Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSDahomey.Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024), a documentary about the repatriation of artifacts plundered by French colonists to the present-day Republic of Benin, won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. It is only the second film from the African continent to take the festival’s top prize.The Berlinale has filed criminal charges against activists who hacked the festival’s Instagram account on Sunday to post calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which the festival deemed “anti-Semitic.”The festival has also released a statement disavowing the acceptance speeches of award winners who used their platform to speak out against the occupation and war. Such speeches included those by Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, whose Direct Action won Best Film in the Encounters section, and by Yuval Abraham,...
- 2/29/2024
- MUBI
What Sets Us Free? New German Cinema is now showing on Mubi in most countries.The All-Round Reduced Personality.In September 1968, filmmaker Helke Sander delivered a spirited speech to the men of the powerful Socialist German Student Association (Sds). She demanded equal rights for women in all matters. How could women bring their perspective to political discourse when they were expected to organize the private lives of revolutionaries and raise the children? When she confronted the progressive men of the Sds with their sexism, Sander earned derisive laughter. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of upheaval and rebellion in Germany, but the male heroes of the anti-authoritarian student revolt had no interest in challenging their patriarchal dominance. As they fought against the established institutions with teach-ins, happenings and street protests, their wives, girlfriends, and lovers resisted male chauvinism at all levels of society. Film became an important means of...
- 8/2/2023
- MUBI
Tales from Planet Kolkata.The essay film has always been a shapeshifting entity. It is an offshoot of the documentary mode that fully employs the potential of montage, with various texts and personal reflections interfacing and proposing new ideas, much like written counterparts. It’s a genre that defies immediate and digestible definition in most cases, with Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, Thom Andersen, and Orson Welles employing different strategies in their respective canonical examples. In the United Kingdom, the yearly Essay Film Festival champions and explores the form, often incorporating study days and seminars. This year, the festival presented three densely structured and unique films by Ruchir Joshi, an Indian cultural writer and novelist. In the early 1990s, Joshi produced two short essay films focused on the Indian cities of Ahmedabad and his hometown of Calcutta, and an expansive feature concerning the nomadic Baul musicians in West Bengal.
- 5/19/2023
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSJeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.At last, Sight & Sound have released the results of the 2022 Greatest Films of All Time critics’ poll. 1,639 ballots later, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) has risen to the number-one spot, accompanied by a new piece from Laura Mulvey. The New York Times offers a useful interactive feature to unpack how the rankings have evolved over time.The American documentarian Julia Reichert—best known for Growing Up Female (1971), Union Maids (1976), and the Oscar-winning American Factory (2019)—died last week of cancer at age 76. Eric Hynes wrote an elegant appreciation of her work in a 2020 piece for Crosscuts, published by the Walker Art Center: Consistently through half a century of filmmaking, Reichert spends time with people.
- 12/6/2022
- MUBI
No matter what your image of modern China, it’s nowhere near complete until you’ve seen it through New York-based, China-observing director Jessica Kingdon’s eyes. Working in the mold of photographers Lauren Greenfield (“Queen of Versailles”) and Edward Burtynsky (“Manufactured Landscapes”), the Tribeca Film Festival winner trains her camera on the impacts of China’s fast-exploding economy in the Oscar-nominated “Ascension,” leaving audiences with striking and frequently absurd scenes burned into their imaginations. Without contextualizing what we’re seeing, the hi-def collage asks us to make sense of a society even more stratified and excessive than our own.
Kingdon’s curiosity spans the class divide, from assembly lines where women prepare silicone sex dolls for demanding clients to private dining rooms where nouveau-riche elites learn how to eat a banana with fork and knife. The title, taken from a poem written by her great-grandfather Zheng Ze, refers not...
Kingdon’s curiosity spans the class divide, from assembly lines where women prepare silicone sex dolls for demanding clients to private dining rooms where nouveau-riche elites learn how to eat a banana with fork and knife. The title, taken from a poem written by her great-grandfather Zheng Ze, refers not...
- 3/27/2022
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
The first film has several names, all variations on a theme: Workers Leaving the Lumières Factory, Lunch Hour at the Lumière Factory, Dinner Hour at the Factory Gate of M. Lumière at Lyon. In the short clip of workers streaming out the doors of the Lumières’ factory in Lyon, France, we see men and women and one dog bursting from the doors of the factory. In all but one of the film’s titles, the fact that most of the workers leaving the factory are women is not mentioned. Most often, both men and women are folded into one gender-neutral term: worker. In the century since, another theme formed particularly in American films. It was a variation on a title about workers, but with a significant qualifier. Working Girl (1988), Match Factory Girl (1990), Working Girls (1931 and 1986), Working Woman (2019), Support the Girls (2018). While women being in the workplace were a given in the Lumières’ film,...
- 11/29/2021
- MUBI
International documentary film festival IDFA has revealed the first films selected for its 34th edition, which runs Nov. 17-28 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. These are the program curated by the event’s guest of honor, the German filmmaker, media artist and writer Hito Steyerl, and a selection of four films directed by Armenia’s Artavazd Pelechian, who will receive IDFA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Both helmers will attend the festival in person.
With her curated program of 14 titles, Steyerl offers a window into her world of film and media art. Helping us to understand her own body of work, Steyerl presents a lineup of dissident filmmakers who, each in their own way, have shaped the art of political documentary cinema.
