Your handy one-stop-shop for cinephile news, articles, and videos from the week that was.
News Roundup
• Ennio Morricone, the legendary composer behind scores for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Days of Heaven, and The Battle of Algiers, passed away this week at the age of 91. Days before his death, Morricone penned his own obituary.
• In a letter signed by the New York, Venice, Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals, the four major fall events announced that this year they will not jockey for world premieres and “commit instead to collaboration. We are sharing ideas and information. We are offering our festivals as a united platform for the best cinema we can find. We’re here to serve the filmmakers, audiences, journalists and industry members who keep the film ecosystem thriving. We need to do that together.”
Reading Roundup
• “It has become clear, in these last decades of decadence, decline, towering institutional violence, and rampant bad taste, that American life is stuck somewhere inside the Paul Verhoeven cinematic universe.” For The New Yorker, David Roth revisits Starship Troopers at a time when we finally seem to have caught up with Verhoeven’s vision of a militarized and fascist future.
• “As Scorsese struggled with personal and professional turmoil while making his troubled musical New York, New York and the concert film The Last Waltz, Prince would become one of his closest confidants, occupying a space somewhere between personal assistant, emotional-support dog, and chief of security in the director’s increasingly nocturnal and chaotic world.”Also at The New Yorker, Alex Pappademas profiles Steven Prince, who played the gun salesman in Taxi Driver and featured in Scorsese’s 1978 short documentary American Boy.
• Craig Keller has shared his translation of Serge Daney’s 1981 essay on Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord. Daney, whose work remains largely inaccessible to anglophones, was one the best, most sophisticated French film critics of the latter half of the 20th century.
• For The Brooklyn Rail, Leo Goldsmith has belatedly published a dispatch from this year’s Berlinale, discussing films like Christian Petzold’s Undine, Tsai Ming-liang’s Days, and Hong Sang-soo’s The Woman Who Ran.
Viewing/Listening Roundup
• Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document (Single Channel), which played in our newly inaugurated Transmissions series right before the pandemic hit, has been made available online for free. I highly recommend reading Michael Sicinski’s analysis of the film over at Cinema Scope after watching the film.
• Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow, which will be released in drive-ins on July 31 and digitally on August 7, now has a trailer.
• Today being the 164th birthday of Nicola Tesla, IFC has released the trailer for Michael Almereyda’s forthcoming unconventional biopic about the visionary inventor.
Miscellaneous
VIFF Blog 