REFLECTIONS ON FILM CULTURE

DAILY | Serge Daney: Three Early Pieces

Who's Minding the Store?

Noting the recent wave of interest in French film critic Serge Daney, David Davidson offers his own “attempt to contribute to this conversation”: his own “translations of Daney’s first three contributions to Cahiers, which I think are insightful to better understand the spirit of Cahiers and his legacy which lives on in the world of film criticism.” The three pieces concern Mark Donskoy, Douglas Sirk, and Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis’s Who’s Minding the Store (1963). And Laurent Kretzschmar notes that Diagonal Thoughts has been posting quite a bit of Daney in translation as well.

“Do We Need Professional Critics?” asks the New York Times. Eight responses so far, including Godfrey Cheshire‘s.

“So what is the best film about filmmaking?” Matt Singer asks, and the Criticwire army responds.

Two new short but sweet pieces by Adrian Martin are out. Writing about the “Best of Australian Film 2012” (so far) for the Monthly, he argues that “the year’s stand-out is a comet that seemed to shoot in from nowhere: Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s Hail.” And for De Filmkrant: “Recently scrolling through Vincente Minnelli’s great musical The Band Wagon (1953) on my laptop, I was drawn to what I had not previously seen in the immortal Fred Astaire/Cyd Charisse duet ‘Dancing in the Dark’—that the choreography is not only all about their hands, but that it builds, with enormous emotional suspense to those pairs of hands touching each other tenderly.”

In other news. John Cleese is writing a memoir, reports the NYT‘s Dave Itzkoff.

Umat Dag’s Kuma and Cate Shortland’s Lore lead the award-winners at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

DVD/Blu-ray. The Masters of Cinema slate for January and February: Josef von Sternberg‘s The Blue Angel (1930), Sacha Guitry’s Poison (1951), Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire (1953), Kaneto Shindô’s Onibaba (1964), and Federico Fellini‘s City of Women (1980).

In the works. “Martin Scorsese will reteam with Bahman Ghobadi as executive producer for the Kurdish-Iranian director’s next U.S.-set film.” Clarence Tsui for the Hollywood Reporter: “Titled 60 Seconds of Us, the film will be set in New York and in Iran, the director said in a Busan International Film Festival press conference for his latest film, Rhino Season.”

Michael Fassbender and Ryan Gosling

Rodrigo Perez at the Playlist: “Having recently wrapped Knights of Cups in L.A., a story about a man’s temptations, celebrity and excess that stars Christian Bale, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Lucas (at least in its principal cast), recluse filmmaker turned speedy auteur, Terrence Malick is now in Austin, Texas shooting his next picture, formerly known as Lawless (Malick was kind enough to let his friend John Hillcoat take the name for his gangster drama that came out late August). Untitled for now, the film follows two intersecting love triangles and is a story of sexual obsession and betrayal set against Austin’s vibrant and colorful music scene. This picture also stars Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, in addition to leads Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, and Haley Bennett.” And possibly Michael Fassbender. Perez explains.

And, as Christopher Bell reports, Olivier Assayas has told the Playlist “that he plans to reteam with Juliette Binoche for the tentatively titled Since Maria which he’s expected to shoot next spring. For the most part Assayas was tight-lipped about the project, but he did stress that after two films set in the 1970s he was ready to do something ‘radically different…. I’ve written it for Juliette Binoche, it’s based on her. A Juliette Binoche movie about Juliette Binoche with Juliette Binoche,’ he explained excitedly with a smile. ‘It will be in English and part of the cast will be American.'”

More browsing? At REFRAME[D], Catherine Grant has launched a “weekly roundup of international news and links in media, film and music research.” The range “will always be shaped by a particular interest in open access scholarly material.”

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