, Ruth Beckermann, and more, we’ve updated our Berlinale lineup post ahead of the festival’s commencement on February 15.June Givanni, a writer on and curator of African and African diasporic cinema and the founder of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive, is to be recognized by BAFTA with an Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema...
- 1/23/2024
- MUBI
From Serge Daney's Footlights: Critical Notebooks 1970–1982, translated by Nicholas Elliott and published by Semiotext(e). The series Never Look Away: Serge Daney's Radical 1970s screens January 26 through February 4 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York.Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.The fact that Salò is Pasolini’s last film doesn’t mean that it must at all costs be seen as his “will”.1 It’s simpler to see it as the reconstruction of what masters on the road to perdition would do in a final attempt to enjoy [jouir de] their power, in a comparable context (Italian fascism) and a similar setting (Salò).It has too often been forgotten that, in the history of Italian fascism, the republic of Salò (September 1943–January 1944) is only the grotesque final act, the repetition as grand guignol of what had already failed as farce, the setting for “some last cowardly turpitudes.”2 Salò is not fascism triumphant,...
- 1/23/2024
- MUBI
A seminal French film critic, for too long Serge Daney’s work has been difficult to find in English. Recently published, Footlights is a newly translated (by the formidable Nicholas Elliott) edition of Daney’s important early essays, first published as a collection in French in 1983. Now, Film at Lincoln Center is holding a retrospective from January 26 to February 4 of films discussed in the book. Watch the trailer above, and click here to learn more about the series.
The post Trailer Watch: “Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s,” Film at Lincoln Center’s Forthcoming Series first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
The post Trailer Watch: “Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s,” Film at Lincoln Center’s Forthcoming Series first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
- 1/18/2024
- by Filmmaker Staff
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
A seminal French film critic, for too long Serge Daney’s work has been difficult to find in English. Recently published, Footlights is a newly translated (by the formidable Nicholas Elliott) edition of Daney’s important early essays, first published as a collection in French in 1983. Now, Film at Lincoln Center is holding a retrospective from January 26 to February 4 of films discussed in the book. Watch the trailer above, and click here to learn more about the series.
The post Trailer Watch: “Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s,” Film at Lincoln Center’s Forthcoming Series first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
The post Trailer Watch: “Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s,” Film at Lincoln Center’s Forthcoming Series first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
- 1/18/2024
- by Filmmaker Staff
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSDry Leaf.On Criterion’s Daily, David Hudson has shared a useful roundup of films that might be expected to premiere during 2024. Among the inclusions are: Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s first film since Parasite (2019); It’s Not Me, Leos Carax’s latest collaboration with Denis Lavant; and Dry Leaf, the enticing-sounding new film by Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [2021]), which is said to be about “a photographer who shoots soccer stadiums [who] goes missing.”A list of international filmmakers including Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Costa, Radu Jude, Ira Sachs, Claire Denis, and Abderrahmane Sissako have signed a letter, published during the holiday season in the French newspaper Libération, demanding (as translated by the Film Stage) “an immediate end to the bombings on Gaza,...
- 1/10/2024
- MUBI
Mysteries of Lisbon.Flicking through my notes on my way home from Vienna, I stumbled on a quote whose source I couldn’t quite locate: I have a long story to tell you, and I have never told it to anyone. I knew the words belonged to one of the Raúl Ruiz films I’d binged in town, courtesy of a stellar retrospective held at this year’s Viennale. But I couldn’t recall which. Sounds and images from a week’s worth of journeys into the Chilean filmmaker’s oeuvre had coalesced into a shapeshifting amalgam that made my own recollections hazy, and the films themselves porous. Was this one of the stories that Marcello Mastroianni saunters into in Three Lives and Only One Death (1996)? Did the words ricochet in Love Torn in a Dream (2000), where nine storylines combine to spawn a myriad of others? Or was it one...
- 12/15/2023
- MUBI
As December begins, you might be looking forward to spending time with friends and family over the holidays—and in need of some gift-giving inspiration. Look no further than Notebook's Cinephile Gift Guide, the proverbial online Shop Around the Corner (1940).Below is our third annual, lovingly curated guide to the holiday season. It's sure to spread film-themed cheer, and we hope it's thorough enough to surprise all of the film fans in your life.Jump to a category:Books about cinemaBooks by filmmakers and artistsHome videoMusicHome goods, posters, and gamesApparel Books About CINEMAFirst up is UK culture and music critic Ian Penman’s kaleidoscopic, genre-bending offering to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors. The book has drawn comparisons to Charles Baudelaire and Roland Barthes, but is undoubtedly a sui generis response to a singular legacy.On offer this year from Another Gaze Editions is My Cinema by Marguerite Duras, a...
