Your handy one-stop-shop for cinephile news, articles, and videos from the week that was.
News Roundup
• The full program for the Venice Film Festival has now been revealed and includes the latest works by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ann Hui, Chloe Zhao, and more.
• The Toronto International Film Festival, which will share a number of films with Venice this year, also unveiled their scaled-back program this week. Some of their selections include the latest by Francis Lee (God’s Own Country), Frederick Wiseman (Ex Libris: The New York Public Library), and Werner Herzog.
Reading Roundup
• For Reverse Shot’s symposium “Our House,” critic Vadim Rizov muses about the Paramount Theatre where he came of age. “There were well over a hundred theaters named ‘the Paramount’ built across the U.S. in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Their heavy red curtains, gilded box seats and faux-classical ceiling art components, once individually impressive temples in their communities, now seem essentially interchangeable to me the more such spaces I’ve seen.”
• On a similar note: At the LA Times, Justin Chang reflects on the loss of cinema spaces during the pandemic. “The question now is whether those tastes and appetites can be nurtured, and satisfied, during a health crisis that has temporarily removed theaters and film festivals from the equation. It’s about the fate of cinema that exists as something other than a Netflix-branded narrative delivery machine, and that — in a time of ever more scattered and fragmentary home-viewing habits — requires the light of an enormous screen, the hush of a darkened auditorium and the investment of a fully attentive audience in order to cast its spell.”
• The erudite Australian film magazine Senses of Cinema has released their latest issue, which includes a special dossier on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Viewing/Listening Roundup
Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, debuted his new film Possessor earlier this year at Sundance. The film, which now has a red-band trailer, will be released by Elevation Pictures sometime in the coming months.
On the Light Industry Podcast, critic and scholar Erika Balsom speaks to Jonathan Walley about his new book Cinema Expanded, which considers how contemporary experimental filmmakers are challenging the materials and viewing conditions that once constituted the art form.
On the latest episode of the VIFF Podcast, we present a conversation with Oscar and multiple Emmy award-winning director, Alex Gibney, whose critically acclaimed credits include Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.
Miscellaneous
VIFF Blog 