Did You See This?

What Comes After

Jacob Sewell in Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997)

The Oscar nominations are out, Sundance is on, and SXSW has announced a lineup that includes Mimi Cave’s thriller Holland, starring Nicole Kidman and Matthew Macfadyen; Flying Lotus’s sci-fi adventure Ash, with Eiza González and Aaron Paul; and Alex Scharfman’s comedy The Death of a Unicorn, featuring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega. This year’s edition will open on March 7 with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s half-hour comedy series The Studio and run through March 14.

This busy week has seen the passing of Jules Feiffer and Bertrand Blier. Primarily known as a cartoonist, Feiffer wrote and drew a strip that ran in the Village Voice for more than forty years. He was also a playwright, whose 1969 Broadway play Little Murders was adapted in 1971 by Alan Arkin, and a screenwriter, working with Mike Nichols on Carnal Knowledge (1971), Robert Altman on Popeye (1980), and Alain Resnais on I Want to Go Home (1989).

Blier directed Miou-Miou, Gérard Depardieu, and Patrick Dewaere—and in smaller roles, Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Moreau—in Going Places (1974). Revisiting the film in 1990, Kevin Thomas wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Blier’s strategies in the telling of his sexual odyssey remain fresh, outrageous, and inspired.” Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), centering again on a ménage à trois with Depardieu and Dewaere, won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Blier was eighty-five, and Feiffer was ninety-five.

The loss of David Lynch, in the meantime, carries on burrowing deeper. Recent reflections on the legacy come from Max Nelson (New Left Review), Michael Atkinson (BFI), Tom Shone (Prospect), and Vikram Murthi, who writes in the Nation that Lynch’s films “emanate an almost religious respect for grief, and many reveal a persistent faith that people can pass into a harmonious, otherworldly plane beyond the mortal realm. It’s as though Lynch had spent a lifetime trying to grasp the meaning of such an elemental experience decades ahead of time.”

The most moving remembrance comes from Laura Dern. In an open letter to Lynch published in the Los Angeles Times, she recalls moments they shared on and off the sets of Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Inland Empire (2006), and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). “You leave us amid utter brokenness in our city, our beloved Los Angeles, the place we both called home,” writes Dern. “I know you were worried for everyone’s heartbreak and loss, and yet still, like your films, while horror is happening, you always believed in the light and the goodness in people and held hope for our city and all those who live here.”

This week’s other highlights:

  • In a whopping dossier for 032c, Cassidy George takes a deep dive into the work of Harmony Korine, who wrote Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) when he was nineteen; directed his first feature, Gummo, two years later; actually had a commercial hit with Spring Breakers in 2013; and confounded audiences in Venice last year with Baby Invasion. “For decades, Korine compared making films to warfare,” writes George. “Now, he has placed him­self on the front lines of an even bigger battle: shaping the future of entertainment. Korine is no longer concerned with disrupting or salvaging cinema. He’s interested only in what comes after it.”

  • Eight years ago, Michael Schulman moved into a Greenwich Village apartment that he later discovered had been occupied by Charlotte Zwerin, a documentary filmmaker and editor best known for her work with Albert and David Maysles (Salesmen, Gimme Shelter). “I learned that she was a jazz buff, a chain-smoker, and a founding mother of the vérité movement, which replaced explanatory voice-over and talking heads with fly-on-the-wall naturalism,” writes Schulman in the New Yorker. “Zwerin’s status as the third Maysles was both her calling card and her curse.” But she did complete a film begun by Shirley Clarke, Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World (1963), which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and Clint Eastwood financed her “zenith as a solo director,” Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988).

  • Notebook is running excerpts from the latest issue of its smartly edited and spectacularly designed magazine. Durga Chew-Bose has notes on Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001), and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo (2001). Philippa Snow writes about what draws us—especially when we’re young—to graphic depictions of violence. And Christopher Holliday explores the economic and political factors driving a surge in the digital de-aging of stars getting on in years.

  • In 1929, four years after Battleship Potemkin had become the talk of Hollywood, Joseph Stalin sent Sergei Eisenstein, assistant Grigori Aleksandrov, and cameraman Eduard Tisse on a trip through Europe and the States “to study sound technology in film,” writes Marlenée Heath for Little White Lies. “When the Soviet trio reached Hollywood in 1930, Paramount contracted Eisenstein for three thousand dollars a week. Now he just needed an idea.” He was researching an adaptation of Blaise Cendrars’s 1925 novel L’or (Sutter’s Gold) when the Red Scare led Eisenstein to leave the States before seeing the project through. “But his most outstanding work experimenting with sound, and even color, was yet to come,” writes Heath. “Even though he languished in Hollywood, the Western influence upon him remained, such as the costumes in Ivan the Terrible, inspired by Disney’s Snow White.

  • It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned any best-of-2024 lists. Two that are not to be missed are Reverse Shot’s and La Internacional Cinéfila, the poll of critics (Nicole Brenez, Adrian Martin), filmmakers (Radu Jude, Miguel Gomes), and programmers (Carlo Chatrian, Haden Guest) conducted each year by Roger Koza. This has come up because the new Senses of Cinema published today brings its massive World Poll (128 lists!) as well as interviews—with Matthew Rankin (Universal Language), Athina Rachel Tsangari (Harvest), Tatiana Huezo (Prayers for the Stolen), and Yeo Siew Hua (Stranger Eyes)—articles (Hirokazu Kore-eda, the state of horror), festival reports, and book reviews.

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.

You have no items in your shopping cart