Mekas, Brakhage, and More

For the final issue in print of the Village Voice,Bilge Ebiri talks with Jonas Mekas, “the 94-year-old filmmaker, artist, critic, poet, photographer, cinema owner, and all-around underground impresario who transformed film criticism, filmmaking, and exhibition throughout the 1960s and ’70s.” In the image above, he’s shooting Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972). Mekas “became the Village Voice’s first full-time film critic in 1958, and continued to write his ‘Movie Journal’ column until 1975, fervently championing independent and experimental cinema. . . . He still makes films; he still writes, teaches, programs, and champions. This man who worked with Andy Warhol and John Lennon and Lou Reed and Maya Deren might be the least nostalgic person I’ve ever encountered.”

BOMB is running an excerpt from Mekas’s new book, A Dance with Fred Astaire, “Four Memories.” There was that time he decided “to live like a dog among dogs”; the screening of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) that turned out to be a joke; a political performance with Nam June Paik; and a morning in Vermont with Ken Jacobs: “We felt we were the monks of the order of Cinema.”

BOMB has also posted a letter Stan Brakhage wrote to the poet Robert Kelly in 1963 detailing the struggle to realize Mothlight. The occasion is the republication by Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry of Brakhage’s book Metaphors on Vision, which also originally appeared in 1963. Anthology was founded by Mekas, Brakhage, Jerome Hill, Peter Kubelka—and P. Adams Sitney, who has edited the reissue and will give a talk about the book on Tuesday at Light Industry, “Filmmaker as Film Theorist: Brakhage, Deren, Frampton.” The idea is “to situate [Metaphors] within a lineage of theoretical polemics by American avant-garde filmmakers.” He’ll be screening work by all three filmmakers.

Sabzian has posted Stoffel Debuysere’s recent conversation with Jacques Rancière about “the relations between cinema and fiction, and the workings of fiction in the art of cinema.” Citing the cycle of films made with the inhabitants of Fontainhas, for example, Rancière argues that “Pedro Costa wants to show is what the real living conditions of these people actually are. So in a way fiction—a rather sophisticated fiction—is needed to account for the reality of their lives.”

Catherine Grant flags a new issue Literature/Film Quarterly:

• Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of misreading (1975) inform Talya Alon’s essay on Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin' in the Rain (1952). On a related note, by the way, here’s Henry Giardina, writing for the Paris Review: “I’ve always thought of The Band Wagon [1953] as a poor man’s Singin’ in the Rain.”
• Neil Archer considers Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl and David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation in “post-Cultural contexts.”
• Shooting The Day of the Locust (1975), an adaptation of Nathanial West’s 1933 novel, John Schlesinger embraced an acid, multi-perspectival modernist aesthetic,” writes Julia Prewitt Brown.
• Vanessa Corredera on Tim Blake Nelson’s “reframing” of Shakespeare’s Othello,O (2001): “While the film’s high school milieu has invited critical dialogs about violence, fidelity, and language, attending to the play’s relocation to the American South prompts a different focus—a reconsideration of racial representation in O.”
• Michael D. Friedman draws parallels between Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline (2014) and Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
• William Mooney “explores how [Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s] All About Eve [1950] can be understood as a template for [Olivier Assayas’s] Clouds of Sils Maria [2014], even as Assayas adapts the aging-actress paradigm for a changed society and an era of accelerated media convergence.”
• Writing about Billy Morrissette’s 2001 film, George Moore sets out to “show that Scotland, PA’s frequent depictions of non-productivity punctuate and disrupt the determinism traditionally associated with both Macbeth and the rise of capitalism.”
• Michelle E. Moore has found Howard Hawks’s copy of Dreadful Hollow, a vampire film William Faulkner wrote in 1945, and finds that “he turned a novel with B movie potential into a distinctive screenplay that bears a strong resemblance to his more serious work as a novelist.”

Rewatching Ernst Lubitsch’s Rosita (1923), David Bordwell notes: “Having sculpted a small moment one way, he extracted its principles and remade it, for other purposes in another film,” Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925).