Selected films include “Videograms of a Revolution,” the cult masterpiece by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, in a nod to Steyerl’s long-held admiration of Farocki, who she has written about,...
With her curated program of 14 titles, Steyerl offers a window into her world of film and media art. Helping us to understand her own body of work, Steyerl presents a lineup of dissident filmmakers who, each in their own way, have shaped the art of political documentary cinema.
Selected films include “Videograms of a Revolution,” the cult masterpiece by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, in a nod to Steyerl’s long-held admiration of Farocki, who she has written about,...
- 9/21/2021
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
IDFA will present its lifetime achievement award to revered Armenian director Artavazd Peleshyan.
International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) will present its lifetime achievement award to revered Armenian director Artavazd Peleshyan whose essay films have had a strong influence on the work on filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Atom Egoyan. IDFA is set to take place from November 17-28 in Amsterdam.
Now in his 80s, Peleshyan is expected to make it to Amsterdam for this year’s festival. His latest film La Nature, 15 years in the making, will also be part of the official programme.
“He is coming back with...
International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) will present its lifetime achievement award to revered Armenian director Artavazd Peleshyan whose essay films have had a strong influence on the work on filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Atom Egoyan. IDFA is set to take place from November 17-28 in Amsterdam.
Now in his 80s, Peleshyan is expected to make it to Amsterdam for this year’s festival. His latest film La Nature, 15 years in the making, will also be part of the official programme.
“He is coming back with...
- 8/17/2021
- by Geoffrey Macnab
- ScreenDaily
Relativity (1966)My long-awaited first visit to the International Film Festival Oberhausen was canceled last year, due to the pandemic, so I was thrilled to finally experience the festival this year, albeit via streaming. The 67th edition took place in a dual format, online and with somewhat expanded in-person screenings in Oberhausen (though the online offerings themselves were ample). Founded in 1954, Oberhausen played a decisive role in fostering avant-garde and experimental filmmaking during the Cold War, when much of Eastern Europe suffered the brunt of censorship. It wasn’t uncommon for films that remained unscreened or were banned in their native countries to premiere and win prizes at Oberhausen, and so be saved from critical and public oblivion. Given its longstanding legacy, it was invigorating to see Oberhausen bring a wide-ranging historical perspective to its online platform. Such emphasis helped avoid a common pitfall at other, more industry-driven festivals, whose online...
- 8/5/2021
- MUBI
The series Phantoms Among Us: The Films of Christian Petzold starts on Mubi on May 13, 2021 in many countries.Sooner or later, most interviews with Christian Petzold recur to literature as a pool of inspiration, the visceral experience of books that he synthesizes into on screen narratives. Thickening his films with references, he carefully constructs audacious architectures of ideas and aesthetic impressions, so that a “great desire for cinema” fuses with the legacy of his teacher, Harun Farocki, well known for his documentaries and essay films. Petzold’s “Spielfilme” can thus have an intellectual bent that reflects on “concepts [...] in such a way that they support one another, that each becomes articulated through its configuration with the others,” as Adorno wrote about the Essay as Form. Disparate elements, he described enigmatically, “crystallize as a configuration of their motion,” but do not come across as rigidly discursive. However, the depth suggested by...
- 5/12/2021
- MUBI
In Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, sound technician Jack Terry makes a film to seek the truth. By splicing together a series of photos of a political assassination, and syncing them with his own audio recordings captured on location, he reveals a disguised gunshot immediately preceding the moment of a fatal tire blowout. Terry’s detective work is often read as a metaphor for filmmaking, and how films fashion meaning from disparate sources of information. But there is another way to view him—not as a filmmaker, but a forensic specialist. A flashback reveals that Terry once worked on a government commission against police corruption, bugging agents for sting operations. His use of film technology to expose crimes has little to do with the creative process: this is filmmaking not as artistic ideation, but as applied technique. Where is the line between art and research? Between creating narratives and creating evidence?...
- 5/11/2021
- MUBI
Casa Isho is a small art gallery, nestled within a landscape of tall glass buildings not that far away from the center of Timișoara—a construction which would have been unimaginable thirty years ago, when Harun Farocki first set foot in the town together with Andrei Ujică while researching their seminal 1992 work, Videograms of a Revolution. The film’s first minutes are set in the town which laid the spark for what would become the Romanian Revolution, which would topple the local communist regime at the cost of over 1000 lives—an event that Farocki and Ujică reconstructed from both official and amateur footage, playing with the tangled-up chronology, and then deconstructed in terms of its mediality. Videograms was Farocki’s last major feature film before he migrated into a successful career on the modern arts circuit together with his partner, Antje Ehmann. All of which ties together into the symbolic...
- 2/23/2021
- MUBI
In just over a half-decade’s time, Theo Anthony has established himself as one of the preeminent voices in nonfiction cinema. Following a pair of short films, the Baltimore-based filmmaker rose to prominence with his debut feature Rat Film (2016), an incendiary look at the relationship between his city’s history of racial segregation and its rampant rodent infestation, and the medium-length 30 for 30 documentary Subject to Review (2019), a dizzyingly inventive investigation into the use of instant replay technology in tennis. Anthony’s new feature, All Light, Everywhere, comes five years after his first, but, like Rat Film and Subject to Review before it, the director’s latest takes as its thesis the deficiencies of both the human eye and the moving image to properly account for the truth of the lived moment.Inspired by the unlawful murder of Freddie Gray, All Light, Everywhere takes up the use of surveillance technology at the civic and institutional level,...