- 12/12/2023
- MUBI
Lost in the Night (Amat Escalante).The more familiar one becomes with Cannes, the less one comes to expect anything like aesthetic coherence from it. Even if one accepts its nominal (or self-proclaimed) status as the standard-setter for international arthouse cinema, there’s still a fair amount of variation within its vast program. Which is to say that while one can lament the general calcification of festival-circuit aesthetics, the arbitrary programming decisions of Thierry Frémaux, or the often perplexing set of awards handed out each year, there are always films worth seeking out. In 1982, the French critic Serge Daney remarked that Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman and Godard’s Passion were part of cinema’s “secret factory”: that is, films which wouldn’t receive awards, but from which future directors would draw inspiration in years to come. The challenge with each edition, of course, is to discover which films those are.
- 5/25/2023
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSShadow of the Vampire.Willem Dafoe will join Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu film, news that comes 23 years after he played a fictitious version of Murnau's lead actor, Max Schreck, in Shadow of the Vampire. Dafoe’s supporting role is currently “unknown,” according to Deadline, though Eggers's vampire will be Bill Skarsgard.Sight & Sound continues their rollout of the Greatest Films of All Time, now unveiling the critics’ top 250.The great cinematographer Caroline Champetier will be honored with the Berlinale Camera award at this year’s festival, marking a career of beautifully lensed films for Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Margarethe von Trotta, Claude Lanzmann, and Leos Carax, among many others.Following Sundance’s closing awards ceremony, we’ve compiled the full list of winners here on Notebook.
- 2/1/2023
- MUBI
No year in review would be complete without a thank-you to our writers. Time and again, they reminded us that cinema is not only alive and well, but it is also always transforming; the filmmakers and festivals covered here push the boundaries of what we took for granted about the medium.Here’s a quick overview of what we published in 2022—and, for many more excellent pieces, we encourage you to browse our archive using the “explore” tab on the homepage.ESSAYSContemporary Cinema:When Propaganda Fails: Adam McKay's Don't Look Up by Ryan MeehanThe Horse in Motion: Jordan Peele's Nope by Blair McClendonThe Many Faces of Michelle Yeoh by Sean GilmanHall of Mirrors: James Gray's Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans by Kelli WestonNameless Energies: Don DeLillo at the Movies by Leonardo GoiThe Voice of a Generation: The Trope of the "Complex Female Character" by Rafaela BassiliHong...
- 1/4/2023
- MUBI
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
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSKing Lear.Jean-Luc Godard, groundbreaking French-Swiss filmmaker across six decades, died last week at age 91. In the week since, a number of tributes have been shared: among them, Blair McClendon in n+1, J. Hoberman in The Nation, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, and Richard Hell in Screen Slate. Alternatively, you can find a 2002 essay on Godard by filmmaker and theorist Peter Wollen on Verso's blog, watch a 1988 conversation between Godard and critic Serge Daney, or read this list Godard contributed to the British film journal Afterimage in 1970. Shadow and Act founder Tambay Obenson is fundraising to launch Akoroko, a new platform devoted to African film and television. The platform intends to combine film journalism with “consultation, cataloging, and curated film streaming.”Two posters (below) for the 61st New York Film Festival feature photographs taken by Nan Goldin.
- 9/20/2022
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWomen Talking.The 49th edition of the Telluride Film Festival, which doesn't reveal its lineup until the four-day festival starts, took place last weekend. Its program included world premieres of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking and Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, as well as Adam Curtis’s new 420-minute-long Russia [1985-1999] Traumazone, plus a tribute to Cate Blanchett. A.O. Scott, reporting from the festival for the New York Times, remarks that "Every so often, Telluride’s best is as good as movies can be," and singles out Women Talking specifically: "...what Women Talking shares with Moonlight is an absolute concentration on the specifics of story and setting that nonetheless illuminate a vast, underexplored region of contemporary life. A reality that has always been there is seen as if for the first time."Charlbi Dean Kriek—South African model,...
- 9/7/2022
- MUBI
From Serge Daney's The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinema Years, 1962–1981, translated by Christine Pichini and published by MIT Press.John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection (2018).The reasons behind tennis’s sudden rise, as sport or as spectacle, are various. Television actively participates in it; tennis is in fact one of the sports that translates best to the small screen.Saturday, July 14. While watching the Davis Cup’s lackluster doubles semi-final with Noah/Moretton against the Czech duo Kodeš/Smid, I couldn’t help thinking that at least tennis has an advantage when seen on television. It is, as they say, the sport that “loses” the least and “gains” the most. For someone who loves both tennis and moving images (and even more for someone who enjoys watching movement within images), there are great moments to be had on the small screen. Great moments for...
