Your handy one-stop-shop for cinephile news, articles, and videos from the week that was.
News Roundup
• A few weeks ago, I noted in this roundup how a group of investors had purchased the legendary French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Now, the magazine’s entire editorial staff has quit, arguing that the new ownership (which includes numerous film producers) causes “an immediate conflict of interest problem for a critical review.” Readers of French (and users of Google Translate) are advised to check out the whole story over at Le Monde.
• New Directors/New Films, an annual showcase of works by emerging directors the world over, have announced their lineup for 2020. And among this year’s inclusions are VIFF 2019 selections Anne at 13,000ft and Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.
Reading Roundup
• For Sight and Sound, Bong Joon-ho has made a list of 20 directors “whose work he believes will be pivotal to the next 20 years.” VIFF attendees will recognize names like Hamaguchi Ryusuke, Bi Gan, and Alice Rohrwacher
• At MUBI Notebook, Lawrence Garcia discusses the career of iconoclastic Serbian director Dušan Makavejev, who passed away last year and is now the subject of an ongoing retrospective at Anthology Film Archive in New York. “A director with no utopian illusions or ideological certainties, Makavejev was incapable of imagining a world where innocence would not need to be protected. Indeed, if his career, so resistant to definitive statements, could be said to affirm any single thing, it’s that innocence must be protected at all costs.”
• “As I said in Venice when we were showing the restoration of Crash, if I never make another movie, that’s perfectly OK. People were upset by that, but it’s true.” For The Guardian, Charles Bramesco speaks to David Cronenberg on the eve of the release of Albert Shin’s The Disappearance at Clifton Hill (VIFF 2019), in which the Canadian director plays a conspiracy theorist podcaster.
• Over at the Metrograph Edition, Phoebe Chen discusses Fruit Chan’s 1997 landmark Made in Hong Kong, which was recently restored and now touring rep houses everywhere. “In the summer of that year, after almost two centuries of colonial rule, Hong Kong was handed back to China, a looming fact that steers Chan’s direction, but never surfaces explicitly in the film.”
• On the VIFF Blog, Michael Scoular writes about The Giverny Document (Single Channel), which screened yesterday as part of our newly inaugurated Transmissions series. “Perhaps this footage waits for the future, to one day inhabit another’s archive. It fits a traditional mode now, but anticipates the hands through which it might be animated.”
Viewing/Listening Roundup
• Abel Ferrara’s Siberia recently premiered at the Berlinale to polarized reviews. Here’s the first trailer for this seemingly unclassifiable film.
• For Film Comment, Portuguese director Pedro Costa has assembled an eclectic playlist of music that helped inspire his latest. If you missed Vitalina Varela when it played VIFF last year, you can catch it at The Cinematheque starting next Friday.
VIFF Blog 