- 2/3/2021
- MUBI
“I don’t think that the Second Amendment is ever going to get changed,” said U.S. documentary filmmaker Todd Chandler at Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival during an online Q&a on Sunday, admitting it’s an intense time to be addressing such questions just before the election. His film “Bulletproof” is screening at the festival.
“I don’t think I felt hopeful or hopeless [when making this film], I felt like I hopefully succeeded in making something that can at least prompt some questioning. I feel cautiously hopeful of some small, small shift away from the impending fascism,” he added.
In “Bulletproof,” shown at the Czech event after its premiere at Hot Docs in Canada, where it won the award for the Emerging International Filmmaker, Chandler shows U.S. society in the era of school shootings. Traveling all over the country, from Texas, Las Vegas, New York, Chicago to Silicon Valley in California and rural Missouri,...
“I don’t think I felt hopeful or hopeless [when making this film], I felt like I hopefully succeeded in making something that can at least prompt some questioning. I feel cautiously hopeful of some small, small shift away from the impending fascism,” he added.
In “Bulletproof,” shown at the Czech event after its premiere at Hot Docs in Canada, where it won the award for the Emerging International Filmmaker, Chandler shows U.S. society in the era of school shootings. Traveling all over the country, from Texas, Las Vegas, New York, Chicago to Silicon Valley in California and rural Missouri,...
- 11/2/2020
- by Marta Balaga
- Variety Film + TV
Stricken with Covid-19 earlier this year, celebrated German filmmaker Christian Petzold has been a busy cinephile in quarantine. But during a recent New York Film Festival podcast promoting the premiere of his latest film “Undine,” he didn’t mince words about his experiences using streaming platforms that, according to him, don’t offer much in the way of curation. (The Film Stage first picked up details out of the conversation.)
“I make a film festival on my own based on my DVD library, and this was the best festival I have ever been to,” he said. “I have seen two Ozu movies, one Bresson movie, three Chabrol movies… I hope in the future we have curated programs, really curated programs. Therefore I hate Amazon and Netflix. It’s not curated. I have a headache after.”
Meanwhile, he’s prepping a new project. Petzold has explored themes of desire in his past films,...
“I make a film festival on my own based on my DVD library, and this was the best festival I have ever been to,” he said. “I have seen two Ozu movies, one Bresson movie, three Chabrol movies… I hope in the future we have curated programs, really curated programs. Therefore I hate Amazon and Netflix. It’s not curated. I have a headache after.”
Meanwhile, he’s prepping a new project. Petzold has explored themes of desire in his past films,...
- 10/10/2020
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
After completing his “Love in the Times of Oppressive Systems” thematic trilogy with Barbara, Phoenix, and Transit, Christian Petzold is embarking on a new trio of films inspired by German myths and the elements. The first, the water-inspired tale Undine, finds him reteaming with his Transit stars Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski. Ahead of tonight’s 58th New York Film Festival premiere, Petzold participated in a Q&a with Dennis Lim where German master revealed new details on the forthcoming second film in the trilogy.
“I’m now writing on fire. The Red Sky is the name of the next movie, but I will realize the movie when the pandemic is gone, not before,” revealed the director, who was stricken by Covid-19 earlier this year. “It’s also something to do with love and kissing and homosexual love too. I want to see bodies, and so on. I can’t...
“I’m now writing on fire. The Red Sky is the name of the next movie, but I will realize the movie when the pandemic is gone, not before,” revealed the director, who was stricken by Covid-19 earlier this year. “It’s also something to do with love and kissing and homosexual love too. I want to see bodies, and so on. I can’t...
- 10/9/2020
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Museum of Modern Art
“It’s All in Me” surveys black heroines onscreen.
Films by Fassbinder, Mike Leigh, and more play in a series on television films.
Metrograph
The earth is ending and there’s nothing we can do, but “Climate Crisis Parables” will send you out with some great movies.
“To Hong Kong with...
Museum of Modern Art
“It’s All in Me” surveys black heroines onscreen.
Films by Fassbinder, Mike Leigh, and more play in a series on television films.
Metrograph
The earth is ending and there’s nothing we can do, but “Climate Crisis Parables” will send you out with some great movies.
“To Hong Kong with...
- 2/20/2020
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
One of the enduring peculiarities about the so-called Berlin School of contemporary German filmmaking is that, among the various filmmakers who have been associated with the group, the work they produce exhibits great stylistic variety. What seems to unite them, apart from a few biographical particularities, is an intellectual orientation toward filmmaking, an attitude toward structure and representation that nevertheless yields vastly divergent results. For instance, Christophe Hochhäusler and Nicolas Wackerbarth have both been involved in the foundational film magazine Revolver, a publication that displays a specific orientation toward both German and international art cinema—a throughline that runs between the historical materialism of Harun Farocki and Romuald Karmakur and the somewhat more abstract lyricism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. But a comparison of Hochhäusler and Wackerbarth’s films reveals radically different formal approaches.A Voluntary Year, the recent film collaboration between directors Ulrich Köhler and Henner Winckler, provides a unique case...
