The Criterion Collection

The arts/culture/politics journal n+1 has launched a new online film supplement, N1 FR, which it tantalizingly proposes to “publish semi-regularly, although we’re not sure yet what semi-regularly means in this case.” The wide-ranging and thoughtful inaugural installment contains some great pieces. In one of them, Criterion contributor Chris Fujiwara grapples with the idea of what contemporary cinema is (“Classical narrative filmmaking has become impossible. Contemporary mainstream Hollywood cinema merely confirms this proposition with its endless remakes, sequels, sequels to remakes, and remakes of sequels, its grand-scale repetition-compulsion machine,” and “If the outstanding films are never all visible at the same time until the window of their contemporaneity has closed, it means they are truly contemporary only for a small group of people—critics, programmers, and distributors.”). Fujiwara also gives a shout-out to Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours—as an example of a new kind of collaboration between museums and film—and another to Robert Bresson, as an archetype of the filmmaker who is both timeless and contemporary.

Other Criterion-related highlights from the issue: Christine Smallwood reports on the experience of watching Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by the light of her texting neighbor’s cell phone (as prelude to a marvelous piece on Claire Denis and the happy impossibility of total escape into a movie), and Jeanette Samyn and Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon hold forth on the epistolary nature of the work of Pedro Costa, with a nod to the title of our box set Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa.