Did You See This?

Bergman Centennial, Essential Sirk, Twin Peaks Casting


  • In celebration of the upcoming centennial of Ingmar Bergman’s birth (the director was born in 1918), Sweden is planning a three-part television series and a documentary about him. “The ambition of the film,” said director Jane Magnusson, “is to find out who Bergman really was.”
  • Bob Tanswell, an electrician on the crew of The Shining,discusses what it was like to work with Stanley Kubrick. “It was a small crew and he used us for bit parts,” Tanswell remembers. “He said to me: ‘You look like Jack—put on the jeans and boots.’ In the film, when a semi-conscious Jack is dragged into the food store, those are my legs.”
  • The British Film Institute shares a list of ten “essential” Douglas Sirk films, which runs the gamut from his Technicolor melodramas to lesser-known early German works.
  • “I made it for the ladies,” says Greta Gerwig of Frances Ha, her 2012 collaboration with Noah Baumbach, in Brooklyn Magazine. “I love it when women say they feel heard or seen by it,” she adds. “When you sit in a movie theater and suddenly you see something and you say, ‘Oh my god, somebody knows, how did they know?’ You feel less alone, I guess.”
  • The cast of David Lynch’s upcoming Twin Peaks revival keeps on growing—it’s now set to feature past Lynch headliners Naomi Watts and Laura Dern, along with Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, actors Michael Cera and Monica Bellucci, and many, many more.
  • The writers of The Quietus present a list of their favorite “underrated and misunderstood masterpieces,” including Paul Schrader’s inventive 1985 biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which they call “one of the most outstanding cinematic works about the creative process ever made.”
  • Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras talks about “Astro Noise” (her soon-to-close exhibition at the Whitney), drone warfare, and the representation of surveillance in an interview with Doreen St. Félix at Lenny Letter.
  • For Fandor, writer Jonathan Kiefer revisits Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 science-fiction gem World on a Wire (playing in our Hulu festival this week, incidentally), which he calls a “noirish sci-fi puzzler with a hint of James Bond and occasional soap suds bubbling up from its glassy concourse into the air of grainy fluorescence.”

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