After New York’s legendary Kim’s Video sold their 55,000 titles to the mayor of Salemi, Italy, in a deal meant to keep the collection intact and available to the public, the movies seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. Trying to hunt them down in a small town that had no idea what she was talking about, Karina Longworth discovered bureaucratic malaise, Mafia connections, and a surprisingly happy ending.
“John Powers spoke about his exhaustion with people coming up to him and asking: ‘Why don’t they make films like Jules and Jim anymore?’ His answer was, ‘They do, they just don’t make them the way they used to make them.'” An erudite and wide-rangingly cinephiliac changing of the guard, as incoming Film Society of Lincoln Center programmer Kent Jones interviews the man he’s partially replacing, Richard Peña, on his years with the New York Film Festival.
Professor Ray Carney’s career hasn’t been without controversy (ask Gena Rowlands), but his conflict with Mark Rappaport has the makings of a full-blown scandal. Briefly, Carney offered several years ago to store the filmmaker’s video masters at BU with “the understanding that he would return them to me upon request”; when Rappaport made that request, hoping to stream the movies, Carney refused to hand them over, ultimately demanding a $27,000 payout for their release. Jon Jost has Rappaport’s open letter, along with a chronicle of his own attempts to contact a now incommunicado Carney, and a pained condemnation of his “unconscionable” behavior.
Catherine Grant and Russell Pearce’s new film journal Sequence aims to grow in a modular style, with contributions designed in response to previous entries. However this turns out, they launch with a marvel: Steven Shaviro’s superb reading of von Trier’s Melancholia. The article is academic, yes (for Shaviro the film’s primary message is “profoundly anti-Nietzschean”), but I’m as anti-theory as it gets and my eyes only glazed over a paragraph or three along the way.
I had less luck with the new issue of Screening the Past (though not with Adrian Martin’s “Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma“), but Catherine Russell’s consideration of The Exiles and Alex Ling’s compelling reconfiguration of Last Year at Marienbad‘s time frame are worth sifting through. And if Kay Dickinson doesn’t quite pull off her attempt to highlight the positive lessons of the Syrian film industry despite the country’s less savory aspects, it’s an interesting introduction to a cinema and a studio structure virtually unknown in the west.
“Smart, aren’t you?” “No, not really. I’ve just had time to think things out.” David Bordwell examines Hitchcock’s innovations in Dial M for Murder, which are hardly limited to 3D.
Ruth Donnelly“If Warner Brothers, where she was under contract in the early 1930s, had paid her by the laugh, she would have been worth half a million a year, easy.” Dan Callahan, on why Ruth Donnelly is the actor he’s happiest to see in any movie. Also at The Chiseler, Imogen Smith discusses the incompatibility of attitude and subject matter that characterized most pre-code rural films. (“Even when someone tried to make a film extolling the virtues of rural life, it seems they just couldn’t stop sneering and shuddering.”)
Michael Sicinski launches a series of articles dedicated to long movies—and how their reception changes now that we most often view them at home rather than rapt in a theater—with a look at Greenaway’s The Falls. Via Criterion.
Delighted by the opportunity to discover an unfamiliar master, Farran Smith Nehme surveys the three Grémillon films released by Criterion on their Eclipse line.
At her own site, the Siren recalls Mabel Normand, and King Vidor’s surprising anecdote concerning her funeral. She also links to David Cairns’s recounting of the story from a few years back, where it’s used to size up, as unflatteringly as he deserves, Irving Thalberg.
Home movies, a macaw, and a goldfish may not make the most riveting subjects, but Britain’s National Media Museum has dated these test rolls by Edward Turner to between 1901 and 1903, making them the first color films ever shot. Link via New Scientist.
While considering the opening credits of Twin Peaks, Art of the Title’s Shaun Mir references an Anglo-Saxon myth to draw an intertextual link between the series and Blue Velvet that I’d never suspected.
Forty years on, Fellini’s Roma remains for Jeremi Szaniawski an underappreciated masterpiece, and the template for the director’s subsequent films.
Watts as Princess Di, Jones and Hopkins as dueling Hitchcocks, Akerman and Seyfried as dueling Lovelaces; Dan North has had enough of “le cinéma du looky-likey.”
“And anybody can tell I didn’t do that to him.” “How?” “‘Cause he looks too damn good, that’s how!” The Retronaut offers a small but charming gallery of Clint Eastwood, all breezy confidence on the Dirty Harry set.
LIFE presents a lovely collection of Grace Kelly portraits, taken in 1953 and ’54 by Loomis Dean.
Video: Anne Billson posts a 1998 TV discussion she participated in with fellow critics Alexander Walker, Jonathan Romney, and “actor and film-maker, sorry, all-round genius and Renaissance Man,” Vincent Gallo, who arrives draped in equally ridiculous sailor suit and attitude. Passed along by Adam Cook.
Seattle Events
“Framing Pictures,” the monthly discussion with film critics Richard T. Jameson, Kathleen Murphy, and Bruce Reid (sitting in for Robert Horton, currently on a fellowship in Europe), takes place next week Friday, September 14, at NWFF. The event begins at 5pm and is free. Jameson suggests some topics for discussion at Straight Shooting.
Grand Illusion is showing Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday as a special gala presentation for their annual fundraiser (they’re currently raising funds to upgrade their sound system) on Saturday, September 15. Shows at 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., from what they promise is a beautiful 35mm print. Get your tickets online here.
A new 4K (digital) restoration of Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse plays for a week at The Uptown.
Visit the film review pages at The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, and The Stranger for more releases and see complete Seattle screening schedules through IMDb, MSN, Yahoo, or Fandango, pick the interface of your choice.
The weekly links page is compiled and curated by Bruce Reid, with obituaries curated by Sean Axmaker and other contributions from friends of Parallax View.