The editors of Photogénie introduce the new second issue, “The Everyday (Once More)”: “An ever-growing field of study in cultural studies and cultural theory, everydayness is also still a governing aesthetic principle behind much of what is most exciting in contemporary art cinema: be it in political cinemas incorporating the precepts of new historiographies, like the French ‘Annales’ school, tracing collective perception through anecdotal accounts of everyday life; in slow or ‘contemplative’ cinemas enacting temporality and harking back to modernist or avant-gardist experiments with duration; in contemporary instances of surrealist cinema, discovering the marvelous and absurd in the everyday; in mumblecore anti-narratives hinging on aimless conversation; in the recent interest, both artistic and academic, in home movies and amateur filmmaking; or in observational, ethnographic or personal documentaries that start from lived experience.”
Featured in this issue are Michael Guarneri on Lav Diaz, Guido Kirsten on the Romanian New Wave, Maria Palacios Cruz on Ben Rivers (in particular, Two Years at Sea [2011] and A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness [2013], co-directed with Ben Russell), Muriel Andrin on “filmic miniatures” (we begin in the kitchen), Matthew Barrington on Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Heike Klippel on Todd Haynes‘s Safe (1995) and Fassbinder‘s Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970) and Tom Paulus: “I feel much of what we today refer to as ‘slow cinema,’ typified by its ‘hunger’ for reality and the everyday, has been incorrectly framed in almost exclusively phenomenological or, more rigidly, Bazinian terms.” The wide-ranging piece begins with early French film theory before heading into a discussion of work by Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong, Hong Sang-soo and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
MORE READING
At Movie Morlocks, R. Emmet Sweeney reviews Samuel Fuller‘s rediscovered novel, Brainquake, in which “the whole world is controlled by the rackets, with little hope for those who toil under its thumb.”
Trailer for the new restoration of Fritz Lang‘s M (1931)
Talking to Glenn Kenny about his new book, Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor: Greg Cwik (Criticwire) and Adam Schartoff (Filmwax Radio).
Charles Taylor for Criterion: “Watching Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001) is something like how it must have been to read Henry Miller in the thirties—the shock and the exhilaration, and the turn-on.”
“All art is autobiographical, but it seems extra fitting that Catherine Breillat, who has made a career of capturing her characters at their most vulnerable and reprehensible, would want to directly recreate her own worst (and most public) humiliation for the screen.” Breillat fan (and White Reindeer director) Zach Clark reviews Abuse of Weakness at the Talkhouse Film.
Stuart Cooper’s The Disappearance (1977) “is one of those odd productions that ought to have all the ingredients to make a very memorable film but which never works as well as you might hope,” writes John Coulthart. “The screenplay was by Paul Mayersberg, written between his two films with Nicolas Roeg, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Eureka (1983); there’s a great cast: Donald Sutherland, David Warner, Peter Bowles, David Hemmings (who also produced), John Hurt, Virginia McKenna, Christopher Plummer; Kubrick’s cameraman of the 1970s, John Alcott, photographed the film shortly after winning an Oscar for his work on Barry Lyndon; the source material is very good,” but “the main flaw is that Mayersberg and Cooper stripped away the heart of [Derek] Marlowe’s novel without adding much of their own to compensate for the loss.”
At 333sound, RJ Wheaton looks at the movies’ influence on Portishead.
IN OTHER NEWS
September 5 will be Bill Murray Day in Toronto. Kevin Jagernauth has details at the Playlist.
Sheila O’Malley for Criterion on Gena Rowlands
On a related note, Variety‘s Justin Chang has what seems to be, to this outsider, a fair and well-reported guide to the competition—in some ways healthy, in some ways not—between the three major festivals of early fall, Toronto, Telluride and Venice.
GOINGS ON
New York. “It’s not every day a director comes on stage in Buddhist monk’s garb and slippers, but such was Patrick Lung Kong’s refreshingly idiosyncratic appearance Saturday night at Queens’ Museum of the Moving Image, two days into a two weekend retro of his work. To his right was Tsui Hark, who himself reshaped the Hong Kong film industry multiple times.” Vadim Rizov reports for Filmmaker.
“Of the many edifying pleasures of Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s Red Hollywood, the first and most striking is the notion that anything like a ‘Red Hollywood’ existed in the first place,” writes Benjamin Crais for Film Comment. The theatrical run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is on through tomorrow.
In the Voice, Danny King recommends keeping up with the NewFilmmakers series running at Anthology Film Archives.
And you’ll find more recommendations from the L.
London. Hans Hillmann: Film Posters opens tomorrow at Kemistry Gallery and will be on view through September 27.
IN THE WORKS
“Simon Pegg is making a new film with long-term collaborator Edgar Wright, and could be set to film a whole new trilogy with the British filmmaker,” reports the Guardian‘s Ben Child.
At the AV Club, Katie Rife reports that Johnny Depp will be appearing in Kevin Smith’s Yoga Hosers, “a movie spun off from a movie spun off from a podcast spun off from the fact that stoners will laugh at anything. Yoga Hosers is the tale of two Canadian convenience store clerks (surprise, surprise) charged with stopping an ancient evil using all ‘seven Chakras.'”
OBIT
From the Hollywood Reporter‘s Mike Barnes: “Michael A. Hoey, who wrote the screenplays for a pair of Elvis Presley films and was the architect behind the 1966 cult science-fiction movie The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, has died. He was 79.”
ENDNOTE
Listening (187’11”). Fellini Satyricon (1969) is the topic of the latest episode of The Projection Booth.
Allan Arkush on Roger Corman‘s The Trip (1967)
More listening, via Jason Toon at Dangerous Minds. “Bold Venture is the radio adventure series starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall that originally aired in 1951-52. Bogart plays hotel and boat owner Slate Shannon, and Bacall plays his ward, Sailor Duval.” You’ll find 57 half-hour episodes at the Internet Archive.
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