- 2/14/2020
- MUBI
Atarrabi & Mikelats
Us born French filmmaker Eugène Green’s eighth feature will be Atarrabi & Mikelats, produced by Julien Naveau of Noodles Production and the Dardennes are onboard as well. Green’s cast will be mostly newcomers, including Saia and Lukas Hiriat as the titular leads plus Ainara Leemans, Thierry Biscary and Pablo Lasa. Green will be reuniting with his Dp Raphael O’Byrne. Green’s 2003 title The Living World premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, and he’s competed three times for the Golden Leopard in Locarno – 2007’s omnibus Memories, 2009’s The Portuguese Nun and 2014’s La Sapienza.…...
Us born French filmmaker Eugène Green’s eighth feature will be Atarrabi & Mikelats, produced by Julien Naveau of Noodles Production and the Dardennes are onboard as well. Green’s cast will be mostly newcomers, including Saia and Lukas Hiriat as the titular leads plus Ainara Leemans, Thierry Biscary and Pablo Lasa. Green will be reuniting with his Dp Raphael O’Byrne. Green’s 2003 title The Living World premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, and he’s competed three times for the Golden Leopard in Locarno – 2007’s omnibus Memories, 2009’s The Portuguese Nun and 2014’s La Sapienza.…...
- 12/31/2019
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Straub-Huillet's Too Early, Too Late (1982) is showing on Mubi from August 6 – September 4, 2019.If there is an actor in Too Early, Too Late, it is the landscape. This actor has a text to recite: History, of which it is the living witness. The actor performs with a certain amount of talent: the cloud that passes, a breaking loose of birds, a bouquet of trees bent by the wind, a break in the clouds; this is what the landscape’s performance consists of. This kind of performing is meteorological. One hasn’t seen anything like it for quite some time. Since the silent period, to be precise.—Serge Daney, Cinemeteorology, Libération, 1982In Straub-Huillet films, humans stand erect and impassive like statues, possessed by the spirits of the past. The...
- 8/5/2019
- MUBI
Everyone ElseThe so-called “Berlin School” has gone from strength to strength in recent years. This new wave of precise, formalist cinema has been noteworthy for several reasons, one of them being the fact that most of its practitioners are currently making their best, most fully realized works to date. Despite a critical tendency, across virtually all media, to make a fetish of the “early work,” there appears to be a consensus that these German auteurs are working at the height of their powers.This certainly accounts for the significantly heightened profile of several of the Berlin School filmmakers in recent years. In a rare conjunction between critics and the film business, more and more of these films are being distributed in North America and being seen by not-inconsiderable groups of viewers. Thus far, the highest profile film from the “movement” over here has been Maren Ade’s oddball comedy Toni Erdmann,...
- 5/7/2019
- MUBI
Photo © Corinna MehlA standalone group exhibition, curated to complement the films selected for Berlin International Film Festival’s Forum section, the similarly independent Forum Expanded is an alternative to the festival’s own most alternative and risk taking cinema, a deviation from the daily Cinestar-CinemaxX back-forth feedback loop through the Potsdamer Platz thoroughfare, taking you 5 kilometers north to Kulturquartier. A crematorium built at the turn of the 20th century and in operation until the beginning of the 21st, Kulturquartier still stands adjacent to a cemetery, though instead of a columbarium, is now home to the Harun Farocki Institut, the archives of Arsenal, and, for the month of February, Forum Expanded’s “Antikino: The Siren’s Echo Chamber.” There, fourteen individual works are installed side-by-side, not within four-wall black boxes but in open plan, gathered to coalesce and collect together around this theme—under title and subtitle—before freely diverging again into counterpoints,...
- 3/21/2019
- MUBI
Aside from their Berlinale Panel on the Perspectives of Young Filmmakers, Dffb had one of the most fun parties of the festival as the school’s director Ben Gibson and the staff mingled with film students and young filmmakers from around the world.
Berlinale Panel on the perspectives of young filmmakers covered such issues as:
What are the possibilities for up-and-coming producers to establish themselves independently on the market beyond the first and second films? What are the biggest obstacles? What do the young people’s promotion strategies of the different actors do? Which changes are necessary? And last but not least: How important is the offspring for the future of the German film industry and for German film?
The panel engaged in dialogue about the current status quo and exchanged perspectives, and also developed ideas that could give young talent the opportunities to shape the industry in the future creatively.
Berlinale Panel on the perspectives of young filmmakers covered such issues as:
What are the possibilities for up-and-coming producers to establish themselves independently on the market beyond the first and second films? What are the biggest obstacles? What do the young people’s promotion strategies of the different actors do? Which changes are necessary? And last but not least: How important is the offspring for the future of the German film industry and for German film?
The panel engaged in dialogue about the current status quo and exchanged perspectives, and also developed ideas that could give young talent the opportunities to shape the industry in the future creatively.
- 2/18/2019
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Christian Petzold: The State We Are In is showing at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center from November 30 – December 13, 2018.JerichowIt begins with a train. Sometimes it’s a bus. A few films center their action in a car. This is not to say we will watch a road trip or the story of a journey. The newest film opens with a train escape, but revolves around booking passage on an international ship. Characters pass through space to evade, to rejoin and to hide. Movement through landscape is essential, but rarely do characters succeed in reaching anywhere new. Frames are precise; form is economical. The value of money and labor, often dehumanizing, are vital to acquire. Lead characters, often women, are oddly both familiar and alien. They live among us, yet seem unreachable and unreadable. His films are both self-reflexive and of the world; they indicate a particularly German trauma and crisis.
