Rushes: Edith Scob, Chinese Censors, Walt Whitman, Giant Squid

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NEWS

Edith Scob by Christophe Beauregard

• The prolific actress Édith Scob, a frequent collaborator of George Franju and Raúl Ruiz, has passed away. Scob first gained widespread attention for her role as the masked and disfigured daughter in Franju's 1960 Eyes Without a Face, to which she would later pay tribute in Leos Carax's Holy Motors.
• Guan Hu's war epic The Eight Hundred has been pulled from Chinese theatres and the Shanghai Film Festival, joining Zhang Yimou's One Second as yet another title affected by increasingly strict Chinese film censors.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• H. Paul Moon analyzes every appearance of Walt Whitman in cinema and television, from Intolerance to Breaking Bad, on the occasion of the poet's 200th birthday.

 

RECOMMENDED READING

Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising.

• “When you do find a version of yourself, or many, a tectonic change occurs. You see the world, and you see cinema, in a different way. You can even find community. That’s queer cinema’s power.” In the event of pride month, Kyle Turner has gathered 50+ queer writers to elucidate thoughts on some of their most resonant encounters with queer cinema.

• Notebook contributor Willow Maclay considers the task of defining transgender cinema and from there forming a cinematic canon, "an act of subjectivity as specific as gender identity itself."
• As part of the New York Time's investigation on the "future of movies," Barry Jenkins discusses the "tension between theatrical and digital distribution," specialty theaters, and buying bootleg DVDs of Moonlight.

Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho.

• "What has allowed him to remain a star, 30 years later, is a blend of virility, vulnerability, and an aura of mystery." A deep dive into the enduring appeal of Keanu Reeves over the course of 30 years.

• Though Elaine Hendrix and Lisa Ann Walter played enemies in Nancy Meyers' The Parent Trap, their on-set encounter started a decades-long friendship. The two speak to Vanity Fair about matching costumes, Dennis Quaid's long-lasting charm, and playing dress-up on the set of The Parent Trap. 
• The Chicago Tribune profiles film scholar Allyson Nadia Field, whose research links the history of minstrelsy to that of early American cinema in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including the recently unearthed film, Something Good-Negro Kiss. 

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

• Willow Maclay begins a series of essays on Hideaki Anno's landmark anime Neon Genesis Evangelion with an introduction to Anno's investigation of climate change, morality and mechanics, and mental health.
• Filmmaker Takashi Makino discusses his abstract filmmaking forms and his latest film, Memento Stella, with Matt Turner.
• Caden Mark Gardner remembers the late Arthur Bressan Jr., whose 1985 film Buddies was the first feature film to tackle AIDS as a subject.

EXTRAS

• In the latest edition of "what is cinema?": shot in the Gulf of Mexico, an underwater camera has captured a remarkable video of the elusive giant squid.