Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSStanley Kubrick in Filmworker.Stanley Kubrick’s long-lost passion project, a biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, may soon be realized. This week at the Berlinale, Steven Spielberg expanded on plans to executive-produce a seven-part series for HBO based on Kubrick’s original script.In June, Terence Davies will begin filming an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl. According to a production announcement, the cast includes Sophie Cookson, Richard E. Grant, and Verena Altenberger.Recommended VIEWINGWe’ve been enjoying the “redefining the food film” video-essay series on Vittles, a food and culture newsletter. Below is Andrew Key’s discussion of A Woman Under the Influence, and the ways that food can tear us apart:Shellac has shared a first trailer for Angela Schanelec’s Music,...
- 2/22/2023
- MUBI
Each December, we invite Notebook contributors to pair a new release with an older film they watched for the first time that year, creating a “fantasy double feature.” In practice, this offers something like a collective viewing diary, speaking to the breadth of moving-image art and the imagination of our writers. Even a quick scroll through this year’s doubles—dreamed up and defended by over 60 Notebook contributors—reveals an inspired bounty. Where else would you find Ulrike Ottinger on a bill with Adam Curtis or Jackass Forever?Our annual poll, now in its fifteenth year, is less about anointing the best than it is about bottling the year’s energy. What unexpected resonances arise between the past and present?CONTRIBUTORSArun A.K. | Jennifer Lynde Barker | Juan Barquin | Margaret Barton-Fumo | Rafaela Bassili | Joshua Bogatin | Anna Bogutskaya | Danielle Burgos | Adrian Curry | Frank Falisi | The Ferroni Brigade | Soham Gadre | Lawrence Garcia | Sean...
- 1/6/2023
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSThis week, we’re remembering the iconoclastic, anti-capitalist filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, who has died at the age of 89. In the course of revisiting Christopher Small’s Straub-Huillet Companion column, we were moved by this quotation from Straub, from a 1974 edition of Jump Cut:The revolution is like God’s grace, it has to be made anew each day, it becomes new every day, a revolution is not made once and for all. And it’s exactly like that in daily life. There is no division between politics and life, art and politics. I think one has no other choice, if one is making films that can stand on their own feet, they must become documentary, or in any case they must have documentary roots. Everything must be correct,...
- 11/23/2022
- MUBI
Our annual tradition of Fantasy Double Features asks the year's Notebook contributors to pair something new with something old, with the only requirement being the films have to have been freshly seen this year.Part diary of memorable viewing during 2021, part creative prompt to think about how cinema's present speaks to its past (and vice versa), the 14th edition of our end of year poll weaves between theater-going and home-viewing so seamlessly as to suggest that early pandemic impediments from last year are now quite normal. Yet clearly that hasn't stopped us from watching, being delighted by, and thinking about movies, and the wonderful combinations below are testaments to the dynamic, idiosyncratic, and interactive vitality of moviegoing wherever and however its being practiced.CONTRIBUTORSJett Allen | Paul Attard | Jennifer Lynde Barker | Susana Bessa | Michael M. Bilandic | Ela Bittencourt | Johannes Black | Joshua Bogatin | Alex Broadwell | Celluloid Liberation Front | Lillian Crawford | Adrian Curry...
- 1/13/2022
- MUBI
Despite the pandemic disruption of the film industry around the world, which impacted everything in film from production to simple moviegoing, the vibrancy of cinema culture throughout the year has felt as strong as ever, and fiercely resilient. In our small but passionate way we also have made a show of force. In 2021 alone, Notebook has published over 400 articles. Here are some highlights from the year—and we encourage you to use the "Explore" menu or dive into our archives to find even more excellent work published this year.ARTICLESTikTok meets silent cinema in Caroline Golum's witty essay. Cinematic technology used not for social celebrity but rather for criminal forensics was the focus of an article by Emerson Goo.The French New Wave's Luc Moullet, a guiding light for Notebook, was the subject of two pieces, one about the extraordinary TV show How to with John Wilson, the other...