- 11/30/2018
- MUBI
Transit star Franz Rogowski on Christian Petzold: "Christian has a deep connection with ghosts. And ghosts keep coming back in his work over the past 20 years." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
The Film Society of Lincoln Center Christian Petzold retrospective The State We Are In includes films with actors Nina Hoss, Benno Fürmann and Ronald Zehrfeld, shot by Petzold's longtime cinematographer Hans Fromm.
Franz Rogowski as Georg in Transit: "Yeah, he's stuck. I mean, bureaucratic hell got him."
Harun Farocki's The Interview, along with Nothing Ventured and Petzold's latest, Transit, starring Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer with Barbara Auer, Lilien Batman, Alex Brendemühl, Godehard Giese, Maryam Zaree, and Matthias Brandt (Main Slate selection of the 56th New York Film Festival), will also screen in the programme.
Transit positions Anna Seghers's novel (originally published in 1944) about a young, nameless man who escaped a concentration camp and travels through France in 1942 in the hopes to.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center Christian Petzold retrospective The State We Are In includes films with actors Nina Hoss, Benno Fürmann and Ronald Zehrfeld, shot by Petzold's longtime cinematographer Hans Fromm.
Franz Rogowski as Georg in Transit: "Yeah, he's stuck. I mean, bureaucratic hell got him."
Harun Farocki's The Interview, along with Nothing Ventured and Petzold's latest, Transit, starring Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer with Barbara Auer, Lilien Batman, Alex Brendemühl, Godehard Giese, Maryam Zaree, and Matthias Brandt (Main Slate selection of the 56th New York Film Festival), will also screen in the programme.
Transit positions Anna Seghers's novel (originally published in 1944) about a young, nameless man who escaped a concentration camp and travels through France in 1942 in the hopes to.
- 11/11/2018
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Infinite Fest is a monthly column by festival programmer and film critic Eric Allen Hatch, author of the recent “Why I Am Hopeful” article for Filmmaker Magazine, tackling the state of cinema as expressed by North American film festivals.DiamantinoCinephilia is a subculture, and we need to represent it that way. I’m not asking you to wear tattered garments held together by safety pins, or accessorize clocks as necklaces. We don’t even need to stop trusting anyone over 30. But we do need to more aggressively filter cynical corporate product marketed to us—and more effectively proselytize for the authentic experiences that make film an art form rather than merely an industry. This cultural moment offers an abundance of that authenticity. Returning home from a week at Toronto International Film Festival, an annual pilgrimage for two decades, followed directly by another week in Maine for Camden International Film Festival,...
- 11/5/2018
- MUBI
Mubi is exclusively showing João Moreira Salles In the Intense Now (2017) from May 3 - June 2, 2018 in the series May '68: When Everything Seemed Possible.João Moreira Salles’ essay film In the Intense Now is playing on Mubi as part of a May ‘68 double-bill alongside Romain Goupil’s Half a Life. Salles’ film explores the implications of well-known revolutionary images; questioning the familiar calling cards of May ‘68’s political upheaval. A meditative film that stands out against the familiar narrative, In the Intense Now focuses not only on the events in France, but on other political events of the same milieu: those occurring in Prague, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro. The film’s necessary pessimism calls the past as we know it into question, reminding viewers that we often experience these events second-hand via a series of provided images and figureheads that might require re-assessment. On the other hand, the...
- 5/10/2018
- MUBI
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Bam
Films by Elaine May, Yvonne Rainer, and Shirley Clarke play under “A Different Picture: Women Filmmakers in the New Hollywood Era, 1967—1980.”
Metrograph
As an Emile de Antonio retro ends, four of Paul Schrader’s best films screen.
Quad Cinema
The long-longed-for Alan Rudolph retrospective continues and mustn’t be missed.
Museum of Modern Art...
Bam
Films by Elaine May, Yvonne Rainer, and Shirley Clarke play under “A Different Picture: Women Filmmakers in the New Hollywood Era, 1967—1980.”
Metrograph
As an Emile de Antonio retro ends, four of Paul Schrader’s best films screen.
Quad Cinema
The long-longed-for Alan Rudolph retrospective continues and mustn’t be missed.
Museum of Modern Art...
- 5/4/2018
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Quad Cinema
The long-longed-for Alan Rudolph retrospective has begun.
Led by Catherine Deneueve, André Téchiné’s Scene of the Crime begins a one-week run.
Museum of Modern Art
“Japan’s Greatest Cinematographer,” a retrospective of Kazuo Miyagawa running concurrently with Japan Society, has its final weekend.
Anthology Film Archives
The essential Harun Farocki retro continues.
Quad Cinema
The long-longed-for Alan Rudolph retrospective has begun.
Led by Catherine Deneueve, André Téchiné’s Scene of the Crime begins a one-week run.
Museum of Modern Art
“Japan’s Greatest Cinematographer,” a retrospective of Kazuo Miyagawa running concurrently with Japan Society, has its final weekend.
Anthology Film Archives
The essential Harun Farocki retro continues.
- 4/26/2018
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Film Society of Lincoln Center
The Us’s first complete retrospective of Czech animation master Jiri Trnka has begun.
Quad Cinema
One of France’s most iconic performers, Anne Wiazemsky, is given a retrospective.
