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A series of films starring Katharine Hepburn curated by renowned critic Molly Haskell will be one of the highlights of this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 21 through 29). Bologna’s festival of restorations and rediscoveries will feature programs focusing on the films Mikio Naruse directed between 1935 and 1939; Lewis Milestone’s milestones, a survey stretching from the silent era to the Hollywood blacklist; a spotlight on Austrian actor-turned-director Willi Forst; plus Nordic noir, music documentaries, and a selection of films turning one hundred this year.
Cannes, in the meantime, has set a date, April 10, for the announcement of the lineup for its seventy-eighth edition (May 13 through 24). Speculation has been heating up as Variety’s Elsa Keslassy, the Hollywood Reporter’s Patrick Brzeski and Scott Roxborough, and the staff at Screen put together lists of the most likely candidates. One of the likeliest is Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s telling of the story behind Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). As it happens, around seventy pages of notes and synopses that Godard jotted down during the production have just been discovered and will be auctioned off later this year.
Also high on these lists is Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, a family drama with an all-star cast headlined by Benicio del Toro. Hundreds of props, costumes, and models from Anderson’s previous films are currently on display at the Cinémathèque française, and the exhibition, on view through July 27, will open at the Design Museum in London in November. Elliott Verdier and Alex Marshall tour the show for the New York Times and note that some of Anderson’s “best known props took weeks or months to conceive and make, including a faux-Renaissance painting, Boy with Apple, that appears in The Grand Budapest Hotel; a vending machine that mixes and dispenses martinis from Asteroid City; and painted Louis Vuitton luggage that appears in The Darjeeling Limited.”
Émilie Dequenne, who won the award for Best Actress in Cannes for her debut performance in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Rosetta (1999), died this past Sunday. She had been struggling with a rare cancer and was only forty-three. “Dequenne would continue appearing in movies throughout the remainder of her life, including The Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Girl on the Train, Our Children, and Love Affair(s), for which she won the César award for Best Supporting Actress,” writes Scott Tobias at the Reveal. “But anyone who has ever seen Rosetta will not forget the agitation, grit, and heartbreaking innocence she brought to the role.”
This week’s highlights:
- All week long, Notebook has been posting features from “Are You Experienced?,” its latest Insert, a must-read seasonal supplement focused this time around on “the cinema of the senses.” Tom Gunning and Gabriel Winslow-Yost survey historical precedents behind the notion of an expanded cinema—see, too, Cindy Keefer at e-flux—while Andrew Norman Wilson, Sara Magenheimer, Kevin B. Lee, Vera Drew, and illustrator Jake Tobin dream up its possible futures. From the perspective of the networked present, Erika Balsom brings fresh insight into the work of such artists as Malcolm Le Grice and Anthony McCall. And sampling early work made for Apple Vision Pro, Blake Williams writes: “If immersive video should become, as cinema itself once was, an invention without a future, I’d hope it might at least be granted the dignity of existing on its own terms.”
- “I don’t know if you can say that desire is what drives all of cinema, but it’s certainly what drives my cinema,” Alain Guiraudie tells Carlos Aguilar in the New York Times. He’s also been talking to Nick Newman at the Film Stage and Marshall Shaffer at Slant. Misericordia—“his best film since his stateside breakthrough, the 2013 Hitchcockian cruising-ground thriller Stranger by the Lake,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns—opens today. For the NYT’s Wesley Morris, Guiraudie’s films “prove absorbingly absurdist, this new one especially. It’s got its own rhythm. If Guiraudie isn’t mocking the way we’ve been trained to receive stories, films, people, then he’s at least disrupting the usual patterns.”
- David Cronenberg and composer Howard Shore have been working together for more than forty-five years, and tomorrow, they’ll discuss their collaboration on such films as Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (1996), and The Shrouds (2024) at the London Soundtrack Festival. “Early on, we developed this idea that a music track can do more than emphasize what’s already there,” Cronenberg tells Charles Bramesco in the Guardian, and Shore adds: “You play to the subtext of the story. You need to broaden the frame. What you want isn’t just in the middle, it’s on the margins, in the fringes, all around the frame. Once I see a cut, it becomes intuitive. I feel what I need to create, really.”
- The work of composer Julius Eastman has been a major inspiration for Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, whose This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) won a Special Jury Award at Sundance and whose Ancestral Visions of the Future premiered in Berlin last month. Tone Glow’s Joshua Minsoo Kim talks with Mosese about his unique approach to sound in his films. Growing up in Lesotho, Mosese couldn’t afford movie tickets, so he would “just stand in the lobby. I’d listen to the movie as the audio came in through the cracks of the door. I would have this imagination of what was going on. And what would happen is that there would be a break in the middle of the film and they would let me in, but most of the time I’d be so disappointed in what I saw compared to the imagination I formed. I had this epic vision and suddenly it became so small.”
- “Payal Kapadia is a director of romances,” writes Poorna Swami for the New York Review of Books. “Not the fairytale kind, but the kind in which desire struggles against violently unromantic forces: religion, caste, marriage. At the center of each of her films—three shorts and two features—are women who confess their dreams about absent lovers and husbands.” For Swami, there is a “slippage between women’s longing and the dogged grip of reality—not least of India’s unyielding social divisions—that defines Kapadia’s work.”
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