More to Come
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February 20 marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Altman, and celebrations are now getting underway with series in Nashville (tomorrow through July 3), Chicago (Wednesday through August 30), and Berkeley (June 13 through August 30). Rebecca Fons, the director of programming at the Siskel Film Center in Chicago, tells NewCity’s Ray Pride that “the challenge was not what to choose for the lineup, but what to exclude. His 1970 to 1975 has to be one of the most prolific and masterful five years of any American filmmaker, and he was only just introducing himself to audiences. I was also struck by his candor: there is a frankness to his work. That isn’t to say an Altman film is simple.” These films “are sophisticated, rich, and multifaceted—but they are also . . . true.”
In New York, Anthology Film Archives is celebrating another centennial through Thursday. Adolfas Mekas, born on September 20, 1925, was a “filmmaker and teacher whose importance within the realm of experimental cinema was comparable to that of his more widely celebrated brother, Jonas Mekas.” The MoMA series Queer and Uncensored is on through June 27 and features It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives (1972), in which, as Melissa Anderson writes at 4Columns, Rosa von Praunheim “savages gay-male self-destruction and the pathological need to appease, fit into, and replicate an irredeemably corrupt and enfeebled heterosexual culture.”
Through the weekend, the UCLA Film & Television Archive is spotlighting Ivan Dixon, the star of the late Michael Roemer’s Nothing but a Man (1964) who went on to direct The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973). The second edition of the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival is on in Hong Kong through Sunday, and Watershed in Bristol has just unveiled its full lineup for the ninth edition of Cinema Rediscovered (July 23 through 27).
In London, Tate Britain is showing moving image works by Ed Atkins through August 25. Writing for the New Left Review, Julieta Caldas observes that “Atkins’s work is full of what he calls ‘mocked-up accidents,’ deliberate glitches. It is haunted by death but animated by a desire to let ‘real life’ intrude into the scene; full of meticulously rendered, hyper-real representations and yet intent on scotching the effect, breaking the artifice; technically virtuosic yet often acutely self-exposing.”
Also on view through August 25 is Satellites, an exhibition conceived by Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, The Neon Demon) and game designer Hideo Kojima and presented at Prada Aoyama Tokyo. Movies and video games “are almost the polar opposite which is what makes it interesting,” NWR tells Shane Anderson in 032c. “You can say that movies feel like the past and games feel like the future. And that sometimes games feel like part of the past and cinema a part of the future.”
For Berlin Art Link, Annalisa Giacinti visits Julian Rosefeldt in his studio. The occasion is Nothing Is Original, a comprehensive exhibition at C/O Berlin dedicated to the artist who shot to fame ten years ago with Manifesto, a thirteen-channel installation featuring Cate Blanchett delivering an array of landmark manifestos from various periods of history.
This week’s highlights:
- Amy Holden Jones’s Love Letters (1983), starring Jamie Lee Curtis and arriving on the Criterion Channel on Sunday, is “a movie that ought to be considered a small-scale but emotionally potent classic,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. It’s “a romantic melodrama built on a venerable framework, the eternal triangle, that Jones fills out with a modest but jolting modernism—as much in the form of its story as in the images and tones with which she realizes it.” And “the casting of Curtis turned out to be inspired. Love Letters was Curtis’s first lead role outside of horror films, and she throws herself into it, filling the screen with irrepressible energy and focussed intensity.”
- A new restoration of Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (1977), the earliest complete surviving feature directed by an Iranian woman, begins a weeklong run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music today before heading to Cleveland,Vancouver, and Toronto. Flora Shabaviz stars as an eighteen-year-old whose defiance of her village’s expectations of her is taken as a sign of demonic possession. “Nabili, who will be present at several of the BAM screenings, has cited Robert Bresson as an influence,” notes J. Hoberman in the New York Times, “but The Sealed Soil is not a would-be European art film. An act of clandestine resistance shot for a pittance at a two-to-one ratio with available light in six days and a cast of villagers (save for Shabaviz, who was married to the cinematographer), it is a triumph of what the Cuban film theorist Julio García Espinosa called ‘imperfect’ cinema.”
- The new issue of Cineaste is out, and the magazine is presenting a few online exclusives, including Edward Frumkin’s conversation with Matthew Rankin about Universal Language (2024), Guy Maddin and other Winnipeg filmmakers, Iranian cinema, and trading a life in academia for making movies. Paul Risker talks with Carson Lund about Eephus (2024)—and about baseball and cinema as the two great American pastimes. And Page Laws reviews Herbie J. Pilato’s new book, One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg.
- A few weeks ago, Lisa Lu became the oldest person to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As a teenager in 1930s Shanghai, Lu translated Hollywood movies live for Mandarin-speaking audiences. In the 1950s and ’60s, she landed small roles on American television series, and in 1975, she won her third Golden Horse Award for her lead performance in the Shaw Brothers production The Empress Dowager. She’s appeared in supporting roles in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club (1993), and Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians (2018). “No other Asian American actor has enjoyed such a notable career on both sides of the Pacific, and even now, at age ninety-eight, Lu continues to seek and land roles,” writes Oliver Wang in the introduction to his interview with Lu for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
- Takashi Miike is preparing to work with Charli XCX on an English-language feature, and he’s slated to direct Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo for Neon. His new thriller, Sham, will premiere next month at Tribeca, and earlier this year, he brought Blazing Fists to Rotterdam. There, Blake Simons listened to Miike answer questions about Audition (1999) “and its feminist readings” and Ichi the Killer (2001) “and its urban legend of nauseating festival-goers.” For Notebook, Simons later asked Miike about new modes of production in Japan, gay themes in his work, and how—and why—he keeps so busy. “Under what circumstances can a veteran, as they grow older, still create something truly interesting?” asks Miike. “Moving forward, my work should serve as a source of encouragement for both those who have built a career and retired, and young people—conveying the message ‘There’s more to come for you, too!’”
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