Did You See This?

A Guide to Chinese Cinema, Kiarostami Photographs, a Tourneur Retrospective

  • Over at the BFI, John Berra has published a guide for getting to know some of Chinese-language cinema’s most revered filmmakers, including Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Wong Kar-wai.
  • For its upcoming edition in Hong Kong this spring, the Swiss art fair Art Basel will honor the late Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami with an exhibition of his last photographs.
  • Starting today, the Harvard Film Archive celebrates avant-garde master Jonas Mekas with a monthlong series showcasing his extensive oeuvre. In its program notes, the Archive quotes Mekas as saying, “It is important to know that what I do is not artistic. I am just a film-maker. I live how I live and I do what I do, which is recording moments of my life as I move ahead. And I do it because I am compelled to. Necessity, not artistry, is the true line you can follow in my life and work.”
  • For more on Mekas, check out a new interview with Women’s Wear Daily, in which the indefatigable nonagenarian discusses his plans for the future of New York City’s Anthology Film Archives and an upcoming exhibition in Athens.
  • The Locarno Film Festival has announced that this year’s retrospective will focus on French-born B-movie pioneer Jacques Tourneur, whose work “is still not enjoying recognition on a par with his talent.”
  • Another note from the festival world: with this year’s Sundance already under way, Indiewire’s Anne Thompson interviews independent filmmakers like Eliza Hittman, Alex Ross Perry, and David Lowery about what they learned from their first experiences in Park City.
  • For the New Beverly cinema’s blog, Kim Morgan reflects on Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 The Last Picture Show, calling it a “tender and heartbreaking big screen adaptation.”
  • In the first installment of his new Film Comment column Cinema ’67 Revisited, Mark Harris writes on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up: “The film observes and reports on its new world unflinchingly and with fascination; sometimes that shades into horror or repulsion, but sometimes into humor or (as in the last scene) a sense of immense, shocked, trippy possibility.”
  • Just in time for Inauguration Day, the Village Voice looks back on classic films that speak to the era of Trump.
  • The Film Society of Lincoln Center has shared a conversation between Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones from its 2001 interview series The Next Generation of Film, in which the pair chat about “film restoration, visual storytelling, and authenticity in cinema.”


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