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A string of auteur directors – from Orson Welles to Steven Soderbergh to Lorenza Mazzetti – have fallen for Kafka’s visionary brilliance, with always-intriguing results

There are director’s cuts, special editions, redux versions – and then there’s Mr Kneff. Normally, a recut film is the prerogative of a film-maker who feels abused by the studio they worked for, or for whom a streaming platform has given the opportunity to enlarge on their “vision”; but this isn’t quite the case for Steven Soderbergh. In 1991 Soderbergh released Kafka, a tricksy fiction-slash-biopic, which – notoriously – managed to extract nearly all the heat from a film-making career that had got off to a stellar start with the Palme d’Or-winning Sex, Lies and Videotape. Soderbergh, though, is nothing if not a trier, and after years of tinkering, has completed Mr Kneff, a whole new version of Kafka, under a whole new title.

Mr Kneff...

The Italian director, whose film Together made a key contribution to the Free Cinema movement in the UK, died in 2020 but this interview is a fitting tribute

Lorenza Mazzetti was the Italian artist, writer and film-maker whose short film Together made a key contribution to the influential mid-1950s Free Cinema movement in the UK; she died in 2020 having returned to Italy and spent her subsequent career writing novels and memoirs, and running a puppet theatre in Rome. While her film output was undeniably slim, she was one of the vanishingly few female directors operating in Britain in the 1950s, and has become something of a focus and symbolic figure for academics and film-makers hoping to unearth hidden histories.

This undoubtedly has been the case for Brighid Lowe, associate professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, the institution into which Mazzetti barrelled as a neophyte artist in 1951, and where,...

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) on Monday added a David Lynch short and an episode of his iconic series Twin Peaks to its Franz Kafka retrospective and unveiled the program of its Out of the Past section, featuring classic, cult, rare and “unfairly overlooked” films, screened in their original or restored versions.

Among the highlights are restored versions of Wim Wenders’ 1984 neo-Western drama Paris, Texas and Two English Girls, François Truffaut’s 1971 period drama about a love triangle.

The Wenders film is part of a three-film program presented by Alexandre O. Philippe, the creator of documentary essays about the history of cinema, offering perspectives on the American landscape in cinema. He will also present his 2021 documentary The Taking (2021), which explores American mythology through the socio-philosophical dimensions of the American landscape.

Also part of the Out of the Past program is Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s documentary about...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSGuy Maddin’s next film, Rumours, recently wrapped production in Hungary. The ensemble piece is led by Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, who play world leaders who end up stranded in a forest during the annual G7 summit. Maddin has shared a breathless, spoof press release (below) announcing the film, describing the project as “an elevated dramedy and erotico-political threnody cum sylvan moodbank.”Paul Thomas Anderson is also at work on something new. So far, all we know is that his project is set in the present day and will star Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Regina Hall. Production begins in California later this year.Recommended VIEWINGOne of the most exciting rediscoveries of the 2023 Il Cinema Ritrovato festival was the restoration of David Schickele’s Bushman...

As the leaves crunch underfoot and the wintry chill intensifies, you may realize: it’s time to think of a good gift for that friend of yours who’s already packed their shelves to the gills with Blu-rays and back issues of Cahiers du Cinéma. Have no fear. Covering books, home video, music, posters, and apparel, here are some gift ideas for the dearest cinephiles in your life.Books And MAGAZINESFireflies Press recently published Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper: a beautiful set of two complementary volumes to honor the filmmaker’s centenary. The smaller book includes a revised translation of his poem “Poet of the Ashes,” while the larger volume includes tributes from 20 contemporary artists and critics, including Catherine Breillat, Jia Zhangke, Luc Moullet, Angela Schanelec, and Mike Leigh.Written by Karen Han, Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema is a mid-career monograph covering the Korean auteur’s features,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSSacheen Littlefeather: Breaking the Silence.Sacheen Littlefeather, Native American actress and activist, has died at 75. At the 1973 Academy Awards, she declined Marlon Brando’s Oscar for The Godfather on his behalf to condemn the treatment of Native Americans by the film industry and bring attention to the Wounded Knee protests.After five years in charge of BFI Flare and the London Film Festival, Tricia Tuttle has stepped down from her role as Festivals Director at the British Film Institute.Feminist film journal Another Gaze has announced a publishing imprint. Another Gaze Editions launches in late 2022 with My Cinema, a collection of writings by and interviews with Marguerite Duras, and a new translation of The Sky Is Falling, Lorenza Mazzetti's first novel.Recommended VIEWINGHunt, the directorial debut from popular South Korean actor Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game), has a trailer.

Italian film-maker and author who became a founding member of the British Free Cinema movement

The Italian film-maker and author Lorenza Mazzetti, who has died aged 91, declared herself to be a genius on her first day at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and she made good on her promise. She unleashed a capacity to tell stories in film and literature that evoked a childhood trauma in Italy that she found too painful to discuss in person. Living in Britain after the second world war, she became a founding member of the British Free Cinema movement alongside Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson.

Her most acclaimed movie, made in 1956 with the support of the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund, was Together, a heartbreaking depiction of urban isolation. In this largely dialogue-free film, the painter Michael Andrews and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi appear as two brothers, both deaf and without speech,...

“Everything But The Kitchen Sink”

By Raymond Benson

In the late 1950s, a film movement emerged in Britain known as “Free Cinema.” Some of the U.K.’s most celebrated filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s were among its practitioners—Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Lorenza Mazzetti, and Tony Richardson. The directors made low budget, short documentaries about the working class with an almost deliberate “non commercial” sensibility. It was radical and exciting, and it was a precursor to the British New Wave that dovetailed with the French New Wave that was so influential on filmmakers everywhere.

Many of the pictures of the British New Wave, released between 1959 and 1964, focused on characters described as “angry young men,” and the films themselves were referred to by critics and theorists as “kitchen sink dramas.” This was because the movies were presented in a harsh, realistic fashion and were indeed about the gritty, working...

The selection for the 2016 Venice Film Festival has been announced, with new films by Terrence Malick, Pablo Larraín, Lav Diaz, Wang Bing, Amat Escalante, Tom Ford, and more.COMPETITIONVoyage of TimeThe Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour)Une vie i (Stéphane Brizé)La La Land (Damien Chazelle)The Light Between Oceans (Derek Cianfrance)El ciudadano ilustre (Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat)Spira Mirabilis (Massimo D'Anolfi, Martina Parenti)The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz)La región salvaje (Amat Escalante)Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford)Piuma (Roan Johnson)Paradise (Andrei Konchalovsky)Brimstone (Martin Koolhoven)Jackie (Pablo Larraín)Voyage of Time (Terrence Malick)El Cristo Ciego (Christopher Murray)Frantz (François Ozon)Questi Giorni (Giuseppe Piccioni)Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)Les beaux jours D'Aranjuez (Wim Wenders)Out Of COMPETITIONSafariOur War (Bruno Chiaravolloti, Claudio Jampaglia, Benedetta Argentieri)I Called Him Morgan (Kasper Collin)One More Time with Feeling (Andrew Dominik)The Bleeder (Philippe Falardeau)The Magnificent Seven (Antoine Fuqua...