- 9/6/2022
- MUBI
Serge Daney's The Cinema House & The World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962-1981—translated by Christine Pichini, and with an introduction by A.S. Hamrah—is available now from Semiotext(e).Serge Daney in Jacques Rivette, The Night Watchman.Critics, writers, or essayists: the modern world has made us bring our most intimate existences right into the light of day, into the world of intellection. A critical oeuvre these days can only be personal, and whatever its aesthetic qualities it’s bound to be poetically unique.— Jean Louis Schefer1In 1962, Serge Daney, under the intellectual mist of the French New Wave, began publishing criticism at the age of 20. As a loyal Bazinian, he wrote about Hawks and Preminger and Jerry Lewis, railed against conclusions published in Positif, and beat the drum for auteurism. To some, film criticism of this era, say from Bazin to the late ’60s, should remain...
- 9/5/2022
- MUBI
“Yet the death of this friend inexplicably relieves something, like the threat of his death.”—Jean Louis Schefer, in his eulogy for Roland Barthes1For Jean Louis Schefer, the distinctive writer and nonpareil theorist of art who died in early June of this year, the interaction between oneself and the image is a fraught site of self-definition. Perhaps no other thinker was as dedicated to exploring the interlocking of interior self-consciousness and external perception that the experience of images provides. It is an event that occurs across cultures, across eras.The singularity of his thought stems in part from the uncommonness of his childhood. He was born in 1938 into an aristocratic and well-connected family. And like something out of Proust, his childhood was filled with the household visits of famous artists and writers. The most memorable for Schefer, and the person who would exhibit great influence on his thinking, was...
- 7/11/2022
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSDore O.'s Alaska (1968)The German avant-garde artist Dore O., whose poetic films were at once vast and intimate explorations of dreams, has died at 75. O. was a founder of the Hamburg Filmmakers Co-op (1968-1974), a participant in the famous German exhibit documenta 5 in 1972, and a prolific painter. The DVD label Re:voir Video had recently released a collection of six restored films by O. In 1988, the critic Dietrich Kuhlbrodt wrote: "Dore O. has become classic, and suddenly it turns out that her work has passed the various currents of time unharmed: the time of the cooperative union, the women's film, the structuralists and grammarians, the teachers of new ways of seeing."Subscriptions are now open for Notebook magazine, our print-only publication devoted to the art and culture of cinema. Subscribe now and you’ll...
- 3/9/2022
- MUBI
The Stranger Wore a GunIn the pantheon of great Western collaborations sits three mantels: John Wayne and John Ford, James Stewart and Anthony Mann, Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher. There is another mantelpiece, unvarnished and dirty from disuse: Randolph Scott and André De Toth. Does it belong there? Elements, directions, suits in a deck—the trappings of the West always come in fours. Why does this cycle of films lack a reputation, good standing, or even a quick moniker? Skronky where Ford is rhythmic, constricted where Mann is open, jagged where Boetticher is smooth, the De Toth films, six all told with Scott, give, rather than a cohesive persona or moral treatise, a cluster of pictures and ideas on a centerless society. Brass lanterns blown dark, drawn-out fistfights, flaming wagons streaking across the plains, gunfights in pitch-black bars; these images run across the sextet, fogging the hopeful vision of the American West.
- 2/11/2022
- MUBI
The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Femmes femmes“Post New Wave” has mutated into a catch-all term that not only accounts for French directors whose output began to crest in the 1970s and beyond, but also for those who may have operated adjacently, or even on the fringes of the five-pronged Nouvelle Vague. Belabored attempts to identify a newly-minted movement in French cinema and subsequently foist it upon a sect of filmmakers typically buckle under closer scrutiny. The more one burrows and subdivides this unwieldy categorization, the more the examples only grow more far-flung, resisting the very grouping that collected them side by side in the first place.Although not a direct predecessor of André Bazin and his acolytes, Diagonale et Co., the production company founded by one-time Cahiers du cinéma critic and director Paul Vecchiali, exists...
- 12/18/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Killers of the Flower Moon (2021)From Osage News, the first official image from Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, featuring Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio. Recommended VIEWINGFollowing the release of his series The Underground Railroad, Barry Jenkins has also released The Gaze, a 50-minute non-narrative video piece that captures the show's background actors in moments of stillness. The film challenges the notion of the "white gaze" by pursuing what Jenkins refers to as "the Black gaze; or the gaze distilled." Shudder has released an official trailer for George A. Romero's The Amusement Park, a restoration of the long-lost 1973 film. Originally a commissioned work by the Lutheran Society, The Amusement Park was shelved for its terrifying depiction of elder abuse. The film will premiere on Shudder on June 8. Over at Ecstatic Static,...
- 5/12/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe winners of this year's socially distanced Academy Awards ceremony include Daniel Kaluuya, Youn Yuh Jung, and Chloé Zhao. Find our full list of winners and nominees here.The legendary layout artist Roy Naisbitt has died at 90. Best known for his intricate and interweaving visions, Naisbitt worked on films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Space Jam, Balto and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Recommended VIEWINGAn extension of This Long Century, Ecstatic Static is a database of films and information from a broad community of artists. The site is currently screening films like Simon Liu's Signal 8, and also has an extensive library featuring new notes on filmmaking by Jodie Mack, Helena Wittmann, and more. Anthology Film Archives has announced a new online festival, presented in partnership with production company Vanda. Entitled Vanda Duarte: Dissident Films by Latin American Women Directors,...
