As an end-of-year gift to our writers and readers, we've compiled a user-friendly overview of our publishing highlights from 2023. The collection is broken down by category: essays, interviews, festival coverage, and recurring columns.Browse at your leisure, and raise a glass to our brilliant contributors!Meanwhile, you can catch up with all of our end-of-year coverage here.{{notebook_form}}ESSAYSContemporary Cinema:Cinema as Sacrament: The Limitations of Killers of the Flower Moon by Adam PironA Change of Season: Trần Anh Hùng and Frederick Wiseman's Culinary Cinema by Phuong LeWalking, Talking, & Hurting Feelings: Nicole Holofcener's Everyday Dramas by Rafaela BassiliThe Limits of Control: Lines of Power in Todd Field's Tár by Helen CharmanThe Art of Losing: Joanna Hogg's Haunted Houses by Laura StaabTreading Water: Avatar: The Way of Water by Evan Calder WilliamsThe African Accent and the Colonial Ear by Maxine SibihwanaTen Minutes, but a Few Meters Longer:...
- 1/3/2024
- MUBI
The following interview was originally published in the second issue of Outskirts Film Magazine, an independent print magazine on the past and present of cinema. Issue two is now available from the Outskirts e-shop.At 189 pages, Outskirts Nº2 is made up of original essays, interviews, reviews, translations, and a single large dossier dedicated to Japanese filmmaker and actress Tanaka Kinuyo.Forever a Woman.During the last edition of the Locarno Film Festival, a retrospective dedicated to Douglas Sirk took place, organised by Bernard Eisenschitz and Roberto Turigliatto. Among the many incredible guests invited to introduce Sirk’s films, such as Miguel Marías, Jon Halliday, Olaf Möller, Martina Müller, was Laura Mulvey. In speaking to her several months later, what started out initially as a conversation between myself and Mulvey about Sirk, unexpectedly morphed into a broader investigation that included the work of Tanaka Kinuyo, the subject of our dossier.The...
- 8/8/2023
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSShadow of the Vampire.Willem Dafoe will join Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu film, news that comes 23 years after he played a fictitious version of Murnau's lead actor, Max Schreck, in Shadow of the Vampire. Dafoe’s supporting role is currently “unknown,” according to Deadline, though Eggers's vampire will be Bill Skarsgard.Sight & Sound continues their rollout of the Greatest Films of All Time, now unveiling the critics’ top 250.The great cinematographer Caroline Champetier will be honored with the Berlinale Camera award at this year’s festival, marking a career of beautifully lensed films for Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Margarethe von Trotta, Claude Lanzmann, and Leos Carax, among many others.Following Sundance’s closing awards ceremony, we’ve compiled the full list of winners here on Notebook.
- 2/1/2023
- MUBI
As 2022 came to a close, we asked seven writers and filmmakers to reflect on Jean-Luc Godard's memory. Starting from a single aspect of his filmmaking—a particular film, image, sound cue, or affecting experience with his work—their responses evoke the breadth of his revolutionary legacy. We're thankful they found the words.The pieces below are written by Ephraim Asili, Richard Brody, A.S. Hamrah, Rachel Kushner, Miguel Marías, Andréa Picard, and Lucía Salas.In Memoriam JLGWhen I was in high school in the 1980s, I drove 50 miles with some friends to see Breathless at a student screening in a big auditorium at UConn. How did we know this screening was happening? How did we know how to get there? How did we even know anything was happening anywhere, ever? We saw listings in newspapers and paid attention to flyers. We had maps in our cars. But above all, it...
- 1/30/2023
- MUBI
For the tenth time in 11 years, the Locarno Film Festival is hosting 10 international film critics from various stages of development during the 10 days of the A-list Swiss festival.
Coming from places as far from the Swiss resort town as Bangalore, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro and Jakarta, and from an even more varied matrix of backgrounds, disciplines, writing styles, and interests, participants in the anniversary edition of the Critics Academy will have the chance to interact face-to-face with a wealth of major critics, programmers, and filmmakers in attendance at Locarno.
Returning after one aborted edition in the first year of the pandemic and another for which there was no public call for applications, Locarno’s incubator for aspiring professional critics takes place once again in the midst of an extraordinarily trying moment both for the art and commerce of cinema but also, perhaps even more acutely, for writing about it.
While...
Coming from places as far from the Swiss resort town as Bangalore, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro and Jakarta, and from an even more varied matrix of backgrounds, disciplines, writing styles, and interests, participants in the anniversary edition of the Critics Academy will have the chance to interact face-to-face with a wealth of major critics, programmers, and filmmakers in attendance at Locarno.
Returning after one aborted edition in the first year of the pandemic and another for which there was no public call for applications, Locarno’s incubator for aspiring professional critics takes place once again in the midst of an extraordinarily trying moment both for the art and commerce of cinema but also, perhaps even more acutely, for writing about it.
While...
