Mann’s Men and More
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This week has brought the first full trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and an announcement from Sundance that, from 2027 on, the festival’s new home will be Boulder, Colorado. That’s the good news. The horrific and infuriating development is Monday’s attack on No Other Land codirector Hamdan Ballal in the West Bank.
Ballal tells the Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo that Israeli settlers bearing batons, knives, and an M16 rifle—and accompanied by Israeli soldiers—beat him and detained him overnight. “It was a revenge for our movie,” says Ballal. “I heard the voices of the soldiers, they were laughing about me . . . I heard [the word] ‘Oscar.’” No Other Land, the winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, chronicles the ongoing destruction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank and was made by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers.
Codirector Yuval Abraham lashed out at the Academy for its silence immediately following the widely reported attack, and after Academy CEO Bill Kramer and President Janet Yang released an open letter condemning “harming or suppressing artists for their work or their viewpoints,” Abraham noted that—unlike previous public statements, such as one protesting the imprisonment of Iranian director Jafar Panahi—there is no mention of Ballal’s name.
In other news:
- Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri talks with Michael Mann about his plans for Heat 2 and about his first feature, Thief (1981). Writing in the new LARB Quarterly, Clayton Purdom calls Thief “one of film history’s clearest debuts-as-thesis-statements, up there with Breathless, Eraserhead, Blood Simple.” Mann soon “became a director top actors sought out, enabling his widest-screen visions, but also, I think, enabling the actors themselves to inhabit an archetype that Mann did not invent but by this point had entrenched as one of American cinema’s most beguiling. Many—Russell Crowe, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx—were never better than when given a Mann man to portray. As if they had an inherent desire to work like this, obsessively and astonishingly, and beheld by someone who understood and appreciated, at a cool remove. Maybe that is all anyone wants.”
- “Although he is mostly recognized as a pianist, one the greatest interpreters of Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Liszt of our time,” writes Mark Kidel for Prospect, Alfred Brendel, now ninety-four, “also collects art, has published several volumes of poetry, and has written with finesse about Surrealism and Dada and the use of humor in classical music. Then there’s his cinephilia—more sophisticated than being a mere film buff—which has led him to curate seasons for major festivals in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, always on the theme of ‘Laughter and Dread.’” Brendel, who grew up as the son of the operator the second largest movie theater in Zagreb, has put together two lists, favorites (Erice, Buñuel, Ozu) and recommendations (Balagov, Hausner, Miranda July).
- “You never forget your first visit to Café Flesh,” writes Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian, recalling his first viewing of the 1982 “twisted masterpiece” at “the notorious Scala cinema in tawdry, pre-gentrified King’s Cross” on his fifteenth birthday in the summer of 1986. Newly restored and slated to screen tomorrow at the ICA in London, this midnight movie “influenced the artist Dinos Chapman and the horror maestro Rob Zombie,” notes Gilbey. “Vera Drew, award-winning director of The People’s Joker, recently confessed: ‘I will be rewatching this movie (and probably ripping it off) for the rest of my life.’ Who can blame her? The film’s production design is slick and debased, gleaming and corroded, wreathed in smoke and style. It blends a 1980s ad-agency gloss with 1950s Americana, as well as an atmosphere of nuclear dread applicable to both decades.”
- Just before he won the award for Best Director in Cannes last year for Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes spoke with Dennis Lim for Film Comment and with Jordan Cronk for Notebook, where Robert Rubsam writes about temporal and spatial disjunctions in Gomes’s tale of a British functionary wandering Asia with his fiancee in pursuit in 1918—and in Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983), Lucille Carra’s The Inland Sea (1991), and Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988). “The effect is stirring, exciting, and like all travel, deeply melancholy,” writes Rubsam. “Through the magic of the footage projected in a dark room, we can visit other places and times. At bottom, all images record a dead world, a world that is passing further away with every instant.” Gomes tells Nick Newman at the Film Stage that he hopes to begin shooting Savagery, based Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 account of a late nineteenth-century uprising in Brazil, later this year or in early 2026.
- The University of California Press has made the entirety of the new issue of Film Quarterly freely accessible. Jean Ma introduces a special section on the history of cinephilia in Hong Kong, Sheila Liming surveys adaptations—and attempted but never realized adaptations—of novels by Edith Wharton, Duncan Wheeler tours a recent Pedro Almodóvar exhibition, Katarina Docalovich considers recent work by Mati Diop, and Denise Khor talks with Yiman Wang about her new book, To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World.Cineaste, in the meantime, is offering web exclusives and excerpts from articles in its new issue.
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