- 4/28/2021
- 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
*special thanks to Nancy Fornoville for gifting me this book
On the occasion of the film programs dedicated to Ogawa Shinsuke and Ogawa Pro at Cinematek and Tsuchimoto Noriaki at Courtisane Festival, Stoffel Debuysere, Elias Grootaers, and Quinten Wyns have compiled a book that contains a number of essays on the work and life of Shinsuke Ogawa and Noriaki Tsuchimoto, by a number of experts but also by the filmmakers themselves.
The first part of the book deals with Shunsuke Ogawa and particularly his company, Ogawa Pro and the way he and his crew shot the “Sanrizuka” documentary series, which recorded the struggle of farmers and student protesters to prevent the construction of the Narita International Airport in Sanrizuka, Chiba Prefecture. The rather unusual ways he implemented both in the way he run his company and the way he shot his documentaries are highlighted in the best...
On the occasion of the film programs dedicated to Ogawa Shinsuke and Ogawa Pro at Cinematek and Tsuchimoto Noriaki at Courtisane Festival, Stoffel Debuysere, Elias Grootaers, and Quinten Wyns have compiled a book that contains a number of essays on the work and life of Shinsuke Ogawa and Noriaki Tsuchimoto, by a number of experts but also by the filmmakers themselves.
The first part of the book deals with Shunsuke Ogawa and particularly his company, Ogawa Pro and the way he and his crew shot the “Sanrizuka” documentary series, which recorded the struggle of farmers and student protesters to prevent the construction of the Narita International Airport in Sanrizuka, Chiba Prefecture. The rather unusual ways he implemented both in the way he run his company and the way he shot his documentaries are highlighted in the best...
- 10/10/2020
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
Mubi's retrospective Spotlight on Barbet Schroeder is showing summer 2020 - spring 2021.Above: Barbet SchroederTrying to situate Barbet Schroeder on the film world-trend-map of the past six decades can be a tricky task. Coming on the scene as part of the MacMahonist group1, writing for Cahiers du cinéma mostly about American cinema in the late 1950s, Schroeder should be correctly considered a direct descendant of the politique des auteur. However, unlike other acknowledged “sons” of the New Wave, such as Jean Eustache and Philippe Garrel, this inheritance was not directly passed on to Schroeder when he began producing-directing his own stories, following the steps of his much admired Otto Preminger—in fact, his affective bonds with Cahiers didn’t protect him from the occasional scolding from the magazine’s “third-generation” critics: Serge Daney accused Schroeder of turning the subject of his documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974) into a stereotype,...
- 8/20/2020
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSNext year's Sundance Film Festival has received permission from the Park City Council to be seven days rather than 11. The festival will also have limited capacity in theatres to address public health concerns. Recommended VIEWINGEvery Thursday in August, MoMa is streaming selections of historic films from its collection in a series titled Film Vault Summer Camp. In episode 1, collection specialist Ashley Swinnerton introduces The Flying Train and Great Actresses of the Past.In a new video essay for Little White Lies, Luís Azevedo explores the role of kitchens in the films of Pedro Almodóvar.From Netflix, the official trailer for Charlie Kaufman's psychological thriller I'm Thinking of Ending Things, adapted from the bestselling novel by Iain Reid. Recommended READINGAbove: Ja'Tovia Gary by JerSean Golatt for the New York Times. For the New York Times,...
- 8/17/2020
- MUBI
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Philippe Garrel's L'enfant secret is exclusively showing October and November 2019 in the United Kingdom and United States in Mubi's Rediscovered series.To engage in Philippe Garrel’s autopoetic world is not a task; instead, the viewer’s participation fuses with a spellbinding mood. Garrel is a filmmaker who seems to be forever working on the periphery, yet he is treasured whenever he is discovered. His body of work, which spans over six decades, is remarkably self-complementary and bracingly emotionally consistent. Across it can be found an unmissable thread of thematic preoccupations, as well as typified characters drawn from Garrel’s biography, such as a consistent filmmaker protagonist (Garrel shot his first film age sixteen) and tumultuous relationships (mirroring his own with the singer Nico), electroshock and heroin abuse. A son of an actor himself, he often explored familial...
