Light in Stereo
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A new restoration of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) will premiere in Cannes next week, and a still from the film featuring a young Catherine Deneuve adorns the cover of a brochure listing all the films in all the sections of this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato. The bounty can also be browsed at the site, whetting our appetites for the thirty-eighth edition running in Bologna from June 22 through 30.
Locarno, in the meantime, has announced that filmmaker Jessica Hausner (Little Joe, Club Zero) will preside over this year’s jury from August 7 through 17. And the Tokyo International Film Festival (October 28 through November 6) has a jury president as well: Tony Leung, the star of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) and the winner of a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Venice last year.
In New York, Hong Sangsoo’s In Our Day opens at Film at Lincoln Center today before heading out across North America, and in the New York Times, Brando Yu finds it “as warm and wise as it is simple and languid.” Also opening today are Marco Bellocchio’s Films of Revolution at the Quad, Out of the 80s at Film Forum, the Rooftop Films Summer Series, and two films by Kim Ki-young at Metrograph. You may well have seen The Housemaid (1960), and if so, you’ll know it’s worth revisiting, and the new restoration of An Experience to Die For (1995) is making its North American premiere.
Man Ray: Return to Reason, a set of four newly restored films from the 1920s with a new soundtrack from Carter Logan and Jim Jarmusch’s Sqürl, is still on at IFC Center through Thursday. At Hyperallergic, Eileen G’Sell writes that Ray “anticipated the extent to which the motion picture would inform how we curate and call up memory, excavating the depths of the subconscious.”
This week’s highlights:
- Metrograph Journal has been coming on strong lately with essays by K. Austin Collins and Keva York on Kelly Reichardt, Kyung Hyun Kim on Youn Yuh-jung, and Nick Pinkerton’s interview with Bill and Turner Ross. In the run-up to next week’s series marking the publication of the first English-language edition of Le Dépays, a collection of writing and photography that Chris Marker put together while he was working on Sans Soleil (1983), Sasha Frere-Jones puts forward “a slightly exaggerated and pedantic theory of Marker,” namely, that he was “a ‘stereo thinker,’ someone who created fully loaded sound, image, and text streams, working with the productive friction generated between all three. (The Greek word ‘stereo’ means three-dimensional, not two.)” Sabzian, in the meantime, is running Kumail Syed’s translation of Jean Delmas’s 1978 piece on Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat (1977).
- The first part of a major Hiroshi Shimizu retrospective carries on at the Museum of the Moving Image through the weekend, while the second part has just opened at Japan Society and will run through June 1. At 4Columns, Andrew Chan focuses on the “gorgeous chamber drama” Sound in the Mist (1956), the story of the illicit love between botany professor Kazuhiko (Ken Uehara) and his assistant, Tsuruko (Michiyo Kogure). “Shimizu had a neorealist’s affinity for people enduring war, poverty, and disability,” writes Chan. “With its relatively bourgeois protagonists, Sound in the Mist at first seems like a departure, but its heart lies with the downwardly mobile.” This “late-career triumph . . . exemplifies his attentiveness to inconvenient feelings and awkward entanglements—a quality shared by his subsequent melodramas Dancing Girl (1957) and Image of a Mother (1959).”
- American Cinematographer has just republished Clifford V. Harrington’s 1960 profile of Kazuo Miyagawa, who shot Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), and Ozu’s Floating Weeds (1959). For Reverse Shot, Nicolas Rapold talks with another legendary cinematographer, Frederick Elmes, about his work with David Lynch and John Cassavetes. “David working on Eraserhead was a very precise experience, and we shot very meticulously with a very small crew, and only what we needed,” says Elmes. On The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, “John Cassavetes—who was also making a film the only way he knew how—was much looser and more open to things that the actors would bring to the table. John was much more interested in feeling the performance in a scene . . . John needed it to feel alive.”
- Bass, the new light and sound installation by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Small Axe) on view at Dia Beacon through next summer, is “unclassifiable,” writes Siddhartha Mitter in the New York Times. “An immersive environment. A dematerialized sculpture.” Sixty light boxes bathe the 30,000-square-foot gallery in color, oozing through the complete spectrum of visible light accompanied by an improvised soundtrack from a group led by bassist Marcus Miller and featuring Meshell Ndegeocello, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, and Laura-Simone Martin. “McQueen’s most abstract work may be one of his most fertile,” suggests Mitter, and the Guardian’s Adrian Searle finds that it “slows you down and sucks the air out of you. Bass is vertiginous, compelling, and very moving.”
- One of the most pleasant ways to keep up with Cannes is listening to smart critics talking through their first impressions of the films they’ve just seen with equally smart and inquisitive podcast hosts. On The Last Thing I Saw, Nicolas Rapold chats with Eric Hynes about Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (more on that one soon) and with Arnaud Desplechin about his “filmgoer’s coming-of-age story,” Spectateurs! Recent guests on the Film Comment Podcast include Beatrice Loayza and Isabel Stevens discussing new films by Quentin Dupieux, Sophie Fillières, and Agathe Riedinger and Bilge Ebiri and Jonathan Romney on Furiosa and several other titles. If you’re looking for a break from Cannes, tune into Rapold and Kelly Reichardt on Alain Delon and/or the FC roundtable on writing about avant-garde cinema with Amy Taubin, Genevieve Yue, and Ayanna Dozier.
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