Your handy one-stop-shop for cinephile news, articles, and videos from the week that was.
By Josh Cabrita
News Roundup
• The Berlinale, which runs February 20 to March 1, has made their first programming announcement: Matteo Garrone (Dogman, Gomorrah) will play in a special gala spot with Pinnochio, a live-action remake of Carlo Collodi’s fairy tale starring Roberto Benigni.
• The Vancouver Film Critics Circle will announce the winners of their annual awards on Monday, January 6. The Canadian awards are led by Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century, which is nominated for Best Canadian Picture alongside Kathleen Hepburn and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open and Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 ft. (The Twentieth Century and Anne at 13,000 ft. will both screen at the Vancity Theatre in the spring.)
Reading Roundup
• MUBI Notebook asked its writers to contribute one image from a film they’d like to remember from the 2010s. The results are as wide ranging as the years in cinema that they represent.
• Cinema Scope has released their latest issue, with essays on Uncut Gems (playing Vancity Theatre in mid-January), The Irishman, and The Giverny Document (Single Channel). The latter will screen at Vancity as part of our new Transmissions series, programmed by yours truly and dedicated to showcasing noteworthy works that fall outside of traditional modes of distribution.
• Srikanth Srinivasan and Andy Rector have done heroic work translating an expansive interview with Jean-Luc Godard from the most recent issue of Cahiers du cinéma. You’ll be unsurprised to find Godard in typically fine form, as obtuse and provocative as ever.
• “When I hear franchise filmmakers claim that theirs will be the first film of their franchise to do this or that with LGBT representation, what I hear is hubris, or at least a lack of knowledge and context.”Over at Vanity Fair, K. Austin Collins exoriates the insulting, pandering gay kiss in the latest Star Wars.
• “Something unexpected happened to Agnès Varda this century: the Belgian-born director, who died at the age of ninety in March, became a ‘treasure’.” With a full Agnès Varda retrospective underway at Lincoln Centre (not to mention at our very own Cinematheque), Sukhdev Sandhu surveys the director’s wide-ranging career and speaks to her indelible legacy over at 4Columns.
• For the VIFF Blog, Sonja Baksa discusses three films that played our Cindy Sherman series over the holidays. Finding certain affinities between these works and Sherman’s own practice, Baksa writes that “cinema plays a significant role in contextualizing the various identities we pick and choose from,” and that it is these very identities which Sherman seeks to deconstruct.
Viewing/Listening Roundup
• Bask in the electronic euphoria of Oneohtrix Point Never’s score for Uncut Gems, yet another exquisite collaboration between the artist and directors Josh and Benny Safdie (who previously enlisted them for Good Time and Heaven Knows What).
• With Nina Menkes’ Queen of Diamonds now restored and touring cinematheques across North America, check out the trailer for this forgotten feminist classic (and read Erika Balsom’s incisive review of the film in the latest Cinema Scope).
VIFF Blog 