The combination of Michael Koresky‘s marvelous piece on The Long Day Closes (1992), the extraordinary clip Criterion’s posted from the film, the news that Koresky’s working on a forthcoming book about Terence Davies and then the appearance at Film.com of David Ehrlich‘s conversation with Koresky about Davies pretty much assured that this combo would be the top item in the next general roundup.
I still heartily recommended the essay, clip and interview, of course, but something disturbing, maybe even infuriating happened yesterday:
i’ve just been informed that this is my last day as editor of @Filmdotcom. it’s been a strange & wonderful year. my services are available.
— david ehrlich (@davidehrlich) January 30, 2014
I’ll refrain from commenting on Viacom’s practices, but I do want to note that not many of us in Ehrlich’s position would be able, within hours, to come up with a statement as classy as the one he sent into Criticwire.
READING
“What Malick’s cinema… certainly shares with Romanticism is… its promise of honesty,” writes Tom Paulus at photogénie. “And of course honesty, in combination with flights of lyricism, is hard to take seriously as philosophy. This is what lies at the heart of the critical disdain for Malick’s recent films, To the Wonder most of all: it cannot abide this cinema’s willed naïveté, a naïveté that almost always is coupled with the equally derogatory qualifier romantic.”
The latest interview at The Talks: Wim Wenders.
Via Catherine Grant comes word of the newly launched ANIKI: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento/Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image. There’s a good handful of pieces in English here, including Catherine‘s own on videographic film studies and Tiago Baptista‘s interview with Laura Mulvey.
A Pair of Outsiders presents the first part of “An Introduction to the Work of Mark Rappaport.”
A blog devoted solely to PREMINGER FILMS NOIRS by Despina Veneti & Olivier Eyquem, in English ! WOW !! http://t.co/DdKtarfTkF
— Adrian Martin (@AdrianMartin25) January 30, 2014
Matthew Sorrento for Film International: “From Gangster to Master: the Forgotten Edward G. Robinson.”
The Dissolve has spent this week focusing on Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1952). Matt Singer delivered the keynote, a discussion followed, and Keith Phipps has interviewed Sandra Bernhard. Also at the Dissolve: Sam Adams talks with Philip Glass about writing music for film.
For Neil Young, Patrick Keiller’s essay collection The View From the Train “should maintain his status as a crucial semi-underground influence on wider debates and conceptual currents.”
Brian Darr‘s “I Only Have Two Eyes 2013” rolls on with an impressive roster of contributors.
IN OTHER NEWS
“The Telluride Film Festival will not change its approach toward offering premieres—despite growing pushback from the organizers of the Toronto and Venice festivals.” Dave McNary reports in Variety. So far, as representatives from each of the three festivals talk to each other through the press, the tone has remained civil. But it’s also toughening up.
For Cineuropa, Héctor Llanos Martínez interviews Thierry Frémaux, whose official title is General Delegate of the Cannes Film Festival. He’s pleased to see Paolo Sorrentino doing so well and insists that Jane Campion was not chosen to preside over this year’s jury because she’s a woman. “She was chosen because she is a great artist.”
The Austrian Film Museum @ 50 — Anniversary Projects: http://t.co/gZftC8PhdF
— Keyframe Daily (@KeyframeDaily) January 31, 2014
“Guillaume Gallienne’s Me, Myself and Mum (Les garçons et Guillaume, à table!) and Abdellatif Kechiche’s Adele: Chapters 1 & 2 (aka Blue Is the Warmest Color) are the hot favorites in France’s upcoming César awards.” Melanie Goodfellow has the full list of nominations at Screen Daily. And by the way, you who’s nominated for one? Julie Gayet. In Quai d’Orsay, she plays, as John Lichfield puts it in the Independent, “a nymphomanic diplomat in [Bertrand Tavernier‘s] comedy about the French foreign ministry.” Case you haven’t heard, she’s also happens to be President François Hollande’s “alleged lover.”
Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby won 13 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards the other day; Garry Maddox reports for the Sydney Morning Herald.
GOINGS ON
New York. In the Notebook, Adrian Curry introduces another collection of amazing posters, this batch from around the world for Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (1961): “Starting next Wednesday, New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center, in association with Milestone Films, will kick off Martin Scorsese Presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema, a must-see 21-film retrospective that will eventually tour the U.S. and Canada.”
“Who better to make a documentary about Pina Bausch than Chantal Akerman?” asks Courtney Fiske at Artforum. “Screening at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the long-running Dance on Camera series, Akerman’s Un jour Pina m’a demandé (One Day Pina Asked, 1983), follows Bausch’s Wuppertal, Germany-based troupe as they bring their compound of dance and theater, tanztheater, to venues in Milan, Venice, and Avignon, France. The two make a fortuitous couple, their collaboration a pared instance of the art-and-dance world crossovers that epitomized New York’s Judson moment of two decades prior.” For more on Dance on Camera 2014, opening today and running through Tuesday, see Gia Kourlas in the New York Times.
Philadelphia. Michael Snow: Photo-Centric opens tomorrow at the Museum of Art and Tyler Green talks to the man himself (62’07”). Then, on Tuesday, back in Brooklyn, at the Issue Project Room: “The trio of Michael Snow, Alan Licht and Aki Onda achieves the all-too-rare alchemy of strong separate identities and shared aesthetics into a holistic unit. Snow, who began his career as a pianist, performs on the CAT synthesizer, with Licht on guitar and Onda on cassette recorders and electronics.”
San Francisco. Vince Keenan files a dispatch from Noir City 12, on through the weekend.
Berlin. The Arsenal’s Hommage à Ingrid Caven begins tomorrow with Caven in town for the first two days.
OBITS
“Alan Bridges, who has died aged 86, was a leading director during the glory days of the BBC, from the mid-60s to the early 70s,” writes Ronald Bergan in the Guardian. “While continuing to have a distinguished television career into the 80s, adeptly moving from the popular to the experimental, from the modern to the classical, and from the underground to the drawing room, Bridges found time to direct eight feature films. One of them, The Hireling (1973), won the coveted Palme d’Or in Cannes (sharing it with Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow). The Hireling was the first and best of Bridges’s films dealing with the repressive nature of class and the conflict between sexual desire and social conventions. There is no cinema in the world more class-conscious than Britain’s, and most of Bridges’s movies are in that long tradition.”
At We Are Movie Geeks, Tom Stockman remembers “underrated horror director” Gordon Hessler. Via Movie City News.
“Hal Sutherland, who co-founded Filmation Studios with the late Lou Scheimer, passed away on January 16th,” reports C. Edwards at Cartoon Brew.
ENDNOTES
Ted Hope, our new CEO, has gathered a collection of links to sites he discovered in 2013 that are now part of his daily virtual route.
Meantime, the Film Doctor has another whopping batch of links.
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