Persona, Wiseman, African Cinema in the Spotlight
Share
- In his latest Cinema ’67 Revisited column for Film Comment, Mark Harris looks back at the rapturous critical reception of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona upon its release, calling the film a monument “to a moment at which serious critics became completely committed to making the case that movies could be as great as any other art form.”
- Ang Lee also pays tribute to Persona in a list of six films that have been influential in his life.
- “I don't really know what I want, other than good sequences, whatever that means,” says documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman in a conversation with New York Film Festival director Kent Jones in Interview magazine. “What I find is always a matter of chance, judgment, and luck.”
- Another nonfiction filmmaker we love, Cameraperson director Kirsten Johnson, discusses documentary ethics and formal innovation with online magazine 4:3.
- Over on his site, Leonard Maltin published an appreciation of our new editions of His Girl Friday and Mildred Pierce.
- For more female-led classics, read Farran Smith Nehme’s primer on the Joan Crawford and Bette Davis gems you should watch before the premiere of Ryan Murphy’s latest television series, Feud: Bette and Joan, this Sunday.
- And if that doesn’t satisfy your classic Hollywood appetite, join Eddie Muller over at TCM for Noir Alley, kicking off Sunday morning with The Maltese Falcon.
- For the New Yorker, Ned Beauman profiles Mica Levi, the Oscar-nominated composer behind the score for Pablo Larraín’s Jackie. “What makes the score so remarkable,” he writes, “is the sense that the familiar orchestral textures of the prestige Hollywood biopic have been melded with something uncanny, as if we had stumbled across the hairless, tar-colored alien from Under the Skin hiding in the Lincoln bedroom.”
- With our second World Cinema Project box set arriving this May, we were excited to hear about a major new initiative at Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation: an effort to preserve and increase access to works of African cinema.
- New York’s Blum & Poe gallery just opened its Agnès Varda exhibition, which features a collection of the director’s video installations, photography, and sculpture.
