Rushes. Faye Wong Reprise, The Female Gaze, A Spike Lee Profile

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NEWS

• We are devastated to learn that the late Theodoros Angelopoulos' home, which housed the director's archives, has burnt down amidst the Attica wildfires in Greece. It is currently unclear what has been lost in the fire.

This is the house that housed the whole archives of late director Theo Angelopoulos. Everything has been burnt. A massive loss to not only modern Greek culture but world culture. pic.twitter.com/DM60QxWP6a

— Konn1e (@ntina79) July 25, 2018

RECOMMENDED VIEWING 

• The ever-elegant "Mandopop diva" Faye Wong reprises her cover of The Cranberries' "Dreams"—best known for its appearance in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express—in the first episode of Phantacity, a Chinese variety show that creates "music video-worthy performances." The full episode can be viewed here.

• Lucrecia Martel has directed a music video for Argentine singer Julieta Laso's "Fantasmas", comprised of beguiling superimpositions of dancing women in a summertime trance.

• Shinya Tsukamoto, the infamous director of the cult classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man, is premiering a new picture at the forthcoming Venice film festival entitled Zan, which looks to be an intimate Samurai film realized through the director's signature caustic formalism. Here's the first trailer.

• The Museum of Modern Art hosted a live Q&A with Film Curator Dave Kehr, who thoughtfully addresses questions ranging from the educational and career path of a film curator, to the relationship between taste and curation.

• Following a series of monographs and short documentaries about his father and mother in the the town of Cradley Heath, photographer Richard Billingham has directed his first feature, Ray & Liz. Luxbox has released a warmly layered trailer for the film, which premieres in competition at this year's Locarno Film Festival.

 

RECOMMENDED READING

• “I’m not like most filmmakers, and the films I make aren’t like most films,” Spike Lee declares, in a new interview with Vanity Fair's K. Austin Collins. In anticipation of Lee's latest BlacKkKlansman, Collins is keen to differentiate Lee from Hollywood's favored brand of "milquetoast liberal solutionism", writing: "The mere idea of his movies has meaning."
• TIFF Cinematheque's Summer in Japan program continues with Azadeh Jaferi on the "majestic strength" of actress Kinuyo Tanaka, best known as Kenji Mizoguchi's muse in masterpieces like The Life of Oharu and Sansho the Baliff, but a filmmaker in her own right. "Tanaka’s tiny body is consistently held, embraced, constrained," Jaferi writes. "[But] her unreadable face masks a fierce determination and devotion that endow her with a preternatural dignity and power."

• The landmark arts magazine, The Believer, has re-launched its website to provide its full archive (15 years worth of writings!), including what might be the definitive essay on the films of the late Jerry Lewis: B. Kite's 2-part "The Jerriad". Here's part one, and part two.

• Until August 26, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will celebrate the artistry of female cinematographers with its series The Female Gaze, featuring the work of Agnès Godard, Natasha Braier, Kirsten Johnson, Joan Churchill, Maryse Alberti, Ellen Kuras, and Babette Mangolte. The magnitude, and the undeniable complexity, of these films is captured in two probing overviews written by Willow MacClay for The Film Stage and Tatiana Craine for Village Voice.
• On August 4, Brooklyn Academy of Music's monthly series Beyond the Canon pairs F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off with Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. For the BAM Blog, critic Fanta Sylla illuminates both films' "similar position as transgressors [...] [hijacking] the generic heist program, subverting the conventions that gave it its solid and enduringly fertile structure."
• To commemorate the restoration and re-release of Barbara Loden's Wanda, critic Kit Duckworth—in collaboration with online shop tees-en-scène—has penned a moving reflection on Wanda's "kin tie to the rural South—to the need [...] to drift, [...] or to bolt, with muddled fervor and animated cleverness, to New York, as Barbara did." Duckworth's essay is available in print with each purchase of a "Loden" tee.

• .@cgduckworth’s meditation on Barbara Loden & Wanda is essential reading pic.twitter.com/tr4zqd2XJG

  — tees-en-scène (@teesenscene) July 25, 2018 

EXTRAS AND RE-DISCOVERIES

• Nicholas Cage and John Travolta strike a pose, (presumably) in promotion for John Woo's Face/Off.

pic.twitter.com/r0CHuDLyd1

— Jen Lewis (@thisjenlewis) July 30, 2018 

• Leanne Shapton and Niklas Maak of the New York Times have compiled a list of houses "built on the foundations of love. [...] In every case the love affairs lasted just three years after the houses were completed." One such haunted house is La Cupola, a dome built for then-lovers Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni: "a monument to danger and beauty — a theme in Antonioni’s work."
• A "cleanly typed" manuscript of a lost English-language Orson Welles novel, entitled V.I.P., has emerged in Turin.

Read about my discovery of the unpublished English language novel V.I.P., credited to #OrsonWelles, in Turin. @Wellesnetcom https://t.co/KDduRjymjs pic.twitter.com/XjJc1CH0SM

— Matthew Asprey Gear (@MatthewAsprey) July 27, 2018 

• Illeana Douglas shares a charming snapshot from the set of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas.

Some of the ladies from #Goodfellas on a hot summer New York night. pic.twitter.com/Hws1rDtZ3l

— Illeana Douglas (@Illeanarama) July 31, 2018