Liquid Sky must be seen to be believed, and it can now be seen in a 4K restoration
In celebrating their first-year anniversary,...
Film Society of Lincoln Center
The Us’s first complete retrospective of Czech animation master Jiri Trnka has begun.
Quad Cinema
One of France’s most iconic performers, Anne Wiazemsky, is given a retrospective.
Liquid Sky must be seen to be believed, and it can now be seen in a 4K restoration
In celebrating their first-year anniversary,...
- 4/20/2018
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Museum of Modern Art
Discover “Japan’s Greatest Cinematographer” in a retrospective of Kazuo Miyagawa, running concurrently with Japan Society.
Quad Cinema
Liquid Sky must be seen to be believed, and it can now be seen in a 4K restoration
In celebrating their first-year anniversary, the Quad offers films by Buñuel, Schrader, Oshima and more.
Museum of Modern Art
Discover “Japan’s Greatest Cinematographer” in a retrospective of Kazuo Miyagawa, running concurrently with Japan Society.
Quad Cinema
Liquid Sky must be seen to be believed, and it can now be seen in a 4K restoration
In celebrating their first-year anniversary, the Quad offers films by Buñuel, Schrader, Oshima and more.
- 4/13/2018
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Quad Cinema
Some of the best films ever made are about Joan of Arc, and they’re now playing at the Quad.
Films starring Alain Delon and American tough guys are screening.
Metrograph
Retrospectives on Grace Jones and Morris Engel take place, while Jafar Panahi’s debut, The White Balloon, plays on Saturday and Sunday.
Quad Cinema
Some of the best films ever made are about Joan of Arc, and they’re now playing at the Quad.
Films starring Alain Delon and American tough guys are screening.
Metrograph
Retrospectives on Grace Jones and Morris Engel take place, while Jafar Panahi’s debut, The White Balloon, plays on Saturday and Sunday.
- 4/6/2018
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Barbara and Phoenix director Christian Petzold returned to Berlinale this year with Transit, without regular muse Nina Hoss for the first time since 2005’s Ghosts. Rather, the drama centers on Georg (Franz Rogowski), an escapee of a concentration camp who flees Paris just as the Nazis march in as the film depicts his few weeks in the French port city of Marseille before his final trip out of the continent. Despite the film taking place during the era of the Second World War, Petzold boldly decides to ignore the historical setting, costume- and production-wise, rather having the feel of the present day.
“Local boy Christian Petzold’s audacious retelling of Anna Seghers’s World War II-set novel about refugees escaping Nazi-controlled France is a strange, beguiling creation that will be hard to beat in the competition line-up, and ranks as a rare period piece that utterly gets under the skin of contemporary concerns,...
“Local boy Christian Petzold’s audacious retelling of Anna Seghers’s World War II-set novel about refugees escaping Nazi-controlled France is a strange, beguiling creation that will be hard to beat in the competition line-up, and ranks as a rare period piece that utterly gets under the skin of contemporary concerns,...
- 3/13/2018
- by Zhuo-Ning Su
- The Film Stage
Below is a strictly personal, unapologetically idiosyncratic list of the twenty films I'm most looking forward to in 2018 and which have so far yet to be seen by any paying audiences. Among those seriously considered but ultimately excluded on the basis that they're more likely to be ready next year are Ad Astra (James Gray), Blessed Virgin (Paul Verhoeven), The Fire Next Time (Mati Diop), Late Spring (Michelangelo Frammartino), the particularly-dynamite-on-paper Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello), Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due (Abdellatif Kechiche) and Motorboats (Yuri Ancarani). I also reluctantly discarded a couple of highly tantalising projects whose status, at the time of writing, was frustratingly unclear, namely Tijuana Bible (Jean-Charles Hue) and the worryingly long-in-gestation You Can't Win (Robinson Devor). Omitted because they're made primarily for TV rather than cinemas: Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (Netflix) and Bruno Dumont's Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Arté). Finally, Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir: Part I...
- 1/16/2018
- MUBI
This is the diary Angela Schanelec wrote when she visited Marseilles in March 2002 in preparation to making her film Marseille, released in 2004. Originally translated and published as a complement to the fifth issue of Fireflies, which celebrates the cinema of Angela Schanelec and Agnès Varda. Angela Schanelec's Marseilles. Courtesy of Schramm Film.Marseilles, 1-10 March 2002 My mood was free of all desire.—Walter Benjamin, Hashish in MarseillesFriday. Marseilles, Provence. At the airport you can choose your destination: Aix, Marseilles, the sea or the mountains. You can see the mountains, light and craggy, beyond the airfield. The highway passes through urban canyons in the middle of the city. The houses are the same colour as the mountains. Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse. In Marseilles there are innumerable buildings like this one, unit agglomerations designed with varying degrees of passion, each unit a cell housing life. The hotel is on the third floor,...
- 11/27/2017
- MUBI
Christian Petzold's The State I Am In (2000) and Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below (2010) will be showing in September and October, 2017 on Mubi in most countries around the world.Christian Petzold (left) and Christoph Hochhäusler (right) on the set of Dreileben. Photo by Felix von Böhm.We meet in Christian Petzold’s office in Berlin-Kreuzberg. A giant wall of whispering books, almost like a Borgesian brain of fiction, encircles the table at which Christoph Hochhäusler, myself and the owner take place to discuss their films. The idea of the interview was to get Petzold’s take on Hochhäusler’s The City Below (2010) and Hochhäusler’s take on Petzold’s The State I Am In (2000). In the end, both filmmakers ended up talking about a lot more, as cinema for them has always been something that shines most brightly when remembering it, discussing it and loving it. The fictions proposed...