“Cinematographer Sean Price Williams has been revered by critics and indie film fans for the better part of the last decade,” writes Jon Hogan, introducing an interview for Hyperallergic, noting that he’s shot “four movies in 2017 alone”: Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime, Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time, Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits, and Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street, “the truest visual smorgasbord of the batch.”

Stephen Saito interviews Silver and, for Grasshopper Film, Williams writes about his ten favorite films from the last ten years—in chronological order. You’ll find his thoughts on work by Damien Odoul, Leos Carax, Claire Denis, James Gray, Darren Aronofsky, Vincent Gallo, Roman Polanski, Cristi Puiu, Jean-Luc Godard, and Paul Verhoeven.

Rat Film director Theo Anthony writes about his ten favorite films of all time at Ioncinema, work by Harun Farocki, Werner Herzog, Shirley Clarke, José Massip, Chris Marker, Joshua Oppenheimer, Alain Resnais, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, and Ulrich Seidl.

Steven Zultanski for 4Columns: “Against the illusion of capitalism’s neutrality, Rat Film’s juxtaposition of historical detail, personal experience, and formal experimentation suggests a way of mapping and constructing history that is intentionally partial, positioned, and open-ended.”

Laurent Kretzschmar’s translation project—the columns about watching movies on television that Serge Daney wrote for Libération in 1988—barrels ahead at a dizzying pace. Over the past couple of weeks alone, we’ve been able to read Daney on Roberto Rossellini,Valerio Zurlini,Ridley Scott,Marilyn Monroe,Sidney Lumet,Claude Autant-Lara,Sergio Martino,Otto Preminger, and Orson Welles.Plus: “Is a telefilm depressing? Yes, it’s depressing.”

The Chiseler has posted the eulogy that Barbara Steele delivered at Curtis Harrington’s funeral in 2007: “I always think of him as an opera.” And, via Thomas Beard, here’s Harrington’s 1949 monograph for Sight and Sound,An Index to the Films of Josef von Sternberg.

“No great movie of the 1960s had a longer, stranger trip into the consciousness of American filmgoers than The Battle of Algiers [1966],” writes Mark Harris. It “may have been slow to arrive, but once it was here, it put down roots. [Gillo] Pontecorvo’s work felt—and still feels—like a radical document, a bulletin from the front that blazed straight into the middle of a left debate about when violence is permissible in a revolution and what guerrilla tactics young American protestors might adapt.”

Also writing for Film Comment,Eric Hynes introduces his interview with Vitaly Mansky (Under the Sun,Close Relations), who “has had to grapple with the conflicted feelings and loyalties of being born in the Soviet Union, raised in the Ukraine, educated and developed into an artist in Russia, and ultimately left stranded by recent events.”

And Robert Horton on Ruby Gentry (1952): King Vidor, “always a director who excelled when close to the earth, gets at something authentically wild and vital in this blend of seaside noir and Southern-fried soap opera.”

“I was a little bit mystified at the fact that Italian master Ermanno Olmi had a new movie out, and none of the major festivals (Telluride, Toronto, New York) had chosen to screen it,” writes Michael Sicinski. “A defiantly minor work, [Vedete, sono uno di voi (See, I Am One of You)] is a biographical snapshot of a key figure in 20th century Italian Catholicism, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, Archbishop of Milan. . . . Olmi does a fine job in articulating Martini's significance as both a pillar of Italian civil society and a moral compass through an extremely turbulent period of history (roughly, the end of Italian Fascism through the terrorism-marred 1970s and 80s).”

Also at Letterboxd, we find Neil Bahadur on Les vampires (1916), wherein Louis Feuillade “warns us—do not have faith in images, do not trust images: cinema is an inherently deceptive device.” Even so, “this does not negate cinema's ability as art or social science, but rather is reason to build on it.”

Bahadur’s also recently written about Rossellini’s Paisan (1946), “one of the heights of theoretical humanistic cinema: a film about people from antithetical cultures who cannot communicate, but do: perhaps the romance of Vidor's The Big Parade (a huge influence on Rossellini) expanded to a film in itself.”