- 10/27/2019
- 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 The Death of Empedocles (1987) is showing on Mubi from September 10 – October 9, 2019."I am torn asunder by love and hate."—Friedrich Hölderlin in a 1794 letter to a friend"Yesterday I was up on Etna. I recalled the great Sicilian of old who, when he had had enough of ticking off the hours, having become intimate with the soul of the world, in his bold lust for life plunged into the terrific flames. It was because—a mocker afterwards said of him—the frigid poet had to warm himself in the fire."—Passage from Hyperion; or, The Hermit in Greece (1797-99)The three versions of Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of Empedocles)—the first finished, the latter two left incomplete—were the product of a bleak, tumultuous period in Friedrich Hölderlin's life.
- 9/11/2019
- 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 Too Early, Too Late (1982) is showing on Mubi from August 6 – September 4, 2019.If there is an actor in Too Early, Too Late, it is the landscape. This actor has a text to recite: History, of which it is the living witness. The actor performs with a certain amount of talent: the cloud that passes, a breaking loose of birds, a bouquet of trees bent by the wind, a break in the clouds; this is what the landscape’s performance consists of. This kind of performing is meteorological. One hasn’t seen anything like it for quite some time. Since the silent period, to be precise.—Serge Daney, Cinemeteorology, Libération, 1982In Straub-Huillet films, humans stand erect and impassive like statues, possessed by the spirits of the past. The...
- 8/5/2019
- MUBI
His first task in new two-year term will be appointing replacement for managing director Isabelle Giordano.
Serge Toubiana has been re-elected president of French cinema promotional and export body Unifrance, for a second two-year term.
The body said its 50-member steering committee - including sales agents, producers, filmmakers as well as other institutional appointees - had voted unanimously for Toubiana’s re-appointment.
His first task in this fresh term as president will be deciding who will replace Unifrance’s outgoing managing director Isabelle Giordano who is due to depart at the end of July after six years in the role.
Serge Toubiana has been re-elected president of French cinema promotional and export body Unifrance, for a second two-year term.
The body said its 50-member steering committee - including sales agents, producers, filmmakers as well as other institutional appointees - had voted unanimously for Toubiana’s re-appointment.
His first task in this fresh term as president will be deciding who will replace Unifrance’s outgoing managing director Isabelle Giordano who is due to depart at the end of July after six years in the role.
- 7/4/2019
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- ScreenDaily
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 Not Reconciled, Or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules (1965) is showing on Mubi from May 8 – June 6, 2019.Critics have often noted Straub/Huillet's preference for diagonals, for instance, but have underestimated the aesthetic and thematic significance of the contrast with more symmetrical composition. Scenes in Not Reconciled involving the characters' inability to reconcile past and present are most often shot in diagonals. In addition to making a simple set “vibrate with life,” Straub/Huillet's diagonal shots keep the viewer from relaxing at the point of a perspective triangle in relation to the screen. In this way they are able to vary the sense of narrative space inherent in all three-dimensional pictorial representations. Not only is the viewer not at rest as the subject for whom the composition...
- 5/9/2019
- MUBI
Mubi's retrospective The Parallel Worlds of Olivier Assayas is showing May 3 – June 11, 2019 in the United States.Cold WaterWhen a filmmaker’s body of work is as prolific as it is varied, the paths to profile split two: the explanatory chronology that threads together A-to-b episodes of a life, and the thematic retrofit that groups one film with an unsuspecting other. But both are really about the same, hopeful thing: that the right arrangement of themes and biographic detail will yield some incandescent truth about their practice. With Olivier Assayas, the truths are dropped generously in correspondence—“Cinema has to be light,” he has told Kent Jones, and later, Film Comment1—always too articulate and discerning an interviewee to not betray his past as a writer and (reluctant) critic at Cahiers du cinéma, then helmed by Serge Daney and Toubiana. Assayas is, in fact, generous enough to have written a memoir,...
- 5/5/2019
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSBarbara Hammer by Mickalene Thomas for Vanity FairA treasured trailblazer of the American avant-garde, lesbian artist and filmmaker Barbara Hammer, has died. In a posthumously published interview with Vanity Fair, Hammer discusses the intertwining of her personal life and political obligations that appear in her works: "I’ve never understood why experiences need be separated into categories. And, so, I don’t." Amid ongoing talks among both parties, the Cannes Film Festival will not be screening any Netflix films in or out of its competition this year. The decision rules out a number of titles from screening, including Martin Scorsese's The Irishman and the Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems.To our surprise and elation, Wong Kar-Wai has confirmed that Blossoms will be his next film, and will act as the third part to In the Mood For Love...
- 3/27/2019
- MUBI
Amanda director Mikhaël Hers: "Vincent Lacoste is naturally very intuitive and Stacy Martin, maybe due to her double nationality, is more cerebral, more rational as an actor."
