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NEWS
The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, 2023).
- The start of the Academy Awards ceremony was delayed by hundreds of protestors obstructing the red carpet to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
- Asghar Farhadi has been cleared of plagiarism charges by an Iranian court after allegations were leveled by a former student, who accused him of stealing the idea for A Hero (2021) from her documentary on the same subject, produced in his 2014 filmmaking workshop.
- Meanwhile, Alexander Payne has been accused of plagiarizing The Holdovers (2023) “line-by-line” from a screenplay by Simon Stephenson he appears to have read on spec.
- Thailand is planning to reform its national film industry as part of a “soft power” program, which may include increased production funding, more rebates for foreign productions, and a reduction of state censorship domestically.
- Meanwhile, Argentina will defund its national film and television institute, INCAA, under the direction of right-wing President Javier Milei, affecting the country’s film schools, productions, festivals, and cinemas.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- John Carpenter’s music video for “My Name Is Death,” a song he performs with his son Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, is a film noir murder mystery in miniature, complete with hard-drinking detective and question-mark gobos.
- Takashi Miike has made a short film, Midnight, featuring the daring driver of a souped-up taxi on his nightly rounds, based on the manga by Osamu Tezuka, for Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 15 Pro” series.
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RECOMMENDED READING
I Heard It through the Grapevine (Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, 1982).
- “We are compelled to confront not merely this country’s political life as a kind of static theater caught in an endless loop, but also its willful, determined reversals.” For The Nation, Kelli Weston finds James Baldwin retreading the freedom trail in Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley’s I Heard It through the Grapevine (1982).
- “Raúl Ruiz, thirteen years after his death, has managed to arrive at the Oscars.” In the Brooklyn Rail, Jaime Grijalba traces the Chilean auteur’s long and circuitous journey to recognition (of a sort) by the Academy, in the archival footage of Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory (2023), which received a Best Documentary Feature nomination.
- “Hou offers a persuasive vision of a world in which conflicts resolve themselves naturally and organically.” In Criterion’s Current, Sean Gilman considers Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early romantic comedies, made within the strictures of “healthy realism” then imposed on Taiwanese cinema by the Kuomintang party.
- “This scholar/collector/artist/inventor turned amateur anthropologist was for much of his life indistinguishable from a derelict, surviving largely on handouts, tarot readings, and research gigs commissioned by fellow occultists.” In the New York Review of Books, J. Hoberman reviews two recent books and an exhibition on Harry Smith, the underground filmmaker and folk-art anthologist.
- “Behind every such symphony of onscreen savagery is a village of craftspeople responsible for bringing its brutality to life.” Vulture rounds up the hundred greatest fight scenes of action cinema, featuring contributions from Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and more.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Neighboring Animals (Mary Helena Clark, 2024), installation view.
- New York, through March 23: Bridget Donahue Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Mary Helena Clark, featuring Neighboring Animals (2024), a two-channel video about the mouth: “as a tool to bite and chew, as an instrument of speech, and as a site of disgust and desire,” per the press release.
- Los Angeles, March 19 and 20: The New Beverly presents an early-’70s double-bill of two women on the edge, featuring Frank Perry’s Play It as It Lays (1972), based on Joan Didion’s first novel, and Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), the directorial debut of Jerry Schatzberg—both on 35mm.
- New York, April 11–15: NewFest and the Brooklyn Academy of Music present the fourth annual Queering the Canon retrospective, including a digital restoration of Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) and 35mm screenings of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) and F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off (1996).
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023).
- “It’s Burn’s job to produce that second film, the one we hear.” Johnnie Burn, the Academy Award–winning sound designer of The Zone of Interest and Poor Things (both 2023), discusses his craft with Rachel Pronger.
- “I really want to make it clear that this is not a film about the hospital, but about the patients and their bodies.” Claire Simon introduces her new documentary, Our Body (2023), now showing on MUBI in many countries.
- “Proof, be it images, words, or recordings, turns out to be fragmentary and imperfect, and all of the witnesses are either biased or lack the complete picture, much like the viewer.” Dora Leu considers the courtroom drama’s treatment of truth via Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023) and Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022).
- “Yes, my work is about black life. It is also a series of love stories, I think.” In an excerpt from Devotion, published in February by MIT Press, filmmaker Garrett Bradley and art historian Huey Copeland talk about the making of America (2019) and the rediscovery of Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913), an early Black-cast comedy.
- “In 2022, Shinzo Abe was killed, and it would take a figure from the 1960s to remember how this story should be told.” Z. W. Lewis details a history of the political assassin in cinema, from the Edison Studios’ The Execution of Mary Stewart (1895) to Masao Adachi’s Revolution+1 (2023).
WISH LIST
- Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy, out this fall from Penguin Random House, “is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide.”
EXTRAS
Taking Public Transit to the Oscars (Hayden Begley, 2024).