“Netflix’s selection of classic cinema is abominable,” argues Zach Schonfeld in Newsweek, and “as the company shifts its focus to streaming and original content, cinephiles fear the cinematic canon is being left behind. . . . ‘The gap between “casual film fan” and “film history buff” has never been harder—or more expensive—to bridge,” Vox.com critic Todd VanDerWerff argued in a 2016 piece on the subject. VanDerWerff’s conclusion: ‘It’s never been easier to see classic movies—but it’s never been harder to become obsessed with them.’” The question Schonfeld pursues is: “When did interest in movies made before, say, 1980 become such a weirdo niche?”

“We are living in the golden age of the silent video,” argues Amanda Hess in the New York Times. “Though we may still pop headphones in to watch a YouTube rant, social media has cultivated its own mute visual culture.”

Also in the NYT,Bruce Fretts has put together an oral history of the making of Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987). And Kathryn Shattuck talks with Jackie Chan, Claire Foy, Kirsten Dunst, Chadwick Boseman, Stephanie Beatriz, Tony Goldwyn, John Cena, Armie Hammer, and Neil Patrick Harris “about the worst, weirdest or most memorable days on the sets of their forthcoming movies.”

A. S. Hamrah for Tank on Sofia Coppola: “The rich will always be with her, only slightly less of a problem for her than they are for everybody else. It is to her credit that she understands them, even as her elegance restrains her. If she elides the harsh truths that underpin the fading lives of her glamorous characters, her oblique approach does not save them from moral rot.”

In Louis Malle’s Black Moon (1975), Jeremy Carr, writing for Vague Visages, sees “the influence of everything from the composite works of Luis Buñuel and Lewis Carroll to singular films like Ingmar Bergman’s Shame (1968) and Robert Altman’s Images (1972)” as well as “stimulus from real-world occurrences, like the Vietnam War, which had ‘ended’ in April of 1975, less than five months before Black Moon was released, and the Feminist movement, which was still gaining liberating steam as the 1970s progressed. It was a heady time, a little overwhelming maybe.”

The BFI’s Lou Thomas listens to director Neil Jordan and producer Stephen Woolley discuss The Crying Game (1992).

Newcity’s Brian Hieggelke talks with Shabana Azmi, who’s appeared in “at least 141 feature films,” starring “in big Bollywood films while also making some of the most important films outside of the mainstream, notably in India’s Parallel Cinema movement, which began in West Bengal in the 1950s.” She’s “won more National Film Awards in India than anyone else in history, male or female, and was singled out by the great Satyajit Ray at the beginning of her career.” She’s also “an activist on women’s issues and on poverty, and not in a dilettantish celebrity way, but as someone who’s also served in Indian parliament and as a Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations.”

For Kinoscope, Irina Trocan writes about the “hypnotic and ethereal” work of Québécois filmmaker Alexandre Larose.

Writing for Film International,Christopher Weedman revisits the “enchanting cinematic experience” of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Tony Williams compares Criterion’s earlier and current releases of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).

“In its own way, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976) is as stylized an examination of the emerging fissure’s in one woman’s icily-composed outer shell as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion,” writes Dennis Cozzalio at Trailers from Hell.

“There were numerous characteristics that the [Hong Kong] second wave filmmakers shared, but one in particular was an apparent, though disjointed, affinity with the 1960s,” writes Matthew E. Carter.

In the Notebook, Greg Cwik admires the “oneiric ghost story aura” of John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), while Escape From New York (1981) “is a more severe yet cartoonish vision, more traditionally fun.” And at Little White Lies,Bryan Hempel revisits They Live (1988), “a work that combines science fiction and horror elements in which Carpenter makes a compelling statement relating to the real world—that film can be a weapon which fights the social coercion of television.”

Also at Little White Lies,Stephen Puddicombe looks back on Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947), “a stylish, restless work as messy as it is inspirationally offbeat, and that bore many of its director’s most idiosyncratic hallmarks.”

Back in the Notebook, we find Almudena Escobar López on Ben Rivers’s The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015) and Oliver Laxe’s Mimosas (2016), noting that a “liminal space of transit and border dissolution between fiction and reality, between the real and the spiritual, is what fluctuates freely between these two films,” and Michael Pattison on Claire Simon’s The Graduation (2016), an “account of the protracted admissions process at France’s most prestigious film school, La Fémis.” Alumni “include François Ozon and Arnaud Desplechin; Raoul Peck is its current president.”

