This Year’s Cannes Lineup, Readings on Akerman, Early Czech Cinema
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- The just-announced 2017 Cannes Film Festival lineup is a wealth of riches, with new work from Arnaud Desplechin, Abbas Kiarostami, Todd Haynes, Michael Haneke, Noah Baumbach, and Lynne Ramsay, plus a mystery-shrouded Twin Peaks revival.
- Bright Wall/Dark Room has unveiled a new issue packed with illuminating articles on some of our favorite actors and directors. Highlights include an appreciation of Paul Verhoeven, a sprawling interview with Agnès Varda, and an examination of melancholy in the work of Chantal Akerman.
- Looking for more reading on Akerman? Poet and novelist Dennis Cooper has compiled a selection of quotes, videos, and essays charting the director’s filmography.
- Over at Film Comment, veteran editor Tony Lawson discusses his work on Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing and Insignificance, and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.
- With a wide-ranging retrospective of Swiss-born filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville now playing at Brooklyn’s BAMcinématek, Craig Hubert considers her underappreciated career, which has long been overshadowed by her relationship with Jean-Luc Godard. “Godard often used his romantic partners in work—sometimes in ways that bordered on the exploitative,” Hubert writes, “but his work with Miéville was different. She has a stronger and interrupting voice, one that challenges and contradicts and refuses to be sublimated.”
- Speaking of legendary partnerships in Francophone cinema, Kevin McMahon takes a look at a beautifully designed new anthology of writings by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, which is “not merely easy to read but a pleasure to hold. People who’ve never heard of Straub-Huillet will want to be seen with it.”
- In a nod to Straub and Huillet, TIFF has asked filmmakers and artists to contribute visual essays that represent “landscapes of resistance.” In the latest installment of this ongoing series, Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman investigate the “mercurial beauty” found in rural Texas.
- MoMA’s fourteen-film series Ecstasy and Irony: Czech Cinema, 1927–1943 is a “precious reminder of just how vast and inexhaustible the treasury of world cinema is.” Nick Pinkerton at Artforum surveys these rarely screened gems, which reflect the creative vitality that emerged between the tail end of the silent era and the early years of sound cinema.
- Nathan Rabin looks back on Sidney Lumet’s sixty-year-old courtroom drama 12 Angry Men and considers the lessons we might learn from it in today’s political climate.
- Indiewire chats with John Waters about his performance on the television show Feud: Bette and Joan, which allowed him to fulfill his lifelong dream of embodying one of his idols, B-movie pioneer William Castle.
- Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are among the classic Hollywood icons who turn up on the BFI’s list of ten films that inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose tastes “naturally ran to extremes—of emotion, style and vision.”
