Pages, Paints, and Protests
Back in October, the Austrian Film Museum and the Viennale launched a monthlong Yoshishige Yoshida retrospective. In the program notes, Haden Guest called Yoshida an “innovative stylist and profound thinker about cinematic form and meaning” who “helped usher a new spirit into postwar Japanese cinema.” When Srikanth Srinivasan heard that the director of such fiercely political films as Eros + Massacre (1969), Heroic Purgatory (1970), and Coup d’état (1973) had died on Thursday at the age of eighty-nine, he tweeted: “2022 is determined to take all the giants of cinematic modernism with it.” Writing for the New Left Review, Jonathan Rosenbaum remembers Jean-Marie Straub and Jean-Luc Godard as “the two most imposing pillars of cinematic modernism in Western Europe.”
- It’s been two years, but Screening the Past now returns with a bumper issue to savor over many weekends to come. And it opens with a bang. Patricia MacCormack, Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University and self-described “old school Melbourne goth,” asks what’s so upsetting “about the idea of the extinction of the human species, and with it the end of the anthropocene? And what has it to do with cinema?” Issue 46 also offers essays on Jacques Rivette, Pier Paolo Pasolini, “It Girl” Clara Bow, and Anthony Mann; reviews of books on Terrence Malick, Mike Nichols, and Douglas Sirk; and in the “Classics and Reruns” section, shorter pieces from Philippe Grandrieux, Jacques Rozier, and Adrian Martin.
- Through January 4, Another Screen is presenting Films from Iran for Iran, a freely accessible program of “films by women and nonbinary filmmakers, made from 1979 to the present day, with a focus on experimental and nonfiction work.” In an accompanying essay, Pegah Pasalar, Katayoon Barzegar, and Niloufar Nematollahi trace the roots of the ongoing protests to 1817, when a woman refused the veil, through the street protests that led to the Constitutional Revolution of the early twentieth century and the mass demonstrations on International Women’s Day in 1979. The essay is “a denunciation of the commodification we have witnessed over the last couple of months of the new Woman, Life, Freedom movement.”
- White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, arrives on Netflix on December 30. “It’s a Cultural Studies bibliography rendered in 35 mm,” writes Sukhdev Sandhu at 4Columns, adding that “DeLillo has always been preoccupied with cinema (in 1982’s The Names, he describes the twentieth century as ‘the filmed century’).” Leonardo Goi goes long on this in the Notebook: “It’s not just that screens bob up everywhere in DeLillo’s books; images—and cinema—end up shaping their structure, rhythms, and textures. Asked about his earliest influences, DeLillo once stated that the movies of Jean-Luc Godard had ‘a more immediate effect’ on his craft than anything he’d ever read.”
- The new fortieth anniversary 4K restoration of The Draughtsman’s Contract is currently touring selected cities. Introducing his conversation with Peter Greenaway for Screen Slate, Nicolas Rapold describes the film as “part floridly witty post-Restoration drama, part serpentine mystery, part aesthetic treatise on artistic practice and property . . . A Peter Greenaway interview is its own subgenre, with its themes and variations invariably featuring a proclamation of cinema’s inferiority and infancy next to painting.” Walking to Paris, featuring Emun Elliott as Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, is now in postproduction, and Greenaway hopes to make a film with Morgan Freeman “about death to ask the extraordinarily stupid existential question: is death necessary?” And he’s working on a new screenplay “which is very much about Christianity.”
- To circle back to the Sight and Sound poll one more time, many were surprised to see Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) not only enter the top one hundred so soon in a poll conducted just once every ten years but also land so high: #30. Isabel Stevens, the magazine’s managing editor, talks with Sciamma about what the director calls the slow burn of “desire and then the burst of love” between a painter (Noémie Merlant) and her subject (Adèle Haenel) who have “this strong sense of chemistry but also equality.” Also, spoiler alert: “I want people to get ‘page 28’ tattoos.”