Top of the Lake (2013) and its sequel, Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017), were both “conceived by [Jane] Campion, and although she coscripted—with her occasional writing partner Gerard Lee—and directed or codirected only eight of the thirteen episodes, this grand-scale work is the most mature enactment of the conflicts and desires evidenced in all her films,” writes Amy Taubin.

Also writing for Artforum,Howard Hampton: “Playing like an extended flashback to the freestyle movies of the ’70s, [Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die (1986)] starts to feel less like a crime story than a brutal, thinly veiled Hollywood parable.”

“On March 12, 1910, a remarkable ad entitled ‘We Nail a Lie’ appeared in Moving Picture World and The Billboard,” writes Joe McClintock for Bright Lights Film Journal. “The ad has been rightly recognized as a pivotal moment in motion picture advertising.” It “contributed greatly to the fame of Florence Lawrence, the original ‘Biograph Girl,’ but more importantly advanced the notion of movie stardom, the idea that the star of the movie was perhaps the most important element in selling a movie.”

Posters! Laurie Yarnell introduces a round of five favorites selected by Ira M. Resnick, “author of Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters from Classic Hollywood, an art book that showcases Resnick’s superb collection of 2,000-plus vintage movie posters.” In the NYT,Robert Ito presents work by seven of the best artists making fan art alternatives.

And then there’s this news item: “A stash of beautiful cinema posters dating from the 1930s and 40s that were used as a makeshift carpet underlay have sold at auction for £72,000 [around $97,300],” reports Steven Morris for the Guardian. “Oddly, being kept under the carpet of the house in the seaside town of Penarth, near Cardiff, for several decades appears to have kept the posters in good condition.”

In Other News

The British Film Institute has launched the BFI Filmography, “the world’s first complete and accurate living record of UK cinema, which means everyone—from film fans and industry professionals to researchers and students—can now search and explore British film history, for free. A treasure trove of new information, the BFI Filmography is an ever-expanding record that draws on credits from over 10,000 films, from the first UK film released in cinemas in 1911 through to present day, and charts the 250,000 cast and crew behind them.”

The most recent news regarding Mohammad Rasoulof is that the Iranian filmmaker is waiting for a date to be set for a court hearing in Tehran a week after his passport was confiscated when he returned to the country from the Telluride Film Festival. According to Nick Holdsworth in the Hollywood Reporter, Rasoulof, “who won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes this year for his film A Man of Integrity (also known as Lerd),” had been “back and forth to Iran ‘a few times’ since his Cannes win without any problem.”

“You probably don’t know Habibullah Ali’s name, but he’s something of a hero when it comes to Afghan cinema,” writes Zack Sharf for IndieWire. “In the mid-1990s, Ali risked his life by hiding thousands of film reels from Taliban forces who invaded Afghanistan’s state-run movie company, Afghan Film. The Taliban banned popular entertainment during their rule from 1996-2001, and they would have destroyed some 7,000 films if it weren’t for Ali’s efforts.” Now “those films are finally being saved and digitized nearly two decades later.”

Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts has premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin, and IndieWire’s David Ehrlich gives it a highly unusual A+; at the A.V. Club, Katie Rife gives in an A.

The festival rolls on through Thursday, but two of its co-founders, Tim League of Alamo Drafthouse and Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News, as well as the director of international programming, Todd Brown of ScreenAnarchy, are not attending. One week before this year’s edition began, League issued a public apology in response, as IndieWire’s Dana Harris reports, to “a firestorm of anger following the revelation that League had secretly employed Devin Faraci for several months this year. Faraci was fired as editor of Alamo’s Birth.Movies.Death site last October after accusations of sexual assault, but was employed again as recently as February.” And now Jasmine Baker, a former Drafthouse employee, is claiming that “Harry Knowles groped me, opportunistically, on more than one occasion.” Knowles denies it.