- 9/20/2017
- MUBI
Christian Petzold's The State I Am In (2000) and Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below (2010) will be showing in September and October, 2017 on Mubi in most countries around the world.How can we hang on to a dreamHow can it, will it be the way it seems—Tim Hardin, “How Can We Hang On to a Dream”“When you live in no man’s land, you get stuck with your memories.”—Clara, The State I Am In1. Lovers go on the run while a teenager falls in love. Christian Petzold’s first theatrical feature, The State I Am In (2000), tells two stories simultaneously: that of Hans (Richy Müller) and Clara (Barbara Auer), fugitives pursued by German authorities, and that of their long-suffering daughter Jeanne (Julia Hummer)—who is downcast from the film’s opening scene, in which she meets a German boy named Heinrich (Bilge Bingül) at the beach.Though...
- 9/14/2017
- MUBI
Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Peter Nestler's Death and Devil (2009) is available to watch on Mubi from August 2 - September 1, 2017 in most countries around the world as part of the retrospective A Vision of Resistance.Death and Devil (2009) holds a special place in the filmography of Peter Nestler, marking an intriguing crossroads. Nestler’s work is strongly associated with filmmakers including Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Alexander Kluge, and Harun Farocki. Like them, he is primarily concerned with history and politics, intent on unveiling the traces of fascism, documenting the processes of the industrialization of cities, and narrating the conditions and struggles of laborers. But here, Nestler turns his gaze to something more immediately personal: his grandfather, Count Eric von Rosen (1879-1948), a celebrated explorer, ethnographer, and archaeologist. The film seemingly presents itself as a linear biography, giving special importance to an African...
- 8/5/2017
- MUBI
Mubi's retrospective on filmmaker Peter Nestler, A Vision of Resistance, presented as part of a collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is showing in from July 18 - September 1, 2017 in most countries around the world.EssaysIt’s difficult to talk about Peter Nestler without talking about historical materialism and the dialectic, which is an interesting problem for a filmmaker to have—interesting, at least, now that his Marxism is in part the reason for his recent recovery in the United States rather than, as it was in 1966, the reason for a self-imposed exile from his home country. Born in 1937 in Freiburg im Breisgau—later incorporated into France’s West German partition—at 18 Nestler traveled abroad (in his words, “I went to sea”), returning for school in Munich. He made his first film, By the Dike Sluice [Am Siel], in 1962, and over the next several years fell in with a crowd of...
- 8/2/2017
- MUBI
PachamamaBeginning Saturday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing to American shores the work of one of Germany’s finest filmmakers, Peter Nestler. Arranged in nine-parts, the extensive series is a major effort to make Nestler’s work better-known in the United States, where it has rarely shown. Nestler is a singular filmmaker, one for whom I have great affection, but also one who came to making films in a time and place singular in and of itself. The movies Germany produced for roughly the fifteen years after the reformation of the country after World War II is a period often misunderstood by cinephiles and, at least until recently, underrepresented in retrospective programming outside of the country itself. In the 1950s and 1960s, German leftists were outraged by the continuing presence of Nazis in the government of the young Federal Republic, and by the way that polite society did...
- 7/2/2017
- MUBI
Manuela De Laborde's short film As Without So Within, which has played at the Toronto International Film Festival, won the Grand Prix at Zagreb's 25 Fps Festival, competed for the Tiger at Rotterdam, and will next screen at New Directors/New Films, is an utterly remarkably, vividly calm work that blends sculpture and filmmaking into a cosmic exploration of physical material transformed by the flatness of the cinema screen. Using ingenious objects made by De Laborde that variously resemble moon rocks, bones, and additional unidentifiable shapes, and by filming them against black backgrounds, awash in precise colored lighting and at different scales, these strange pieces loom or are dwarfed, come into or go out of focus and perceptibility. Sometimes the film feels like a kind of astronomic research report, tactile and scientific in its observation, even seemingly scanning or plunging deep the molecular makeup of these evocatively recognizable, yet alien shapes.
- 3/18/2017
- MUBI
The Masked MonkeysThe cutting edge of cinema culture at this moment is not what’s premiering in competition at Cannes or picking up the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Rather, it is at the quietly flourishing but deeply influential genre of film festival focusing on new and adventurous work in documentary filmmaking. More than any red carpet extravaganza, this type of festival is consistently challenging audiences to expand their understanding of how the art of cinema explores reality and how reality complicates moviemaking. Whether big, like Copenhagen’s Cph:dox, or smaller, like Missouri’s True/False Film Fest, these events go further than the traditional and staid vision of festivals devoted to documentary film, whose emphasis is above all on the camera as a bland tool to invisibly tell a nonfiction story, and instead present more closely curated programs that showcase the infinite nuance and complexity—not to mention shades...