Before the uniFrance and Film Society of Lincoln Center luncheon for the 24th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in New York - attended by the President of uniFrance Serge Toubiana and Executive Director of uniFrance Isabelle Giordano, Russell Banks, uniFrance’s American ambassador, Sophie Fillières, Agathe Bonitzer, Hélène Fillières, Emmanuel Mouret, Eva Husson, Pierre Salvadori, and Pio Marmaï - Amanda director/screenwriter Mikhaël Hers joined me for a conversation. We spoke about the roles of Vincent Lacoste, Isaure Multrier, Stacy Martin, Marianne Basler, Ophélia Kolb, and Greta Scacchi, dancing to Elvis Presley, film critic Serge Daney's book L'Amateur De Tennis and Mikhaël's love of tennis.
President of uniFrance, Serge Toubiana and Executive Director of uniFrance, Isabelle Giordano with Mikhaël Hers...
Before the uniFrance and Film Society of Lincoln Center luncheon for the 24th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in New York - attended by the President of uniFrance Serge Toubiana and Executive Director of uniFrance Isabelle Giordano, Russell Banks, uniFrance’s American ambassador, Sophie Fillières, Agathe Bonitzer, Hélène Fillières, Emmanuel Mouret, Eva Husson, Pierre Salvadori, and Pio Marmaï - Amanda director/screenwriter Mikhaël Hers joined me for a conversation. We spoke about the roles of Vincent Lacoste, Isaure Multrier, Stacy Martin, Marianne Basler, Ophélia Kolb, and Greta Scacchi, dancing to Elvis Presley, film critic Serge Daney's book L'Amateur De Tennis and Mikhaël's love of tennis.
President of uniFrance, Serge Toubiana and Executive Director of uniFrance, Isabelle Giordano with Mikhaël Hers...
- 3/19/2019
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’re highlighting the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller)
Do you have a Lee Israel work on your shelf? What should be a matter of owning one of her books or not since she was a notable author of biographies who hit the New York Times Best Sellers list, things get much more complicated when you look closer to see she wrote more than just about the likes of Dorothy Kilgallen and Estée Lauder. Israel also wrote as some of her subjects too. During the early 1990s when she was down on her luck professionally, financially, and personally, a fateful discovery occurred that would ultimately ensure her name would...
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller)
Do you have a Lee Israel work on your shelf? What should be a matter of owning one of her books or not since she was a notable author of biographies who hit the New York Times Best Sellers list, things get much more complicated when you look closer to see she wrote more than just about the likes of Dorothy Kilgallen and Estée Lauder. Israel also wrote as some of her subjects too. During the early 1990s when she was down on her luck professionally, financially, and personally, a fateful discovery occurred that would ultimately ensure her name would...
- 2/8/2019
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Jean-Luc Godard quipped that his criticism represented a kind of cinematic terrorism. Serge Daney said his writing taught him not to be afraid to see. The Parisian publishing house Post-Éditions has made available a long overdue collection of his articles in French to decide for ourselves. Jacques Rivette became a filmmaker even before he became a critic. When he came to Paris from Rouen in 1950, he had already completed a short film, unlike Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer or Chabrol, his colleagues-to-be at Cahiers du cinéma and later fellow New Wave directors. By his own admission, he never wanted to be a film critic, not in the traditional sense of the term. But, considering his own dictum that “a true critique of a film can only be another film,” he never ceased to be one. Textes Critiques as an object has the appearance of a cinephilic totem: half-a foot in size, portable,...
- 1/7/2019
- MUBI
Jean-Luc Godard's The Image Book (2018) is having its exclusive online premiere in the United Kingdom from December 3 – January 1, 2019.The first thing we see in Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, The Image Book, is the pointing hand of Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John The Baptist, believed by many to be his final work in oils—a masterpiece of sfumato, though Godard’s image is contrasty black-and-white like a Xerox some generations removed from the original. Next, two hands, maybe the director’s, pinning together lengths of film at a Steenbeck editing table, and one of those esoteric quotations for which Godard is famous: “Man’s true condition: to think with hands,” from the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont, previously featured in Godard’s magnum opus, Histoire(s) du cinéma. Then, a montage from Histoire(s): hands (including Giacometti’s The Hand) and part of a favorite quotation from St.
- 12/18/2018
- MUBI
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’re highlighting the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.
A24 Films on Kanopy
With FilmStruck sadly heading into its early grave last night, one may be looking for more options for streaming. One of the best alternatives is Kanopy, which can be accessed for free with a library card in select areas. They’ve also just added a wealth of A24 films ranging from this year’s First Reformed and Lean on Pete all the way back to their first offerings like Enemy and Spring Breakers.
Where to Stream: Kanopy
De Palma (Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow)
Recently, Kent Jones’ Hitchcock /Truffaut — a documentary on the famous interview sessions between the two directors — boasted perhaps the most chaotic,...
A24 Films on Kanopy
With FilmStruck sadly heading into its early grave last night, one may be looking for more options for streaming. One of the best alternatives is Kanopy, which can be accessed for free with a library card in select areas. They’ve also just added a wealth of A24 films ranging from this year’s First Reformed and Lean on Pete all the way back to their first offerings like Enemy and Spring Breakers.