- 8/5/2022
- by Christopher Small
- Variety Film + TV
So here’s a Cinderella story: Last year, Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra directed Embrace of the Serpent,” a trippy black-and-white voyage into the Amazon. His own country didn’t pay much attention, but the rest of the world felt otherwise: It played Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight, and went on to win four prizes at the Fenix Ibero-American Film Awards in Mexico City. That was November 25, 2015 — two months before it landed an unexpected Oscar nomination.
That’s the Fenix Awards. Launched in 2014, it’s a cleverly designed platform that celebrates the cinemas and talents across Latin America, Spain and Portugal, all while keeping its eye on the prize: The Academy Awards.
Last year’s show was telecast live to more than 40 countries by E! Entertainment, Studio Universal, and Cinelatino channels, with a total reach to some 300 million viewers who speak Spanish or Portuguese.
At Morelia, Fenix founder Ricardo Giraldo told IndieWire...
That’s the Fenix Awards. Launched in 2014, it’s a cleverly designed platform that celebrates the cinemas and talents across Latin America, Spain and Portugal, all while keeping its eye on the prize: The Academy Awards.
Last year’s show was telecast live to more than 40 countries by E! Entertainment, Studio Universal, and Cinelatino channels, with a total reach to some 300 million viewers who speak Spanish or Portuguese.
At Morelia, Fenix founder Ricardo Giraldo told IndieWire...
- 10/28/2016
- by Anne Thompson
- Thompson on Hollywood
So here’s a Cinderella story: Last year, Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra directed Embrace of the Serpent,” a trippy black-and-white voyage into the Amazon. His own country didn’t pay much attention, but the rest of the world felt otherwise: It played Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight, and went on to win four prizes at the Fenix Ibero-American Film Awards in Mexico City. That was November 25, 2015 — two months before it landed an unexpected Oscar nomination.
That’s the Fenix Awards. Launched in 2014, it’s a cleverly designed platform that celebrates the cinemas and talents across Latin America, Spain and Portugal, all while keeping its eye on the prize: The Academy Awards.
Last year’s show was telecast live to more than 40 countries by E! Entertainment, Studio Universal, and Cinelatino channels, with a total reach to some 300 million viewers who speak Spanish or Portuguese.
At Morelia, Fenix founder Ricardo Giraldo told IndieWire...
That’s the Fenix Awards. Launched in 2014, it’s a cleverly designed platform that celebrates the cinemas and talents across Latin America, Spain and Portugal, all while keeping its eye on the prize: The Academy Awards.
Last year’s show was telecast live to more than 40 countries by E! Entertainment, Studio Universal, and Cinelatino channels, with a total reach to some 300 million viewers who speak Spanish or Portuguese.
At Morelia, Fenix founder Ricardo Giraldo told IndieWire...
- 10/28/2016
- by Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice received the Pardo alla Carriera award at the Locarno Film Festival for his extraordinary contribution to film.
The universal themes of time and memory are found in Victor Erice’s poignant and poetic features and short films. Carlo Chatrian, the Festival’s Artistic Director, comments:
“Erice’s films may be few in number, but are all extremely important in the context of modern cinema, and bear the hallmark of an independent and coherent filmmaker, who is able to give a very personal form to his stories, combining private and collective memory. ”
Born in 1940 in San Sebastian, Victor Erice’s first feature-length film "El Espiritu de la colmena" (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973), is considered one of the masterpieces of Spanish cinema. In 1983, he directed "El Sur" (The South), which as in his first feature, centers on a father and daughter relationship conveyed through memories. Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Erice’s third feature, the documentary "El sol del membrillo" (also known as The Quince Tree Sun and Dream of Light) (1992) follows the painter Antonio López and the making of his painting.
Adrian Danks writes in Issue 25, March 2003 Senses of Cinema ( http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/erice/#film):
“In "The Quince Tree Sun" we are asked, gently, to contemplate the intense, but here somewhat dissipated, connection and difference between painting and cinema. We watch the painter (Antonio López Garcia, himself a profoundly quotidian painter) attempt to capture the play of light upon the leaves and fruit of a constantly evolving quince tree, while the filmmaker (Erice, one assumes, though he is never directly present in the film) attempts to document the dynamic processes of creating and ‘imagining,’ while simultaneously showing us the painstakingly serene activity of still-life painting. Inevitably, the film can’t capture enough detail and can’t crystallize the painter’s activity into a suitable closing or defining image; while the painting loses the dynamic of light (and life) in the process of committing the tree to the canvas (but it also captures something of it as well). Nevertheless, each, painting and cinema, goes some way toward capturing the essence of its subject. This tension between a medium of movement (and thus time) and stillness or permanence (and thus a different concept of time) preoccupies Erice’s cinema.”