A similar horror show has been playing out in Los Angeles. For the LA Weekly,Jennifer Swann reports on the “public scandal that has rocked not just Cinefamily but the larger indie film community.” In short, “more than a dozen Cinefamily former employees unanimously assert . . . that [vice president of the board of directors Shadie] Elnashai and Cinefamily’s founder, Hadrian Belove, created an atmosphere in which sexual harassment and abuse of employees were rampant.” The board has “suspended operations while it determines whether the organization should be shut down or whether it is salvageable.”

“The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has acquired the archives of Barbara Hammer, the artist and filmmaker who has for decades explored gender roles and bodily connection between viewers and films,” reports Alex Greenberger for ARTnews. “The library, which is based in New Haven, Connecticut, will make the archives available for researchers starting next year.”

Awards

It’s been a full week since the Emmys were presented, but they need mentioning at the very least for the “historic firsts” Jackson McHenry lists at Vulture. Donald Glover, for example, became “the first black director to win an award for directing a comedy,” Atlanta. “It was inevitable that a streaming service would win an Emmy for best drama at some point,” writes John Koblin for the New York Times. “But no one expected Hulu to get there first.” The Handmaid’s Tale scored eight awards. And for the record, the NYT has the full list of winners.

The European Film Academy has announced that its honorary award for European Achievement in World Cinema will be presented to Julie Delpy during the thirtieth European Film Awards ceremony on December 9 in Berlin.

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) will present its Actress Tribute to Nicole Kidman and its Cinematographer Tribute to Ed Lachman at the Gotham Awards on November 27.

Goings On

New York. Today is the last day of Printed Matter’s 2017 New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, where you can catch FOOD SEX ART | The Starving Artists' Cookbook, “ten hours of video interviews, captured by Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf between 1986 and 1991,” as Jeff Goldberg explains at Artsy. “They broke bread with over 160 artists, talking about food, art, and life as they prepare their favorite cheap eats.” Among these artists are John Cage, Louise Bourgeois, Jonas Mekas, Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Gracie Mansion, and Taylor Mead.

Chicago. Among the films highlighted in this week’s Cine-File are Jeff Margolis’s Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979) and Andrzej Zulawski’s The Most Important Thing: Love (1975).

Toronto. TIFF’s series High Concept: The Films of Denis Villeneuve opens on Tuesday and runs through October 5. Adam Nayman for the TIFF Review: “While Villeneuve’s recent embrace of blockbuster scale and mastery of macrocosmic imagery has grown his stature on the international film scene, he’s still keen to zero in on small moments of tenderness and intimacy; he’s a big-picture filmmaker with an eye for detail.”

In the Works

“Tom Hanks is attached to star in a remake of A Man Called Ove, the Oscar nominated Hannes Holm-directed Swedish comedy that became the highest grossing foreign language film released in the U.S. in 2016,” reports Deadline’s Mike Fleming, Jr. Hanks will play “a grumpy widower whose overall unhappiness is exacerbated when he is unceremoniously dumped as chairman of the neighborhood association where he lives. Pushed into retirement in his job on top of all else, Ove gives up and resolves to commit suicide. Every attempt is interrupted by some circumstance that leads him to help a needy neighbor.”

PlayTime - Controlled Chaos from The Royal Ocean Film Society

Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva reports that “Showtime has landed a comedy series project from former The Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams and indie filmmaker Jim Strouse, the duo behind The Incredible Jessica James, with Williams set to star.” It’s “the story of an African American aspiring science fiction writer (Williams) who comes of age in Brooklyn.”

Also, “Showtime has acquired the rights to The President Is Missing, the upcoming thriller novel by President Bill Clinton and bestselling author James Patterson. It will be developed as a TV series.”

“James Schamus’s production outfit Symbolic Exchange is teaming with UK company Parkville Pictures to develop The Warning, a wartime drama from rising directing talent Leanne Welham (Pili),” reports Screen’s Tom Grater. “Based on Welham’s original idea, The Warning is set in October 1940, at the height of the Blitz, when Britain suffered relentless bombing from the German Luftwaffe.”

