Out of Your World
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Cannes has spent the week setting its jury and screening schedule and lining up its Classics and CinĂŠma de la Plage programs. Weâll be previewing the seventy-ninth edition, which opens on Tuesday and runs through May 23, early next week. Locarno, in the meantime, has announced that it will present the Pardo dâOnore, its Honorary Golden Leopard, to Darren Aronofsky.
In Berlin, the Arsenal Film Instituteâbest known to locals for its year-round screenings and to international visitors for running the Forum and Forum Expanded programs during the Berlinaleâhas reopened at its new location at the silent green Kulturquartier. From today through May 26, the Arsenal will present the cityâs first Valerio Zurlini retrospective.
Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, the series that launched in Los Angeles in 2021 with a gutsy idea and a modest lineup, has expanded to become a global event, rolling out this summer in seventy-three cities. The American Cinematheque has unveiled the schedule for the fifth LA edition, which will open on May 31 with the late BĂŠla Tarrâs SĂĄtĂĄntangĂł (1994) and run through June 7. Special guests will include Isabelle Huppert, Ari Aster, Denis Villeneuve, Werner Herzog, Gregg Araki, Theresa Russell, Louise Weard, and Vera Drew.
On Wednesday, the great poster designer Midnight Marauder passed along the shocking and terrible news that his immensely talented friend and collaborator, Tony Stella, had passed away. All across social media, fans and admirers of Stellaâs workâincluding filmmakers such as Kleber Mendonça Filho and institutions like Japan Societyâimmediately began sharing their favorite posters, many of them harking back to the era of gloriously hand-painted illustration and all of them shot through with a vibrant immediacy.
âLosing someone so vital to the film world, and so revered by so many of us,â writes Chad Perman at Bright Wall/Dark Room, âleaves a deep and lonely space behind where so much art, passion, and joy used to be.â
This weekâs highlights:
- On Monday, Film Comment relaunched as a quarterly digital magazine, and the first issue offers Blair McClendonâs cover story on Boots Rileyâs I Love Boosters, Erika Balsomâs essay on Lucrecia Martel, Amy Taubinâs profile of Michaela Coel, Jonathan Rosenbaumâs reflections on writing for the magazine in the 1970s, and an introduction to FCâs latest incarnation from editors Devika Girish, Clinton Krute, and Michael Blair. The bright new site features a criticsâ grid and notes on forthcoming articles, and subscribers have access to the entirety of every issue FC has published since its founding in 1962.
- Itâs been seventeen years since Richard Kelly directed his last feature, The Box, and like many, Cory Atad has been wondering what heâs been up to. So for GQ, he called Kelly up last month, and the two of them spoke first about Southland Tales, which critics dumped on when it premiered in Cannes twenty years ago. âA cult has steadily grown around the film,â writes Atad, âand while it hasnât yet achieved the kind of classic status Donnie Darko quickly accrued, its tribe of evangelists is growing. Its vision of a world consumed by capitalism, self-branding, corporate war-making, and potential apocalypse remain depressingly resonant.â Turns out, Kelly has been writing. A lot. âIâm just sitting on an arsenal of screenplays that, once the first one goes into production, Iâm pretty confident Iâm just going to be making a whole lot of movies back-to-back,â he says. Also, âI have a gigantic novel that Iâve written. Itâs gonna be published later this year.â
- Lynne Ramsayâs filmography isnât quite as sparse as Kellyâs. Sheâs made five features since her debut short film, Small Deaths (1996), and now, as Mark Smith notes in his profile in the latest issue of the Gentlewoman, sheâs got five more projects sheâs working on when she isnât painting, shooting photos, writing songs, picking up her daughter from school, or meditating. And âcuriously,â writes Smith, âthe director who has given us child drownings, school shootings, and hammer-wielding hit men would like to make âthe ultimate escapist film,â as an antidote to our troubled times. âBecause thatâs what I loved as a childâsomething that just brought you out of your world. There is value to that, and I never thought Iâd say that.â
- Braddock, Pennsylvania, a boom town during the heyday of the American steel industry, boasted a population of more than twenty thousand in 1920. One hundred years later, that number had fallen to just over 1700. Filmmaker Tony Buba grew up in Braddock and began making a series of films about his home town in the 1970s. âTony quickly became one of my favorite living American filmmakers,â writes Steve Macfarlane, who profiled Buba a few years ago for Topic. âIf you only watch one of his masterpieces, pick Sweet Sal, his 1979 portrait of neighborhood hustler Sal Carulli. If you watch another, make it Tonyâs breakout feature, Lightning over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy (1988), a rib-bruisingly hilarious meditation on the eponymous townâs decline, and a ruthless interrogation of Tonyâs mixed feelings over becoming the preeminent documentarian of said decline.â Buba will be in New York on May 15 and 19 when Spectacle screens Lightning over Braddock.
- On the 120th anniversary of the birth of Roberto Rossellini, Sight and Sound is republishing Philip Strickâs 1976 interview. Rossellini was in London to present Year One (1974) and The Messiah (1975), neither of whichâat the time, at leastâseemed to have won much appreciation for the directorâs late all-talk, no-action style. But Rossellini was convinced that the educational films he was making for television were having the desired effect. Blaise Pascal (1972), for example, had Italians reading the works of the philosopher and mathematician. âAt the point in any Rossellini film when the individual must weigh his own wishes against the needs of his fellow men, individualism always loses,â observes Strick. âPietro Missirilli goes to the guillotine, General della Rovere steps before a firing squad, Garibaldi hands Italy over to Victor Emmanuel, Socrates drinks hemlock, Alcide de Gasperi catches a train.â
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