- 12/31/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Drive My Car (2021)List-making season has fully started. Film Comment released both the top twenty films as well as the top twenty undistributed films of the year, and IndieWire published the results of a massive poll of 187 critics. Vulture's critics have each written about their top tens, and Drive My Car tops both Barack Obama and Screen Slate's annual list. Screen Slate has also included individual ballots from "contributors, friends, critics, and filmmakers," which gave Paul Schrader the opportunity to rank The Card Counter as his pick for the best film of the year. Due to a nationwide lockdown in the Netherlands, the International Film Festival Rotterdam will be taking place online, cancelling its previous plans for an in-person event. There are two weeks left to submit to the Sundance Film Festival's 2022 Native Lab,...
- 12/22/2021
- MUBI
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Ivana Miloš, Quince Alight (2021), monotype and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cmAGAINST The Weight Of The WORLDFor see, my friend goes shaking and white;He eyes me as the basilisk:i have turned, it appears, his day to night,Eclipsing his sun's disk—Robert Browning, “A Light Woman”Brown rotten quinces. They used to be lushly golden. Now they are decaying on the ground. The camera’s gaze rested on them like a basilisk’s deadly eyes. It asked too much of the quince tree. It would have happened anyway but it catalyzed its death. Like time, cinema always catalyzes death.
- 12/20/2021
- MUBI
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Ivana Miloš, A Gentle Creature (2021), monotype and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cmDEAD Flowers At The WAYSIDEEvery day there are hundreds of dead flowers, originally torn from the earth in order to display love, rotting at the side of the road. Some of them have just fallen victim to time: They dried out or their colors faded, leaving a sad and ultimately unbearable reminder of a beauty that is no more. Others, however, are thrown away in full bloom. Helpless bouquets cover streets and garbage cans like monuments to frustrated loves. Discarded in moments of anger or passionate refusal,...
- 11/19/2021
- MUBI
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom. Ivana Miloš, Tomato Earth Seedling (2021), monotype, collage and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cmGROWING Under The Bed “…the tomato, / star of earth, / recurrent / and fertile / star, / displays / its convolutions, / its canals, / its remarkable amplitude / and abundance, / no pit, / no husk, / no leaves or thorns, / the tomato offers / its gift / or fiery color / and cool completeness.“—Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Tomatoes”Flies approach. They always do. I suppose they are always hiding somewhere close to us, waiting for little cracks and smells to appear. Now they are everywhere, buzzing around the piles of tomatoes we’ve gathered from our garden.
- 10/12/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Audrey Diwan's Happening. The Venice Film Festival has come to a close. Check out all of the award winners, which include Audrey Diwan's Happening, Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God, and Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, here.Comedian Norm Macdonald, best known as a former cast member of Saturday Night Live and for his performances in films like Dirty Work, has died at 61. In a tweet dedicated to Macdonald, Adam Sandler described Macdonald as the "most fearless funny original guy we knew." Once titled Soggy Bottom, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest feature has a new title: Licorice Pizza, a reference to the record store chain from the 1970s. Surprise 35mm trailers for Licorice Pizza, described as having similarities to Anderson's Boogie Nights, have been seen playing before films like American Graffiti and Repo Men.
- 9/15/2021
- MUBI
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Ivana Miloš, Little Joe's Got It Covered (2021), monotype, collage and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cm“She is putting on a smile / Living in a glass house" —“Life in a Glasshouse,” RadioheadWhat do plants want? This question lurks at the bottom of recent shifts in thinking about vegetal life as well as fueling the popular genre of plant horror in literature and cinema. From Triffids and Killer Tomatoes to tendrils suddenly reaching for ankles in order to draw humans into the darkness, the genre has been a popular subject of awe, ridicule and countless interpretations. As this column is...
- 9/13/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSChameleon StreetThe New York Film Festival has announced an excellent selection for its Revivals section. The roster includes restorations of Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala, John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street, and Michael Powell's Bluebeard's Castle. The 2021 Locarno Film Festival has come to an end, with Indonesian filmmaker Edwin's Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash winning the Golden Leopard. For a full list of this year's award winners, read here. Recommended VIEWINGAhead of premiere, a trailer for the latest Spike Lee joint: the four-part documentary series NYC Epicenters: 9/11 → 2021 ½. The series, which captures twenty years of New York City history from the perspective of its citizens, will premiere on HBO Max August 22. Cinema Guild has released a trailer for Matías Piñeiro's Isabella.
