“Another year, another two weeks wasted on the Riviera, but at least I got a tan.” Editor Mark Peranson opens another issue of Cinema Scope. And on another page: “Cannes is a vacuum that negates all reasonable thought, be it from the programmers, the producers, all the way down to us critics.” Be that as it may, the special section on this year’s edition includes, online: Blake Williams on Godard‘s Adieu au langage; Quintín on Jauja, the new film by Lisandro Alonso, this year’s Filmmaker in Residence at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center; Jordan Cronk on Nuri Bilge Ceylon‘s Winter Sleep, winner of the Palme d’Or, just picked up for North American distribution by Adopt Films; Tom Charity on Alice Rohrwacher‘s The Wonders, winner of the Grand Prix; and Boris Nelepo on Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent.
Issue 59 opens with a conversation between Alex Ross Perry and Joel Potrykus, whose latest films, Listen Up Philip and Buzzard, respectively, will be screening, you may remember, at Locarno in August. It might seem churlish to point out that Mark Peranson heads up Locarno’s selection committee or to remind readers that Perry stars in Peranson and Raya Martin‘s La última película, but I might also do so to commend the editor, programmer and filmmaker for doing all he can for the sort of cinema he deems worthy of promotion.
Also online from the new issue: Adam Nayman on Robert Greene‘s Actress, Samuel La France on artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman, Max Nelson on the films of John Torres, Christoph Huber‘s remembrance of Michael Glawogger and Jonathan Rosenbaum‘s column, “Global Discoveries on DVD.”
Via Catherine Grant, Jacques Rancière‘s lecture at the University of Reading on May 2, 2014, “Cinema and the Frontiers of Art”
MORE READING
In his latest column for L’étoile, Niles Schwartz, taking a slew of pieces marking the 25th anniversary of Tim Burton’s Batman as his cue, addresses “‘anniversary writing,’ really specific to the decades of the ’80s and ’90s, which has been incessant: Speed, Forrest Gump, Purple Rain in just the last couple of weeks. Even trash is given laurels, with pieces memorializing Troop Beverly Hills and the original Police Academy. The coming year will surely have some words of complimentary retrospect for 20-year-olds The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction, 30-year-olds Amadeus and The Killing Fields, and then 40 years of The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Young Frankenstein…. This calls to question about the movies before our time, and why the anniversary-piece culture rarely strays beyond the 1970s–or, even within a recent time frame, why it’s centered on popular Hollywood films…. Maybe it’s anniversary-spike season because summer’s all about the lost glow of youth. Goddamn, summer meant something back then because you had three months off.”
And on a related note: “Nostalgia for one’s youth forms much of the nostalgia for picture houses, which, in the movies is often elegiac.” In the New Statesman, Oliver Farry presents a “cultural history of cinemas on the big screen.”
“Hollywood extracted entirely the wrong moral from the story of Marlon Brando,” argues Tom Shone in the Atlantic. “We don’t go to the movies anymore to be convinced. We go to be tricked—to admire acting as a kind of special effect.”
Matthew Thrift writes up “10 great wuxia (swordplay) films” for the BFI.
For frieze, Agnieszka Gratza reports on the third edition of the Berlin Documentary Forum.
A Q&A that preceded the lecture
GOINGS ON
Nashville. The Belcourt is “a perfect partner as the Frist expands the programming of its new animation exhibition, Watch Me Move: The Animation Show,” writes Joe Nolan in the Scene. “In conjunction, The Belcourt has assembled a series that includes anime, midnight cult films (accompanied by movie-themed cocktails, of course) and classic cartoons for the kids.”
IN THE WORKS
“Paul and Chris Weitz are about to co-write a film for the first time in more than a decade, working on DreamWorks’ remake of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s hit Japanese melodrama Like Father, Like Son.” Noel Murray has details at the Dissolve.
Arnaud Desplechin will film a prequel to “My Sex Life…” (via @HugoBrisset ) that he’ll call “Our Arcadias”… http://t.co/vABTkrURx9
— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) June 25, 2014
“Out of the Furnace and Crazy Heart helmer Scott Cooper will direct a fact-based feature about the Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighter crew that perished in a wildfire that blazed in Prescott, AZ,” reports Deadline‘s Mike Fleming, Jr. Also: “Paramount Pictures is in talks with actress-filmmaker Sarah Polley to adapt Looking for Alaska, the debut novel by The Fault in Our Stars author John Green.”
OBIT
Actress Gina Collens has died at the age of 90. Variety: “Collens’s stage work ranged from Broadway to L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum to experimental theater groups. She appeared in such movies as Otto Preminger’s Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon and the CBS comedy series Rhoda. She was also a playwright and director and member of Los Angeles’ influential Circle Theater group formed in the 1940s by UCLA students including Sydney Chaplin, William Shallert, and Kathleen Freeman.”
ENDNOTE
Listening (130’44”). In Illusion Travels By Streetcar #19, Stuart Collier, Brian Risselada, Max Slobodin and Tom Sutpen discuss Alain Robbe-Grillet‘s first films and more.
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