“By the seventeenth century Bellori could write: ‘Artists, abandoning the study of nature, have corrupted art with maniera, by which I mean a fantastic idea, based on practice and not on imitation.’ And then maniera becomes a negative.” Richard Marshall for 3:AM: “Resnais decoupled false and mannered in Last Year in Marienbad… The mannered style is nothing more than Resnais presenting us with our universe and its literal obscurity.”
“Now more than ever, seemingly every show on television replicates the question that Twin Peaks posed when it premiered on this day in 1990: Who killed the girl?” Sarah Marshall for the New Republic: “Again and again television narratives—to say nothing of other forms of media—use a dead girl as a point of entry into a story that the girl herself is powerless to tell. As the corpses multiply in this fictive crime wave, it’s time for us to ponder a more enduring mystery: Why this is one of the only narrative questions we feel so compelled to answer.”
Claude Lanzmann “has worked throughout the life of his Shoah project to give particularity to the dead for the sake of the living,” writes Aaron Cutler in an essay on The Last of the Unjust (2013) for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Richard Linklater, who’s been presenting some of his favorite films of the 80s in Austin, introduces Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980) and sticks around for a Q&A; see, too, Linklater on Godard‘s Every Man for Himself (1980), Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982) and Bob Fosse’s Star 80 (1983)
“If you take into consideration all his two-reel comedy shorts, educational and industrial films, TV episodes and features, it’s estimated that Sam Newfield directed well over 300 films in a career that spanned from 1919 to 1958,” writes Jim Knipfel. “That you’re likely unfamiliar with the name may well have something to do with the fact he made most of his films for Poverty Row studios… “While none of Newfield’s pictures are included on the AFI’s Top 100 (or Top 2,800), he was quietly, and in some cases infamously, responsible for a number of significant cinematic firsts.” Also at the Chiseler: John Strausbaugh on Jimmy Durante.
IN OTHER NEWS
“Kerry Brougher, a veteran art curator who worked at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art for 14 years, has been named the director of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures,” report David Ng and Mike Boehm in the Los Angeles Times. The $300 million museum is slated to open in 2017.
GOINGS ON
New York. “A sexually anarchic romp filled with gerontophilia and quite literal chubby-chasing, Alain Guiraudie’s adventurous 2009 comedy, The King of Escape, is finally receiving a belated week-long run thanks to the high profile of the director’s follow-up feature, the taut cruising-ground thriller Stranger by the Lake,” writes Melissa Anderson for Artforum. “Guiraudie, who began his career in 1990, remains unrivaled in deftly depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero—libidinous fluidity most exuberantly on display in The King of Escape.” More from Diego Costa (Slant, 3.5/4) and Steve Erickson (Gay City News).
Richard Brody‘s latest “DVD of the Week” is Werner Schroeter’s Palermo or Wolfsburg (1980); recently, he’s discussed John Ford‘s The Wings of Eagles (1957), Nicholas Ray‘s We Can’t Go Home Again (1973) and, above, Luchino Visconti‘s Bellissima (1950)
Philadelphia. Sam Adams in the City Paper: “Giving Philadelphians a jump on the months to come, and a shot at a few movies that may not open here at all (don’t hold your breath waiting for Kim Ki-Duk’s Moebius to return), the Philadelphia Film Society’s Spring Showcase crams 17 one-off showings into a long weekend, followed by a more leisurely four-day tribute to Alfonso Cuarón.”
London. Double Visions, an exhibition of work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, opens tomorrow at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery and will be on view through May 17. For Dazed Digital, Matt Mansfield talks with the artist and filmmaker “about censorship, escapism, and speaking in codes.”
IN THE WORKS
“Amazon Studios has two exciting new pilots in the works,” reports Ryan Lattanzio at Thompson on Hollywood. “Just like the last go-round, which yielded four series orders, viewers will provide feedback and decide the fate of the series when the pilots hit Amazon Instant Video later this year.” Whit Stillman‘s The Cosmopolitans, with Chloe Sevigny, Adam Brody and Dree Hemingway, focuses “a group of American expatriates looking for love in Paris… Next up is Hand of God from producer/writer Ben Watkins, producer/director Marc Forster and producer/star Ron Perlman, who stars as a law-bending judge who has a religious awakening and begins hearing voices and receiving visions through his ventilator-bound son.”
In Lennie Abrahamson’s Room, Brie Larson “star as Ma, a woman kidnapped as a teenager who has been held captive for years in a tiny room where she lives with her 5-year-old son Jack,” reports Jen Yamato at Deadline. “Larsen is coming off of her award-winning central turn in last year’s Short Term 12. She’ll next be seen in Paramount’s upcoming The Gambler opposite Mark Wahlberg, Judd Apatow’s Trainwrecked, and DreamWorks’ The Good Luck Of Right Now.”
Agnès Varda‘s Elsa la rose (1965) via The Seventh Art; be sure to turn on the subtitles
“Following 25 years in the music scene and over 10 million records sold, Britpop band Pulp says goodbye in Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets, a SXSW-screened documentary that has just been picked up by Oscilloscope Laboratories,” reports Eric Eidelstein at Indiewire. The Austin Chronicle‘s Marc Savlov: “Director Florian Habicht’s documentary serves less as an appraisal of the band’s history than as a smartly crafted eulogy.” More from Stephen Dalton (Hollywood Reporter), Charles Gant (Variety) and Adam Woodward (Little White Lies).
ENDNOTES
Viewing (49’12”). The Notebook has posted another round of work produced for Harvard at the Gulbenkian, a series of dialogues about Portuguese film and world cinema. Here, the focus is on Paulo Rocha and his “influential masterpiece of poetic neo-realism,” Mudar de vida (1966), followed by a panel discussion.
Listening (15’53”). At the recent Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Seattle, Peter Labuza gave a talk on Andrew Bujalski‘s Computer Chess as a response to Internet 3.0.
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