- 8/18/2021
- MUBI
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Ivana Miloš, Weeping Willow Meets Andriesh (2021), nature print, monotype and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cm.The soul of a tree is my soul; the heart of a tree is my heart; the sap of the willow is my life. —The Story of Aoyagi, Lafcadio HearnWhenever you turn on the news these days, you are likely to see a burning forest. These images of fires across the world bring with them the unbearable sound of screaming tree spirits. They may only be audible to some of us, but once you finally hear them weep, you can’t sleep any longer.
- 8/17/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.Closeup of Fay Wray from Doctor X after restoration work. Image from https://www.cinema.ucla.eduNEWSAfter working together in the film Rojo (2018), director Benjamin Naishtat and actor Alfredo Castro reunite to talk about the terror, pleasure and mystery involved in the process of creating a film. They agree that for both director and actor, the seed of creation is the irrationality of madness, and that uncertainty is an essential factor in filmmaking. Castro and Naishtat call for a subversive cinema that cannot be domesticated by current narrative paradigms and that is also capable of using the imagination as a means and a catalyst to reinterpret our history. To listen to this episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast app, click here.The great French film director Jacques Rozier is being evicted from his...
- 7/14/2021
- MUBI
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Ivana Miloš, Through the Olive Trees (2021), monotype, collage and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cmThe olive tree does not weep and does not laugh. The olive treeIs the hillside’s modest lady. ShadowCovers her one leg, and she will not take her leaves off in front of the storm.—from The Second Olive Tree by Mahmoud Darwish; transl. Marilyn HackerAs long as there are olive trees growing somewhere, we may find hope for life. While the tree defines landscapes like no other and is connected to a special density of sunlight and the sound of chirping cicadas (so overused...
- 7/12/2021
- MUBI
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Ivana Miloš, Flower is a Dancer (2021), monotype and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cmThink of the manifold ways wherein Nature hath lent to our feelings—Johann Wolfgang von GoetheAnyone who has looked at a field of flowers long enough knows that if you are not loved, it is difficult to grow. In Pina Bausch’s and Chantal Akerman’s work, the fear of not growing is palpable in every second. We should consider ourselves very fortunate to have a television work that documents the meeting of those two extraordinary artists: In Un jour Pina a demandé, Akerman tries to...
- 6/21/2021
- MUBI
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Illustration: Ivana Miloš, All My Life (2021), monotype, collage and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cmIt never will rain roses: when we wantTo have more roses we must plant more trees. —George Eliot, "The Spanish Gypsy"A pan, a landscape, a song: this is all cinema needs. At least one is inclined to believe in such an assessment when confronted with the lush beauty of Bruce Baillie’s All My Life (1966). Recorded in a rush of inspiration at the side of a road in Caspar, California, the short consists of one continuous moving shot accompanied by Ella Fitzgerald singing “All My Life” on the soundtrack.
- 5/14/2021
- MUBI
Study, nymphs, the spreading treesas you gather your flowers in their shade,how they were lovers in former daysand their trunks even now bear their loadof pain.—From Luís de Camões' "As doces cantilenas que cantavam"; To the Fawns, transl. Landeg WhiteFull Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Above: Ivana Miloš, Vuvu lusitanica (2021), monotype and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cmWhen João César Monteiro sits on a bench under the protecting branches of the Cupressus lusitanica (Mexican Cypress) in Lisbon’s Jardim do Príncipe Real in his final film Vai~E~Vem, he is posing for an image that will survive him; an image bound to life and death,...
- 4/13/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Radu Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. Radu Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn has won the Golden Bear at the 71st Berlinale. See the list of this year's award winners here. Recommended VIEWINGFeminist film journal Another Gaze has announced the upcoming launch of its free streaming platform, Another Screen, which will be available worldwide from March 12. Programming will begin with a retrospective dedicated to the late Italian filmmaker Cecilia Mangini. The official trailer for Roy Andersson's About Endlessness, which won Best Director at the Biennale in 2019. Read Leonardo Goi's Venice review of the film here.Janus Films has released its trailer for the restoration of Eric Rohmer's Tale of Four Seasons, an elegant cycle of moral parables. Until March 23, viewers have the opportunity to watch Tsai Ming-Liang's Madam...
