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The Hollow Ones: Scott Stark’s "The Realist"
22 hours ago
When watching Scott Stark’s wonderful new film The Realist, my mind unexpectedly shot back to a 1977 work by Peter Kubelka. Although it’s strange to think of a minor Kubelka film, especially in a career characterized by such parsimony of expression, not that much has been written about Pause!, partly because it is so notably different from the heavily edited, “high articulation” films on which Kubelka built his reputation. Pause!, by contrast, consists of uninterrupted camera rolls of Kubelka’s fellow Austrian avant-gardist Arnulf Rainer, as he contorts his face and body, struggling to maintain his balance. As one watches Pause!, it becomes apparent that the limitations of Rainer’s body are setting the parameters of Kubelka’s shots. In fact, although we cannot be exactly certain of this, it appears that Rainer is taking a breath at the start of each shot, and that Kubelka’s shot lasts »
- Michael Sicinski
Dear Roger
5 April 2013 1:31 PM, PDT
Dear Roger,
I’m not going to pretend that we were close; nonetheless, you were my friend. You were generous and supportive, and I never properly expressed to you how much your generosity and support meant to me. You were the only person I’ve ever asked for advice.
When I learned that you’d died, I had just filed a review for your website. I was about to start wrapping up one for this site—a pan of Simon Killer. I no longer feel like working on that review. I don’t feel like writing about bad movies at all. I want to write about good movies and good people.
In the past 24 hours, I’ve given several interviews about your death and what it meant to work with you. The thing that I’ve tried to stress in all of them—aside from your generosity—is that good »
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
R.I.P. Roger Ebert (1942-2013)
4 April 2013 2:40 PM, PDT
Roger Ebert has passed away at the age of 70. Shortly after announcing he would be scaling back his writing output while undergoing radiation therapy, Ebert succumbed to what has been a long on and off battle with cancer—one that he fought bravely and strongly while actually evolving as a writer, adapting to the Internet as a prolific blogger. Indeed, it could be said that some of Ebert's best work as a writer came in the last few years, not as a movie reviewer, but as a memoirist with what has become his final book, Life Itself, and his insightful and often moving daily musings, be they on movies, politics, food, or life. Just two days ago, in his announcement of his "leave of presence," he had vowed that "on bad days I may write about the vulnerability that accompanies illness, on good days, »
- Adam Cook
The Forgotten: Rome Wasn't Burned in a Day
3 April 2013 9:45 PM, PDT
Above: Rome burns, whereas Nero merely suffers a bit of nitrate decomposition.
Arturo Ambrosio, prolific producer (1313 titles on the IMDb) and specialist in early twentieth century epics of the ancient world (his career climaxed with a 1925 Quo Vadis? but also included the 1913 Last Days of Pompeii (I've seen it: a corker!) pulled out all the stops when releasing his 1909 Nerone (Nero; or The Fall of Rome). Almost three hundred and fifty prints were struck (I believe that's around the same number as accompanied the Us release of the Roland Emmerich Godzilla, to give you an idea) and the movie was accompanied by a sixteen page promotional booklet. That's more than one page per shot in the actual movie, which, being from 1909, is a bit skimpy by the standards of our modern super-films, weighing in at fourteen minutes and averaging one shot per minute.
Above: Home cinema, ancient Roman style.
The most interesting moment, »
- David Cairns
The Noteworthy: Jesús Franco (1930-2013), Announcing "Cléo", Snow Sounds
3 April 2013 5:24 PM, PDT
News.
Jesús "Jess" Franco has passed away at the age of 82. Cléo, "a journal of film and feminism" founded by Kiva Reardon, has just unveiled its debut issue online. For your reading pleasure: pieces on Holy Motors, Haywire, Harmony Korine and more. A new issue from desistfilm is now online, including a Q&A with David Gatten conducted by Notebook regular David Phelps.
Above: an interview with Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt) from the newly released 12th issue of The Seventh Art. As part of the Bard SummerScape Festival held at Bard College, a Russian emigré cinema series will be running this July and August, featuring films by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Epstein and others.
Finds.
Above: via Indiewire, a gorgeous exclusive new poster for Spring Breakers (featuring an image from what just may be the film's best scene). Chinese cinema expert Shelly Kraicer has a new piece up on Cinema Scope »
- Adam Cook
Three Takes #3: Joseph H. Lewis' "My Name Is Julia Ross"
1 April 2013 7:38 AM, PDT
Three Takes is a column dedicated to the art of short-form criticism. Each week, three writers—Calum Marsh, Fernando F. Croce, and Joseph Jon Lanthier—offer stylized capsules which engage, in brief, with classic and contemporary films.
My Name Is Julia Ross (1945)
Correspondence is so often destroyed in Joseph L. Lewis' My Name is Julia Ross—by everything from smugly shredding fingers to curling flame—that the film starts to appear contemptuous toward text. The unlucky scrawlings belong to the title character (Nina Foch), an American expat in London who's kidnapped, dragged to the Cornwall coast, and installed as the faux-loony surrogate wife of a burly nobleman named Hughes (George Macready). (Hughes’ wealth is surpassed only by his barbarism; he reenacts his real spouse’s fate by jabbing a couch pillow, not insignificantly, with a letter opener.) Ever resourceful, the captive Julia scribbles Sos's on scraps »
- Joseph Jon Lanthier
6 articles
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