“Transmedia returns to the New York Film Festival this year with the second edition of NYFF Convergence,” announces the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Brian Brooks. “Spotlighting the intersection of technology and storytelling, the program offers participants the opportunity to experience a curated selection of new immersive storytelling projects.” The three-day program (September 28 through 30) will feature “Experiences,” such as Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill’s Empire Project, “an immersive documentary project that examines the still-unfolding legacy of Dutch colonialism,” presentations, such as Katerina Cizek’s interactive documentary A Short History of the Highrise, and panel discussions.
Writing for Indiewire, Shane Danielsen looks back over his two decades of attending the Venice Film Festival—and, via the recollections of others, even further back. He’s had some memorable experiences (“seeing Beau Travail followed by The Wind Will Carry Us, in 1999, remains one of the best afternoons I’ve ever spent in a movie theater”), but the festival world keeps spinning ’round, and Venice struggles to keep from sinking:
It says something, I think, about the ossified state of Italy that after [Marco] Müller left they foundered for a replacement and finally re-appointed Alberto Barbera, recalled from the National Cinema Museum in Turin, and director of the Mostra from 1998 until 2002, when he ran afoul of then-Minister of Culture Giuliano Urbani, one of Silvio Berlusconi’s creatures. By which I mean nothing against Barbera—who is by most accounts a decent and knowledgeable man (I’ve never met him personally)—but rather about the lack of any better options than someone who’d already done the job.
But this is Venice, and this is Italy—a country of legendary incapability and sanctioned corruption, the preserve of a corrupt elite and a population too lazy, superficial and self-interested to care. Venice will never rival Cannes again, but it at least remains the most beautiful city in the world—a magnificent, improbable ruin that serves as a perfect metaphor for the cultural event it hosts, and to which I return every year, older, certainly, but no less hopeful.
Peter Bogdanovich has posted the fourth collection of notes he kept on the films by Raoul Walsh that he saw between 1952 and 1970.
At McSweeney’s, Chris Okum presents “An Excerpt from ‘Some Instructions to the New Guy Concerning the Preparation and Presentation of My French Toast’ by Stanley Kubrick.”
17 Australian directors and a gadzillion Australian stars collaborate on an adaptation of Tim Winton’s novel, The Turning
In the works. Ben Wheatley is “slated to direct Amy Jump’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, in which the tenants of an affluent self-sustaining building degenerate into a violent, tribal society,” reports Simon de Bruyn at Twitch.
“The Playlist has learned that Matt Damon has joined Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in a small, undisclosed role,” reports Kevin Jagernauth. “Meanwhile, Damon looks to have found what will be his directorial debut: A Murder Foretold, penned by Academy Award-winning Argo screenwriter Chris Terrio. The film is based off a 2008 New Yorker article by David Grann, that tells the true story of a man who is gunned down in the escalating violence in Guatemala, and leaves behind a videotape after his death implicating the president, his wife, and other close aides in his killing.”
Screen‘s Andreas Wiseman reports that Rooney Mara’s replacing Mia Wasikowska to star opposite Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes‘s Carol.
Brian De Palma at the Film Society of Lincoln Center
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