The ’70s, the ’90s, and Now

In the New York Times, Jason Zinoman calls Newhart, who passed away on Thursday at the age of ninety-four, “one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy.” With his 1960 chart-topping, Grammy-winning album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, he established a schtick, uniquely his, and stuck to it. For good reason: it worked like a charm, every time. Often using a telephone as a prop, Newhart gave audiences just one side of a conversation—an ad guy, for example, with Abraham Lincoln on the other end of the line—and the succeeding clicks of recognition of what the unheard voice must have just said triggered the swelling cascade of laughs.

Newhart appeared in a fair number of movies—he was Major Major in Mike Nichols’s Catch-22 (1970) and Will Ferrell’s dad in Jon Favreau’s Elf (2003)—but The Bob Newhart Show was such a beloved landmark that the 1980s sitcom Newhart gave it an uproarious callback before signing off. Last November, Judd Apatow celebrated one of the most unlikely but genuinely tight friendships in all of show business, the one between Newhart, the buttoned-down nice guy, and Don Rickles, the gruff king of insult comedy.

Born just a year before The Bob Newhart Show went on the air, Shannen Doherty was another television star who occasionally gave memorable turns in movies. She appeared in Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1988) and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995), and she “epitomized the experience of growing up female in the ’90s,” writes Time’s Judy Berman. “Like her iconic Beverly Hills, 90210 character, Brenda Walsh, she contained a volatile mix of Gen X angst, teen fragility and feminist grit. She thrived as a porcelain-skinned, dark-haired drama queen in a world of tan, blonde valley girls, and owned her identity as an angry young woman before Courtney Love and Elizabeth Wurtzel made it a trend. She wasn’t for everyone, but that was part of her appeal.” Cancer took Doherty last Saturday. She was only fifty-three.

Pioneering video artist Bill Viola passed away last Friday; he was seventy-three. “Across five decades, his installations found new uses for state-of-the-art audio and visual technology and interrogated the human experience—birth, death, consciousness—in works that drew on eastern and western spiritual and philosophical traditions,” writes the Guardian’s Rachel Healy. In 2001, Observer critic Laura Cumming wrote that Viola had become “the Rembrandt of the video age, an artist who has done more than any of his contemporaries to advance the emotional and aesthetic content of his medium.”

Writing for the Guardian in 2021, Sukhdev Sandhu called Manfred Kirchheimer America’s “least-known great documentarian.” Kirchheimer, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of ninety-three, was known for such New York City symphonies as Stations of the Elevated (1980) and his last film, Free Time (2019), which was “assembled from 45,000 feet of 16 mm footage he shot between 1958 and 1960 with his friend Walter Hess. It’s a quiet rhapsody, a dreamy portal to a mostly disappeared New York, a montage of quotidian yet precious urban tableaux.”

Yvonne Furneaux, who played one of five unhappy women in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le amiche (1955), Marcello Mastroianni’s fiancée in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), and Catherine Deneuve’s sister in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), has died at ninety-eight. Cheng Pei Pei, who starred as a swordswoman on a rescue mission in King Hu’s Come Drink with Me (1966) and the villainous Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), died on Wednesday at seventy-eight. And Anthea Sylbert, who worked as a costume designer with Mike Nichols (Carnal Knowledge), Elaine May (The Heartbreak Kid), Roman Polanski (Chinatown), and Hal Ashby (Shampoo) before becoming Goldie Hawn’s producing partner, has passed away at eighty-four.

Locarno (August 7 through 17) has set its juries and announced that a lifetime achievement award will be presented to Alfonso Cuarón, who has selected Alain Tanner’s Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976) to screen at the festival, where Cuarón will discuss his career. Paul Schrader will preside over the competition jury in Sarajevo (August 16 through 23), and he’ll be joined by fellow filmmakers Una Gunjak and Juho Kuosmanen and actors Sebastian Cavazza and Noomi Rapace.

Giornate degli Autori (August 28 through September 7), the independent program that runs alongside Venice in much the same way that the Directors’ Fortnight does in Cannes, has unveiled a lineup that includes Stephen and Timothy Quay’s Bruno Schulz adaptation Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hour Glass and Marie Losier’s Peaches Goes Bananas, a portrait of the electroclash musician shot over the course of seventeen years. And Toronto will open on September 5 with David Gordon Green’s Nutcrackers, starring Ben Stiller, and close on September 15 with Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut, The Deb.

Let’s make note of two upcoming events in Los Angeles tied to the release of Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay’s new book, Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema. Gardner will be at Whammy! tonight for a secret screening and at 2220 Arts + Archives on Sunday to copresent the program Gender Troublemakers: Trans Authorship, DIY, and Experimentation Through Film with director Cary Cronenwett.