Obits

On Facebook, Ela Bittencourt notes the passing of Grzegorz Królikiewicz, “the unparalleled innovative voice of the Polish New Wave,” and points us to Jordan Cronk’s report for Filmmaker on the 2015 edition of the Neither/Nor sidebar of the True/False Film Festival: “Nominally a fiction filmmaker, Królikiewicz would nonetheless frequently take real people as his subjects, mounting expressionist docudramas by enlisting non-actors and restaging biographical events, often in the very location of their origin.”

Also on Facebook, Richard Brody remembers Lillian Ross, “one of the crucial writers in the history of the New Yorker, and one of the crucial artists of modern nonfiction. . . . Her work about movies is of enduring importance; she wrote Picture, which is one of the great immersive depictions and analyses of the making of a movie [John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951)] and the people who make them; her book about Ernest Hemingway is a deeply insightful portrait of an artist; her Profile of Otto Preminger is a gleeful fusion of form and substance; and here’s a re-post of a piece I wrote a few years ago about her movie pieces and, in particular, ones that she wrote about François Truffaut, which were collected and published as a book.” Ross, who was ninety-nine, “was the greatest profile writer in American journalism and one of the best reporters on the arts, and perhaps on life itself,” argues Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture.

Bernie Casey, “an accomplished National Football League receiver who successfully painted and acted in dozens of films,” has passed away at the age of seventy-eight, reports Richard Sandomir in the New York Times. Casey played J. C. Caroline, “a Chicago Bears teammate of the dying Brian Piccolo, in the television movie Brian’s Song (1971); a C.I.A. agent working with Sean Connery in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983); and an aging action hero in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1989), a parody of the blaxploitation genre that reunited him with [Jim] Brown.”

“Jake LaMotta, the middleweight champion boxer famed for his ferocity in the ring in the 1940s and early 50s, died this week—nearly forty years after his obituary was written.” Chris Klimek for NPR: “That obituary, of course, is Raging Bull. LaMotta published a memoir of that title in 1970, but it was Martin Scorsese's adaptation of the book, released late in 1980 to critical acclaim and commercial indifference, that became the lasting monument to his life.”

Listening

Michael Koresky discusses this year’s New York Film Festival (September 28 through October 15) with festival director Kent Jones on the latest Close-Up from the Film Society of Lincoln Center (62’38).

Film Comment Digital Producer Violet Lucca talks with Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and author of David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, about Twin Peaks: The Return (40’25”).

On the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs (94’20”), Peter Labuza “invites a Roadhouse worthy group of guests—Alison Herman of The Ringer, Scott Nye of Battleship Pretension and Criterion Cast, and Nate Fisher of Mubi Notebook—to dissect [Twin Peaks: The Return’s] use of nostalgic devices, moral dichotomies, and employment of experimental cinema techniques.”

Darren Aronofsky and William Friedkin discuss mother! on the new Director’s Cut podcast (33’24”).

Viewing

When Grasshopper Film asked Pedro Costa to list his ten favorite films of the past ten years, Costa put Jean-Marie Straub’s 2014 short The Algerian War! in the #4 slot. Now Grasshopper’s made the film freely viewable (2’08”).

In their eleventh “Thinking Machine” audiovisual essay for De Filmkrant, “Framing Fritz’s Apartment” (3’08”), Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin trace “various parameters” in Ulli Lommel’s The Tenderness of Wolves (1973): “elaborate camera movements; precise reframings; extended shot lengths; actions and displacements of bodies; conscious or accidental interactions between actors and props; fixtures that either reveal or block and divide the space; concentration on different zones of the apartment; staging based on height or depth.”

Martin Scorsese introduces his first online masterclass (2’17”).

“Maurice Pialat was one of the toughest, most bullish, tenderhearted, pugnacious filmmakers to ever work in Europe,” write Christopher Small and James Corning, introducing their audiovisual essay in the Notebook, “Pialat: Tough Love” (8’43”).

“UniFrance has started a new video series titled ‘First Movie – Day One’ in which the best French filmmakers working today share their personal tips on what’s most important for your first day on set of your first film,” notes Zack Sharf at IndieWire. Along with Olivier Assayas, you’ll hear from Emmanuelle Bercot,Bruno Dumont,Anne Fontaine, and Bertrand Tavernier.

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.