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NEWS
- Naomi Kawase has been appointed as the director of the official documentary film for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Kawase, now the fifth woman to direct an Olympics official film, hopes "to capture ‘time’ and take full advantage of the appeal of documentary films and their ability to freeze those moments into ‘eternity.'"
- A mysterious VR project by Terrence Malick entitled Evolver—his second virtual reality endeavor since this summer's Together—will be one of ten projects presented at VR Days Europe in Amsterdam on October 26. Featuring original music from artists including Wu-Tang Clan and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, "Evolver lets participants experience the human condition from birth until death."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- New York's Museum of the Moving Image has thoughtfully shared a video of a post-screening discussion of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, with stars Keir Dullea and Dan Richter, plus historian Michael Benson and neuroscientist Heather Berlin.
- American Jazz musician Kamasi Washington's new track "Hub-Tones" gets an entrancing, single-shot visual treatment by Jenn Nkiru:
- At VashiVisuals, film editor Vashi Nedomansky highlights the awesome aerial cinematography in Josef von Sternberg's underrated, Howard Hughes-produced Jet Pilot (1957).
RECOMMENDED READING
- Coinciding with David Gordon Green's latest version of Halloween, Matt Patches of Polygon interviews Jason Blum about Blumhouse Productions's lack of a theatrically-distributed horror film directed by a woman. “We’re always trying to that," Blum states. The producer has also released a follow-up statement on Twitter, promising to "do better." On a related note, it is worth returning to Gretchen Felker-Martin's blog post on VRV about women in horror, and how the genre's "visions of female destruction and abandon [...] [expresses] an urge to transgress—to violate taboos around what womanhood is and is not."
- Nate Jones of Vulture imagines how today's celebrity economy of "tweets, takes, listicles, and think pieces" might have responded to the events of Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born.
- Cintia Gill, co-director of the currently in-progress festival DocLisboa, speaks to Screen Daily regarding recent pressures from the Ukrainian and Turkish embassies to withdraw documentaries from the festival and the troubling nature of festival censorship.
- In a recent interview with anchor Chen Luyu, Jet Li discusses the reason why he rejected the role of Seraph in The Matrix Reloaded: "For six months, they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library. By the end of the recording, the right to these moves would go to them.”
- At the VRV Blog Gretchen Felker-Martin champions the tender masculine love and vulnerability to be found in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
- For Vogue, Miranda July discusses #MeToo in the White House, social media, and her "archival chain letter video compilation project" of shorts by female filmmakers, entitled Joanie 4 Jackie.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Kathleen Collins's Losing Ground is the focus of the latest podcast episode from The Cinephiliacs, featuring host Peter Labuza and guest Dr. Terri Francis, who discusses the restoration of Collins's film, as well as her own scholarship in the works of Josephine Baker and black identity.
- Stream John Carpenter's score for David Gordon Green's Halloween, co-composed by collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. The vinyl is available at Sacred Bones Records: "While the new score was made with a few more resources than Carpenter’s famously shoestring original, its musical spirit was preserved."
- Director Peter Bogdanovich joins critic Nick Pinkerton for a new episode of the Film Comment podcast, where he discusses his role in Orson Welles's The Other Side Of The Wind and Buster Keaton, who serves as the subject of his recent documentary, The Great Buster.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Daniel Kasman interviews Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, whose Episode of the Sea tells of the "remarkable longevity and persistence of the Urk fishing community across changes in time, the economy, technology, and globalization."
- Michael Sicinski provides an overview of the titles screening as part of the 2018 New York Film Festival's Projections sidebar that share an engagement with questions of archival knowledge. "As long as experimental filmmakers continue to engage with questions of archival memory, there will still be a place for the undisciplined counter-knowledges that characterized the unruly days of the human sciences."
- Elissa Suh reviews Tamara Jenkins's Private Life, a film that "masterfully seizes on the ebb and flow of decisions and disappointments, cresting in fantastic uncertainty."
EXTRAS AND RE-DISCOVERIES
- Reminder: there's always movies to be discovered within the (free!) streaming database of The National Film Board of Canada:
In 1974, the NFB established Studio-D, the first publicly funded feminist film-production unit in the world. Discover a selection of films produced by women, for women from this visionary studio → https://t.co/2JRe48uRsC pic.twitter.com/AfLDn7k9rY
— National Film Board (@thenfb) October 21, 2018