- 3/11/2021
- MUBI
Whatever it is I am saying, I alwaysneed a leaf or a flower, if not anentire field.—Mary OliverFull Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.Above: Ivana Miloš, What Did the Lady... (2021), monotype collage and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cm.Caught up in our daily lives, we tend to forget about the existence of trees. Especially those growing close to us. I remember taking a large chestnut tree standing in front of my parents' apartment in a small city in Germany for granted. Sometimes I would marvel at the many blackbirds gathering in its crown but mostly I was just too busy with whatever was...
- 3/8/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Joan Micklin Silver on the set of Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979). Trailblazing filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver, best known for films Hester Street (1975) and Crossing Delancey (1988), has died. In an interview with Film Comment in 2017, Silver described the will she possessed as a woman filmmaker who wished to spotlight stories about female relationships and women's labor: "I didn’t want to feel like the woman director. I wanted to feel like one of many women directors."The 71st edition of the Berlin Film Festival will be replacing this year's physical event with a virtual European Film Market in March, and a "mini-festival with a series of onsite world premieres" in June.The International Film Festival Rotterdam has also announced the lineup for this year's hybrid multi-part 50th edition, to be presented between February 1-...
- 1/6/2021
- MUBI
"Plants may sweat profusely but never sully themselves."—W.H. AudenFull Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.It’s impossible to miss the sunflowers in Agnès Varda’s not-quite-as-sunny-as-it-seems Le bonheur (1965). They appear right in the title sequence of the film, accompanied by title cards in the yellow of the flowers. Throughout the film they reappear in different shapes and forms, for example on dresses, postcards, and in bouquets. Varda’s film not only deals with a man perfectly happy with both his wife and his mistress, she deals with the way this world may look in his mind. Shot in beautiful colours by cinematographers...
- 1/4/2021
- MUBI
Ivana Miloš and Patrick Holzapfel continue our series of film dialogues. In collaboration with Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol, Margaret Tait's Blue Black Permanent (1992) is showing on Mubi from July 26 - August 25, 2018 in most countries.Patrick,Here is something I always wanted to tell you about—it is connected to tides, grasses on clifftops, birdsong in the morning, smoking tea cups. All of these come into view in Margaret Tait’s observational practice, leaning in and looking closer, looking in and looking into things. This poetess and filmmaker whose work has been off the radar for decades, as she spent the latter living on Orkney within reach of the waves, made only one feature film, the one you have now seen. Retelling another life’s essence, daughter Barbara travels through memories of her mother Greta’s mysterious death. The multiple voices we hear are joined by those of the landscape in its minutiae,...
- 7/26/2018
- MUBI
Christian Petzold's The State I Am In (2000) and Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below (2010) will be showing in September and October, 2017 on Mubi in most countries around the world.Christian Petzold (left) and Christoph Hochhäusler (right) on the set of Dreileben. Photo by Felix von Böhm.We meet in Christian Petzold’s office in Berlin-Kreuzberg. A giant wall of whispering books, almost like a Borgesian brain of fiction, encircles the table at which Christoph Hochhäusler, myself and the owner take place to discuss their films. The idea of the interview was to get Petzold’s take on Hochhäusler’s The City Below (2010) and Hochhäusler’s take on Petzold’s The State I Am In (2000). In the end, both filmmakers ended up talking about a lot more, as cinema for them has always been something that shines most brightly when remembering it, discussing it and loving it. The fictions proposed...
- 9/20/2017
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSFrom Terry Gilliam's Facebook page comes some of the unlikeliest news in the history of cinema: "After 17 years, we have completed the shoot of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Muchas gracias to all the team and believers." We'll believe it when we see it, but boy do we want to see it!In other long-in-making news but from the other side of the film industry, American avant-garde filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky has revealed that he has edited old footage shot on the now-discontinued Kodachrome 16mm film stock into five new films (!), including "a document from the weeks that Stan Brakhage was dying..." Hopefully we will get to see these in the festivals and venues for alternative cinema where Dorsky's fans usually savor his work.The New York Asian Film Festival, the United States's...
- 6/7/2017
- MUBI
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