Where to Stream: Kanopy
De Palma (Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow)
Recently, Kent Jones’ Hitchcock /Truffaut — a documentary on the famous interview sessions between the two directors — boasted perhaps the most chaotic,...
- 11/30/2018
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.Recommended VIEWINGWe're very much in love with Zama, Lucrecia Martel's long-anticipated return to filmmaking. The new trailer calls us back to our encounter of the film at Toronto last year and our conversation with the director.We all know that Rainer Werner Fassbinder made a lot—a whole lot—of films in his all too brief 15 years of activity, but it's truly remarkable how new (old) work of his keeps appearing. First there was the revelation of World on a Wire (1973) and now another made-for-tv epic has been restored and is being re-released, Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1972-1973). We wonder what other future delights and provocations Rwf has in store for us!Recommended READINGDoll & EmAt The Guardian, Lili Loofbourow takes a look at how stories about women are perceived and received differently than those about men.
- 3/15/2018
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe Weinstein Company has continued its descent after the many sexual assault accusations fired at Harvey Weinstein. According to Variety, the company is now filing for bankruptcy after a sale fell through.Recommended VIEWINGJust a few weeks ago we shared the trailer for Hong Sang-soo's latest film, Grass. Now, in the event of its U.S. distribution (provided by Cinema Guild), there's a new trailer for one of Hong's 2017 ventures: Claire's Camera. You can read our review for the lovingly quaint film in our Cannes 2017 coverage.Marvel mastermind Stan Lee recounts his surreal near-collaboration with the great late French director Alain Resnais for Criterion. February 16th, 2018 was the 100th anniversary of the creation of the state of Lithuania. Thus the nation's avant-garde maestro, Jonas Mekas, has kindly shared his 2008 epic Lithuania and the Collapse of the Ussr on Vimeo.
- 3/3/2018
- MUBI
With the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival wrapped, we’ve highlighted our favorite films from the festival. Make sure to stay tuned in the coming months as we learn about distribution news for the titles. Check out our favorites below.
An Elephant Sitting Still (Bo Hu)
The trick to getting the most out of the Berlin Film Festival is to dig deep into its stupendous program spanning 400 films across a multitude of sidebars. Premiering in the Forum section which traditionally favors more experimental/radical forms of filmmaking, Chinese writer/director Bo Hu’s feature debut An Elephant Sitting Still is the work of raw, intimidating talent driven by a creative fury that would likely daunt most competition titles. Unmissable for anyone craving the gritty realism and independent spirit of pre-00’s Chinese cinema. Fair warning: this is decidedly not the feel-good movie of the year. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)
Grass (Hong...
An Elephant Sitting Still (Bo Hu)
The trick to getting the most out of the Berlin Film Festival is to dig deep into its stupendous program spanning 400 films across a multitude of sidebars. Premiering in the Forum section which traditionally favors more experimental/radical forms of filmmaking, Chinese writer/director Bo Hu’s feature debut An Elephant Sitting Still is the work of raw, intimidating talent driven by a creative fury that would likely daunt most competition titles. Unmissable for anyone craving the gritty realism and independent spirit of pre-00’s Chinese cinema. Fair warning: this is decidedly not the feel-good movie of the year. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)
Grass (Hong...
- 2/27/2018
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
From the years 1973 to 1981 the great film critic Serge Daney held the position of editor of Cahiers du cinéma, that most revered and storied of film journals. He also wrote a tennis column. That idea of a shared symbiotic passion for the worlds of cinema and sport—and how the two might be connected—provides the basis for Julien Faraut’s experimental documentary In the Realm of Perfection, a witty and contagiously impassioned ethnographical study of the game and, in particular, the 1985 finals at Roland Garros.
The story goes that Faraut was working in the archives of the National Sport Institute in Paris when he discovered a pile of film reels from the documentarian Gil de Kermadec. Apparently, the institute had begun making instructional 16mm films in the 1980s, each focusing on the methods of a particular tennis star of the day. In 1985 the subject was John McEnroe.
Indeed, it...
The story goes that Faraut was working in the archives of the National Sport Institute in Paris when he discovered a pile of film reels from the documentarian Gil de Kermadec. Apparently, the institute had begun making instructional 16mm films in the 1980s, each focusing on the methods of a particular tennis star of the day. In 1985 the subject was John McEnroe.
Indeed, it...
