In yesterday’s entry on Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, we heartily recommended Kent Jones‘s essay in the new September/October 2012 issue of Film Comment. Today we need to catch up with more from that issue that’s now online, beginning with Nathan Lee on Keep the Lights On and its director, Ira Sachs, whose 1996 debut (“still his best”), The Delta, “expands on the neorealist technique of situating a drama in, and through, a real-time flow of context and milieu…. Historically aligned with the New Queer Cinema, the film’s energies feel closer to Garrel or the Apichatpong of Tropical Malady, and it would be remembered as sui generis if Sachs hadn’t reworked the template in Forty Shades of Blue (05) and Keep the Lights On.”
“Peter Kubelka watching Arnulf Rainer in presence of Pip Chodorov”
Peter Kubelka, now 78, has announced that he will be premiering “a new film Antiphon (2012) which is part of a new work Monument Film (2012)” at the New York Film Festival on Monday, October 8. Stefan Grissemann has a marvelous piece on the man at work: “He’s sitting at his wooden kitchen table, tackling the 35mm film strips with scissors and glue, as if modern film technology had finally lost all its power, and the art of cinema had returned to the way Georges Méliès created his wondrous films. Kubelka proceeds image by image, patiently splicing together clusters of black or transparent frames, providing them with contrapuntal soundtracks of noise or silence, following his score with minute precision. Arnulf Rainer [1960] and Antiphon each consist of precisely 9,216 frames. Kubelka has to touch every single one of them.”
Also: Stanley Crouch on the newly rediscovered uncut version of Pierre Chenal and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1950/51), screening at NYFF on October 9; Nicolas Rapold on Darezhan Omirbaev’s The Student, John Hillcoat’s Lawless, and Ross McElwee’s Photographic Memory; Violet Lucca on Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s Girl Model, and Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk with Me; Chris Chang on Leos Carax’s Holy Motors and the horror omnibus V/H/S; Jennifer Dworkin on Mads Brügger‘s The Ambassador; Emma Myers on Ursula Meier‘s Sister; Chuck Stephens on the late Chad Everett, and Jesse P. Finnegan on i-docs, “a community of scholars, artists, programmers, activists, and enthusiasts sharing a single-minded devotion to exploring the vanguard of interactive documentary.”
More reading. Catherine Grant alerts us to a new issue of the essential journal Screening the Past, “Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time,” which includes Adrian Martin‘s “Skeleton Key” to Godard‘s Histoire(s) du cinéma, Raymond Durgnat‘s 1984 interview with Stephen Dwoskin, Steve Choe on Golden Lion-winner Kim Ki-duk, and around two dozen more essays and reviews.
Film International has posted Wheeler Winston Dixon‘s piece on film and television after 9/11, a topic also addressed by Adam Ross Rosenthal and Rod Bishop in Screening the Past.
In MUBI’s Notebook, Farran Smith Nehme reviews Jean Grémillon‘s Le ciel est à vous (1944), Lumière d’été (1943) and Remorques (1941).
In other news. As of this writing, critic Ray Carney appears not to have responded to the many calls from the film community to return materials to Mark Rappaport that rightfully belong to the filmmaker. Jon Jost, who knows both personally, has posted details, sparked an ongoing discussion, and issued an open call to “commence an organized, public, social networking process of such a kind that will make Carney’s losses far exceed whatever imagined gains he thinks he secures in keeping Mark’s work in his hands.”
The full program for the Vancouver International Film Festival (September 27 through October 12) is now online; and the Torino Film Festival has announced that it’ll be paying tribute to Miguel Gomes (Tabu) during its 30th edition (November 23 through December 1).
London. BFI Southbank carries on screening the “Ten Greatest Films ever made, according to the Sight & Sound poll,” through October 9.
In the works. Terence Davies will direct Cynthia Nixon in the Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion. From Scott Roxborough in the Hollywood Reporter: “‘I wrote the screenplay with Cynthia in mind,’ Davies said. ‘It was the kind of dream casting you hope for. I never, for a moment, imagined my wishes would materialize. Cynthia has such a strong feeling for the work—and now she is our Emily Dickinson. I’m over the moon.’”
Lists. Wildgrounds blurbs (and posts clips from) some “Essential Japanese Films of the 1960s.”
The Man Booker Prize 2012 shortlist.
Viewing. Twitch has two new trailers, one for Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil, an adaptation of the novel about a sociopathic teacher by Yusuke Kishi, and the other for Feng Xiaogang’s latest historical epic, Back to 1942, featuring Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins.
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