The Conversation
The Conversation took place on 13 August at the Locarno Film Festival. Moderator Miguel Marías and Victor Erice discussed the difference between the viewing audiences of the present and of the past -- a shared point of concern that director Agnès Varda also remarked on at her Conversation at the Festival. Both Erice and Varda addressed the fact that viewers (who now have shorter attention spans) don’t watch films as before; films are watched on small screens, laptops, phones, and so on, which changes the film’s aspect ratio and the look of how the film was shot in and in what format, and in turn, the director’s visual intention.
Marías and Erice spoke about the blurred lines of documentary and fiction films, and how fiction can sometimes be more a true accurate account of the subject matter due to the fact that the writer/director has more control choosing the words of the script whereas in a documentary one shapes it by the interviews of people.
Erice also commented about the various choices documentarians must make and how these choices and unexpected events can affect the film. These choices include “characters” who may or may not want to be filmed, and the significance of what happens in the editing room and how that shapes the story the filmmaker wants to tell.
Concluding the Conversation, Erice stated the importance of finding a unique voice and vision in documentaries. “Do not repeat what other documentary films have done on a specific subject matter; shoot from an unexpected character’s point of view rather than repeating images we’ve seen before.”
Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, Susan Kouguell teaches screenwriting at Purchase College, and presents international workshops and seminars on screenwriting and film. Author of Savvy Characters Sell Screenplays! and The Savvy Screenwriter, she is chairperson of Su-City Pictures East, LLC, a consulting company founded in 1990 where she works with over 1,000 writers, filmmakers, and executives worldwide. www.su-city-pictures.com, http://su-city-pictures.com/wpblog...
The universal themes of time and memory are found in Victor Erice’s poignant and poetic features and short films. Carlo Chatrian, the Festival’s Artistic Director, comments:
“Erice’s films may be few in number, but are all extremely important in the context of modern cinema, and bear the hallmark of an independent and coherent filmmaker, who is able to give a very personal form to his stories, combining private and collective memory. ”
Born in 1940 in San Sebastian, Victor Erice’s first feature-length film "El Espiritu de la colmena" (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973), is considered one of the masterpieces of Spanish cinema. In 1983, he directed "El Sur" (The South), which as in his first feature, centers on a father and daughter relationship conveyed through memories. Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Erice’s third feature, the documentary "El sol del membrillo" (also known as The Quince Tree Sun and Dream of Light) (1992) follows the painter Antonio López and the making of his painting.
Adrian Danks writes in Issue 25, March 2003 Senses of Cinema ( http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/erice/#film):
“In "The Quince Tree Sun" we are asked, gently, to contemplate the intense, but here somewhat dissipated, connection and difference between painting and cinema. We watch the painter (Antonio López Garcia, himself a profoundly quotidian painter) attempt to capture the play of light upon the leaves and fruit of a constantly evolving quince tree, while the filmmaker (Erice, one assumes, though he is never directly present in the film) attempts to document the dynamic processes of creating and ‘imagining,’ while simultaneously showing us the painstakingly serene activity of still-life painting. Inevitably, the film can’t capture enough detail and can’t crystallize the painter’s activity into a suitable closing or defining image; while the painting loses the dynamic of light (and life) in the process of committing the tree to the canvas (but it also captures something of it as well). Nevertheless, each, painting and cinema, goes some way toward capturing the essence of its subject. This tension between a medium of movement (and thus time) and stillness or permanence (and thus a different concept of time) preoccupies Erice’s cinema.”
The Conversation
The Conversation took place on 13 August at the Locarno Film Festival. Moderator Miguel Marías and Victor Erice discussed the difference between the viewing audiences of the present and of the past -- a shared point of concern that director Agnès Varda also remarked on at her Conversation at the Festival. Both Erice and Varda addressed the fact that viewers (who now have shorter attention spans) don’t watch films as before; films are watched on small screens, laptops, phones, and so on, which changes the film’s aspect ratio and the look of how the film was shot in and in what format, and in turn, the director’s visual intention.
Marías and Erice spoke about the blurred lines of documentary and fiction films, and how fiction can sometimes be more a true accurate account of the subject matter due to the fact that the writer/director has more control choosing the words of the script whereas in a documentary one shapes it by the interviews of people.
Erice also commented about the various choices documentarians must make and how these choices and unexpected events can affect the film. These choices include “characters” who may or may not want to be filmed, and the significance of what happens in the editing room and how that shapes the story the filmmaker wants to tell.
Concluding the Conversation, Erice stated the importance of finding a unique voice and vision in documentaries. “Do not repeat what other documentary films have done on a specific subject matter; shoot from an unexpected character’s point of view rather than repeating images we’ve seen before.”
Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, Susan Kouguell teaches screenwriting at Purchase College, and presents international workshops and seminars on screenwriting and film. Author of Savvy Characters Sell Screenplays! and The Savvy Screenwriter, she is chairperson of Su-City Pictures East, LLC, a consulting company founded in 1990 where she works with over 1,000 writers, filmmakers, and executives worldwide. www.su-city-pictures.com, http://su-city-pictures.com/wpblog...
- 9/1/2014
- by Susan Kouguell
- Sydney's Buzz
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