- 2/25/2018
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
At the Berlinale, the place to be surprised by the best kind of nonfiction films is clearly the Forum, which has festival highlights The Waldheim Waltz and Jamila and now has premiered a highly unusual sports documentary by Julien Faraut. In the Realm of Perfection uses remarkable footage shot on 16mm as part of an ongoing research project by director Gil de Kermadec that focused on the French Open as a way to study the movement and play of tennis players. Faraut sets up this context and lets us revel in the footage shot the early and mid-1980s as the sport and its broadcast was changing. He connects the recordings to early cinema studies of the mysteries of human movement captured in film’s frame-by-frame detail and vouchsafes the analysis as cinematic by using Cahiers du cinéma critic and Trafic magazine founder Serge Daney’s brilliant writing on tennis as occasional commentary.
- 2/20/2018
- MUBI
Part of the Jerry Lewis tribute A Mubi Jerrython. Over the course of my forty years as the Los Angeles correspondent for Cahiers du cinema, I wrote about what was happening in American cinema, inventing a way of doing so inspired by Joan Didion’s essay “Having Fun,” which first appeared in The New Yorker. Ironically, Didion’s essay was a blast at the seriousness of people writing about film from outside the business who didn’t understand the inner workings of the studio system. When I met Serge Daney, the editor-in-chief of the Cahiers, at the New York apartment of Jackie Raynal and Sid Geffen on the occasion of the first Semaine des Cahiers in New York in 1977, which I had helped organize, we hit it off immediately. But he was understandably reluctant to entrust to someone who appeared to have been living in a subway the job I...
- 12/26/2017
- MUBI
“Who could fail to sense the greatness of this art, in which the visible is the sign of the invisible?”—Jean GrémillonCinema is what you imagine, and what you imagine first, in the darkness where bundles of light thrown 24 times a second at a wall produce illusion, is movement, an electromagnetic record of the past conjured into motion by your mind’s eye. A vision. So cinema is alchemy, it’s mystery. Unlike television, which is ephemeral but endless, cinema is eternal yet ever ending. (Raúl Ruiz made an entire film from the short ends of another, and the studio system of Classic Hollywood was so dedicated to The End that it couldn’t go on.) Cinema is shadow, totality, the night.Not all film is cinema and not all cinema is poetry, but poetry in the movies is always cinema. And poetry is unknowable, like the films of Paul Clipson.
- 9/20/2017
- MUBI
The Notebook is the North American home for Locarno Film Festival Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian's blog. Chatrian has been writing thoughtful blog entries in Italian on Locarno's website since he took over as Director in late 2012, and now you can find the English translations here on the Notebook as they're published.
Real stars perhaps only exist when the image industry is booming—Serge Daney Le salaire du zappeur (literally The Zapper’s Reward; in French a pun on the original title of Clouzot’s classic thriller The Wages of Fear] was published in 1988, when television had already passed its zenith and entered into decline. Reading it today is like going back to a lost civilization: it’s about a period which perhaps went by too quickly and of which I now find it hard to uncover any trace, except in my own memories as a barely adolescent viewer. The television...
Real stars perhaps only exist when the image industry is booming—Serge Daney Le salaire du zappeur (literally The Zapper’s Reward; in French a pun on the original title of Clouzot’s classic thriller The Wages of Fear] was published in 1988, when television had already passed its zenith and entered into decline. Reading it today is like going back to a lost civilization: it’s about a period which perhaps went by too quickly and of which I now find it hard to uncover any trace, except in my own memories as a barely adolescent viewer. The television...
- 9/19/2017
- MUBI
Olivier Assayas. Photo by Locarno Festival / Massimo PedrazziniAt this year’s edition of the Locarno Festival, French filmmaker Olivier Assayas was the head of the main competition jury. As the festival drew to a close, we caught up with Assayas in the lobby of his hotel for an informal chat about viewing habits, mobile phones in cinema, and his upcoming project Ebook.Notebook: Have you seen any of the Jacques Tourneur movies from the festival's retrospective? Olivier Assayas: I’ve seen Out of the Past (1947) and Berlin Express (1948). Out of the Past I saw ages ago and Berlin Express I thought I had seen but no, this was the first time.Notebook: Do you like him?Assayas: I love Tourneur. I think he’s a genius—a great filmmaker. Well, I don’t know about a genius. Certainly a great filmmaker [laughs]. Notebook: I really like Berlin Express. It’s...
- 9/1/2017
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWe are devastated by the death of performer and director Jerry Lewis this week at the age of 91, one of the 20th century's greatest—and most inspiring—artists. Dave Kehr for The New York Times has penned an excellent obituary, and it's worth revisiting Christoph Huber's 2013 coverage of the Viennale's epic retrospective of Lewis's work as an actor and a filmmaker. Last year, Adrian Curry published a selection of the international poster designs for Lewis's films.The Locarno Festival wrapped last week, with the top prize going to Chinese documentarian Wang Bing's Mrs. Fang. We were at the festival covering it day by day, including its retrospective of Hollywood genre director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past). See all the awards and read our coverage from the Swiss film festival.Recommended VIEWINGThe...
- 8/23/2017
- MUBI
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