Seasons of Discovery
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When David Schwartz programmed the Museum of Modern Art series A Theater Near You this past summer, he suggested that Dan Talbot was “perhaps the single most influential figure in New York film culture, both as an exhibitor (his theaters included the Lincoln Plaza, Cinema Studio, and the Metro) and as a distributor (his company New Yorker Films introduced countless international directors to American audiences).” Talbot had a crucial partner: his wife, Toby Talbot, who has passed away at the age of ninety-six.
In her book The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies,Talbot looked back on the years—1960 to 1973—that she and her husband ran a vibrant hub for the city’s burgeoning cinephilia: “It was a place of communion, where the customers, the owners, the programmers and the filmmakers all seemed to be part of the same family.”
This week’s highlights:
- On Thursday, we announced the Criterion Channel’s November lineup, featuring programs dedicated to the work of Howard Hawks, Werner Herzog, and Jafar Panahi, the subject of a must-read Vulture profile by Roxana Hadidi. In Panahi’s latest feature, It Was Just an Accident, a ragtag cluster of former Iranian prisoners kidnap the man they suspect was once their tormentor. “In formal terms,” writes Adam Nayman for the New Republic, “it might be Panahi’s most conventional piece of work since the 1990s, but accessibility shouldn’t be mistaken for compromise. It’s a bristling, brilliant piece of work: a swift and rollicking comic thriller whose autobiographical subtext lies under the surface, like an engine beneath a chassis, or a body stowed in the trunk.”
- Lucile Hadžihalilović and Gaspar Noé have been working on each other’s films for more than forty years, and with Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower now in theaters and a retrospective in Toronto slated for November, Interview has invited Noé to put a few questions to his partner. He asks about films that have left a mark at various points in her life and then about work made in this century that has “really impressed” her. “If I hadn’t participated in it,” says Hadžihalilović, “I would have said your film Enter the Void. What a shock it would have been to discover such a playful and daring film without having followed its writing and production process! For the past two decades, I would say the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (from Blissfully Yours to Memoria), a discovery as important to me as Lynch or Tarkovsky.”
- On October 25, the Cambridge Film Festival will celebrate the centenary of London’s Film Society with brief talks and “special screenings, one hundred years to the minute after its first program.” Film Society events were attended by the likes of Virginia Woolf and Alfred Hitchcock, and one of its founders, Iris Barry, went on to become the first film curator at MoMA. For Sight and Sound, Henry K. Miller writes about “seven ways in which the Film Society helped crown cinema as the seventh art.” One thread that runs through nearly all of them is the profound impact of Soviet cinema on adventurous moviegoing Londoners.
- Metrograph’s online Journal has introduced a new section, “From the Magazine,” and has so far posted three pieces from the first issue of its print counterpart. Steve Martin talks with magician and magic scholar Michael Weber, who cofounded Deceptive Practices with the late great Ricky Jay, and the consultancy’s newest addition to the team, Derek DelGaudio, about the work they’ve done on productions such as Mike Nichols’s Angels in America (2003) and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006). Yiyun Li writes about Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), and Jackson Howard insists that Disney’s 1997 Hercules is “a queer text and I refuse to argue about it.”
- “Watching Meryl Streep, projected on a nine-foot screen, say ‘I’m Susan Orlean’ was an out-of-body experience,” writes Susan Orlean, who recounts for the New Yorker, step by step, how the 1995 piece she wrote for the magazine, “Orchid Fever,” became the 1998 book The Orchid Thief that became the 2002 movie Adaptation., starring Streep, Nicolas Cage, and Chris Cooper, directed by Spike Jonze, and perhaps most crucially, written by Charlie Kaufman. When Orlean first met Kaufman, she “stammered and said hello, adding, ‘This is kind of embarrassing for me.’ ‘It’s more embarrassing for me,” he said, and rushed out the door. I don’t remember seeing him on set again the rest of my time in Los Angeles.”
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