A couple of weeks ago, Cannes announced that Thomas Vinterberg would be presiding over the Un Certain Regard jury this year. Now, that jury’s complete, adding actresses Zhang Ziyi and Ludivine Sagnier, Festival de Rio Director Ilda Santiago, and producer Enrique Gonzalez Macho. And Agnès Varda will preside over the Caméra d’or jury selecting the best first feature from the Official Selection, Critics’ Week, and the Directors’ Fortnight. She’ll be joined by directors Isabelle Coixet and Régis Wargnier and critics Chloé Rolland, Michel Abramowicz, Eric Guirado, and Gwénolé Bruneau.
In other news. That great American marathon known as the Seattle International Film Festival, running this year from May 16 through June 9, has announced its full lineup of 272 features and 175 shorts. Opening with Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, it’ll close with the US premiere of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring.
After all the live tweets and summaries and paraphrases and bootlegs, Steven Soderbergh has given the San Francisco Film Society the go ahead: You can now watch his State of Cinema address and follow along with the transcript.
The new Artforum‘s out, and Matt Porterfield (Hamilton, Putty Hill, I Used to Be Darker) writes up the top ten for this issue. His #1: Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949).
New site! “Critics Round Up is the first movie review aggregator to select critics and publications based on merit instead of popularity. Merit, on this site, is defined as generally being friendly to arthouse and international cinema and resisting stagnant ways of thinking.”
Reading. The Believer‘s posted Lydia Perović‘s wide-ranging conversation with Margarethe von Trotta, whose latest film is Hannah Arendt; Barbara Sukowa, who plays the political theorist, has just won the German Film Award for Best Actress. “The film is the latest addition to her 45-year-long cinematic career which began when she was an actress in what would later be known as the German New Wave, including starring in many films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and her former husband, Volker Schlöndorff…. I have been watching her films since my late teens and if there is one thing that attracts me the most, it’s the air of freedom they have—they’re films in which women breathe. Perhaps von Trotta’s films offer a glimpse of a post-patriarchal cinema.”
Anthony Mandler’s video for Lana Del Rey’s “Ride” (9’45”) “draws significant attention to the aesthetic manifestation of so-called under-classes, more precisely that of ‘white trash,'” argues Karen van den Berg in an essay at Notes on Metamodernism.
David Davidson has translated professor and Positif contributor Pierre Berthomieu‘s Présentation du cycle Steven Spielberg.
New York. Ken Jacobs turns 80 this month, and MoMA and Anthology Film Archives are celebrating. From tomorrow through Sunday, Jacobs will be given Carte Blanche, and Jacobs himself has written the program notes. He’ll be presenting “films from MoMA’s collection that have influenced and inspired him, alongside selections of his own work—film prints, electronic media pieces, Nervous Magic Lantern performances—that represent key moments in his artistic life. The series also includes the world premiere of Jacobs’s four-part Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus cycle of digital works.”
Anthology’s Insistent Clamor Forever: Ken Jacobs Turns 80! is a “robust six-program tribute includes films and videos from every decade of Jacobs’s voluminous back catalog. With so many works to choose from (and with some of Jacobs’s best-known films screening annually at Anthology as part of our Essential Cinema series), we opted for pieces that have either been long neglected (including works originally made on 8mm in the early-to-mid 1960s) or never more than irregularly screened.”
To mark International Workers’ Day, BAMcinématek will be screening Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Class Relations three times today and, for the Notebook, Ted Fendt has translated French critic Louis Seguin’s 1984 essay on the adaptation of Kafka’s Amerika.
“To celebrate the publication of the latest issue of the Millennium Film Journal, there will be a special screening of films discussed in the magazine,” notes Mike Everleth, who has the schedule for Saturday’s event.
London. Michael Witt will deliver his lecture, “Translating Cultures: Jean-Luc Godard, Historian,” at the University of Westminster Boardroom this evening.
In the works. The Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth has the latest on Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. With backing from Warner Bros., shooting—on 35mm, rather than 65mm—begins this month. And PTA is reteaming with Joaquin Phoenix and cinematographer Robert Elswit.
Meantime, if James Gray is going to follow The Immigrant with The Gray Man, a thriller about a former CIA operative who becomes an assassin, he’ll be doing so without Brad Pitt.
You’ll remember that Justin Kurzel will be directing Michael Fassbender in Macbeth. Now Natalie Portman’s signed on to play Lady Macbeth, reports Andreas Wiseman for Screen Daily.
“Colin Firth will appear alongside American actress Emma Stone in Woody Allen’s next film,” reports the Telegraph‘s Alice Vincent. “The 77-year-old director has set the film, which doesn’t have a title yet, in the south of France and shooting will commence this summer.”
“Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) has signed on to direct an untitled four-hour miniseries documentary on the life and music of Frank Sinatra,” reports Ryan Lattanzio at Thompson on Hollywood. The doc’ll premiere on HBO.
Obit. “Deanna Durbin, who as a plucky child movie star with a sweet soprano voice charmed American audiences during the Depression and saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy before she vanished from public view 64 years ago, has died,” reports Aljean Harmetz in the New York Times. “She was 91.” Glenn Kenny reminds us of an anecdote involving Durbin and her rival, Judy Garland, as told by Gore Vidal. More from the Telegraph‘s David Gritten and Farran Nehme.
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