- 11/29/2016
- MUBI
This was a busy year at Tiff, where I was a juror for Fipresci, helping to award a prize for best premiere in the Discovery section. Not only did this mean that some other films had to take a back burner—sadly, I did not see Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge—but my writing time was a bit compromised as well. Better late than never? That is for you, Gentle Reader, to decide.Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa, Germany)So basic in the telling—a record of several days’ worth of visitors mostly to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienberg, Germany—Austerlitz is a film that in many ways exemplifies the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. What is the net effect for humanity when, faced with the drive to remember the unfathomable, we employ the grossly inadequate tools at our disposal?Austerlitz takes its name from W. G. Sebald’s final novel.
- 9/20/2016
- MUBI
Chris Marker Meets Werner Herzog In Brilliant, Quirky Rodent Documentary ‘Rat Film’ — Locarno Review
“Before the world became the world, it was an egg. Inside the egg was dark. The rat nibbled the egg and let the light in. And the world began.” That opening stanza in Theo Anthony’s remarkable non-fiction endeavor “Rat Film” sets the stage for a movie that brilliantly defies categorization. Anthony’s feature-length debut careens from scientific observation and historical overview to spiritual inquiry with a freewheeling approach that never ceases to surprise, even as it maintains a cogent thesis. Both a chronicle of the rat infestation plaguing the city of Baltimore and a broader assessment of the class problems plaguing its development, “Rat Film” manages to say something real and immediate in a fresh and inventive voice.
At the same time, Anthony’s approach falls in line with established documentary traditions. The eccentric, wandering reflections throughout the film, offered in a monotonous female voiceover narration, recall Werner Herzog’s discursive technique.
At the same time, Anthony’s approach falls in line with established documentary traditions. The eccentric, wandering reflections throughout the film, offered in a monotonous female voiceover narration, recall Werner Herzog’s discursive technique.
- 8/11/2016
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
For the fifth year, IndieWire is co-hosting the Locarno Critics Academy, giving a group of talented up-and-coming critics a chance to help their role in the current climate for film criticism and journalism at the Locarno International Film Festival. With assistance from Penske Media, the Swiss Alliance of Film Journalists and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, participants will engage in a series of activities and then get to work. They will spend the first half of the festival which begins today, in roundtable discussions with working critics and industry figures; beginning next week, they’ll write about films at this year’s festival, as well as topics ranging from television to digital media.
Before then, take a minute to get to know them, and find out what they’re looking forward to checking out. Keep up with their dispatches from this year’s festival here and follow them on Twitter.
Before then, take a minute to get to know them, and find out what they’re looking forward to checking out. Keep up with their dispatches from this year’s festival here and follow them on Twitter.
- 8/3/2016
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
Starting tomorrow, May 6, and on through June 6, MoMA will present the first complete North American retrospective of the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The program will then tour North America and Europe and coincides with the Austrian Film Museum's publication of Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, a collection of essays by John Gianvito, Harun Farocki, Jean-Pierre Gorin and others edited by critic, translator and filmmaker Ted Fendt. We're collecting critical assessments, beginning with J. Hoberman's for the New York Times. » - David Hudson...
- 5/5/2016
- Keyframe
Starting tomorrow, May 6, and on through June 6, MoMA will present the first complete North American retrospective of the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The program will then tour North America and Europe and coincides with the Austrian Film Museum's publication of Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, a collection of essays by John Gianvito, Harun Farocki, Jean-Pierre Gorin and others edited by critic, translator and filmmaker Ted Fendt. We're collecting critical assessments, beginning with J. Hoberman's for the New York Times. » - David Hudson...
- 5/5/2016
- Fandor: Keyframe
The Criterion Collection adds to its handful of contemporary releases this week with Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, a film that has received near-universal acclaim since its 2014 premiere at Tiff, despite a common caveat that its story conceit is exceedingly implausible. Perhaps, as Justin Chang puts it at Variety, “in a movie of exacting subtlety, it sometimes takes the baldest of contrivances to cut straight to the heart of the matter.” He goes on:“World War II has just ended, and Nelly Lenz, a Jewish singer and an Auschwitz survivor, is about to undergo reconstructive surgery after a disfiguring gunshot wound. When she is later reunited with Johnny, the faithless husband who betrayed her to the Nazis to save his own skin, he fails to recognize who she is. Still, he discerns enough of a resemblance to propose a lowly scheme: Nelly — or Esther, as she calls herself — will pass herself...
- 4/27/2016
- MUBI
In today's roundup of current goings on: Early Soviet cinema, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining backwards and forwards, Kenneth Anger's Santa Monica workshop, David Bowie in Los Angeles, Fritz Lang in San Francisco, László Nemes in Chicago, Harun Farocki in São Paulo, Seijun Suzuki in Toronto, Guy Debord in Vienna, James Benning in Berlin, John Akomfrah, Grant Gee and Orhan Pamuk in London, Agnès Varda in Paris, and in Helsinki, "A Simple Event: Tales from Iranian New Wave Cinema." » - David Hudson...
- 1/30/2016
- Keyframe
In today's roundup of current goings on: Early Soviet cinema, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining backwards and forwards, Kenneth Anger's Santa Monica workshop, David Bowie in Los Angeles, Fritz Lang in San Francisco, László Nemes in Chicago, Harun Farocki in São Paulo, Seijun Suzuki in Toronto, Guy Debord in Vienna, James Benning in Berlin, John Akomfrah, Grant Gee and Orhan Pamuk in London, Agnès Varda in Paris, and in Helsinki, "A Simple Event: Tales from Iranian New Wave Cinema." » - David Hudson...
- 1/30/2016
- Fandor: Keyframe
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