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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,...

Translated by Andrey Kartashov. Originally published in Outskirts Film Magazine, an English-language biannual magazine of around 160 pages per issue, made up of original essays, interviews, reviews, and a single large dossier, the first of which is devoted to Soviet filmmaker Boris Barnet. It is now available to buy from the Outskirts e-shop.Final films are doomed to failure. Could it be, perhaps, because at that point their directors have broken away from any expectations of what a film “must” be? A plot summary of Boris Barnet’s final film Whistle Stop fits easily into just a few short sentences. The scientist Pavel Pavlovich, member of the Soviet Academy, goes to the countryside for a vacation with his easel and paints. Several seemingly trivial scenes from village life ensue. A tractor runs away from its owner. A friendly bull pays Pavel Pavlovich a visit. Kids next door insist on building a stove.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSViennale director Hans HurchWe are heartbroken to learn the the director of the Vienna International Film Festival, Hans Hurch, has died unexpectedly in Rome over the weekend. The Viennale—which we have covered for many years—has long been a beacon of aesthetically bold, politically engaged and defiantly personal programming. Hurch and his work will be greatly missed. In his honor, we're revisiting a fabulous interview with the festival director published by Sight & Sound in 2012:i would be happy if it’s a festival that’s not doing harm to the people. It sounds very defensive, but it isn’t. There are so many things in the world that are doing so much harm, and I believe in an old leftist idea – everything you experience does something to you. So if you drink something that is not good,...

★★★☆☆ Names like Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov understandably dominate the column inches when it comes to the pioneering Soviet filmmakers of the early 20th century. This means that it can be easy for other revered cinematic artists of the time, such as Boris Barnet, to be overlooked. To help make sure that doesn’t happen, two of Barnet's most celebrated works, Outskirts (1933) and By the Bluest of Seas (1936) this week receive a DVD rerelease in the UK courtesy of Mr. Bongo Films. Taking place in a village on the Russo-German border, Outskirts tells of a community infected by nationalism at the outbreak of the First World War.

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Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon Melancholia, A Separation Screenplay, Runner-Up Jeannie Berlin: National Society of Film Critics' Surprises Two interesting omissions from the Nsfc roster: critics' fave Michelle Williams (for portraying Marilyn Monroe in Simon Curtis' My Week with Marilyn) and George Clooney (for his stressed out father in Alexander Payne's The Descendants) weren't among the critics' top three actresses/actors. Dunst and Yun were followed by New York Film Critics winner Meryl Streep for her Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady; Brad Pitt was followed by Gary Oldman in Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Jean Dujardin in Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist. Dujardin, in fact, was The Artist's sole representative in the Nsfc 2011 roster. For the record the other runners-up were Christopher Plummer (Mike Mills' Beginners) and Patton Oswalt (Jason Reitman's Young Adult...

Meredith Brody continues her reports from Telluride.Something had to give. All movies and no play (!) makes me cranky, so the flesh is weak: after a full and satisfying day of Wim Wenders’ Pina; The House on Trubnaya Square (1928) by Boris Barnet, with a new score performed by Dennis James and the Filmharmonia Ensemble; Glenn Close and the crème de la crème of British, Irish, and Australian actors in Albert Nobbs, directed by Rodrigo Garcia; and a Tribute to Tilda Swinton with a half-hour of clips, an onstage interview conducted by The New Yorker’s Hilton Als, a screening of Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, followed by a Q and A with Ramsay, Swinton, and co-scenarist Rory Kinnear, I, uh, went to ...

George Clooney, Pierre Étaix and Tilda Swinton

to receive Silver Medallion Awards Over twenty-five new features plus revival programs

and unique programming from Guest Director Caetano Veloso will be presented as part of the 2011 exhibition

Telluride, Co (September 1, 2011) . Telluride Film Festival (September 2-5, 2011), presented by the National Film Preserve, announces its program for the 38th Telluride Film Festival. Featuring diverse programming from around the globe, Tff once again sets the stage for some of the year.s most highly anticipated films.

Tff opens its 38th year with over twenty-five new feature films plus special artist tributes, Guest Director programs selected by Caetano Veloso, Backlot programs, classics and restorations, shorts, student films, seminars and conversations, each introduced or proceeded with a Q&A by its filmmaker, actors, writer or producer. Telluride Film Festival opens Friday, September 2 and runs through Labor Day, Monday, September 5.

The .Show.

38th Telluride Film Festival is proud...

"Take a close look at the lineup the Telluride Film Festival," advises Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE. "These are films you’ll be hearing a lot about over the next few weeks during a fall festival swing that begins in Venice, travels to Telluride and continues through to big-city fests in Toronto and then New York. For many movies on the roster, the journey even dates back to Cannes in May."

The festival opens tomorrow and runs through Labor Day; meantime, here's the Show:

Viviana García Besné's Perdida, a look at the Calderon family, a cinema dynasty in Mexico.

Dr. Biju's The Way Home. See the description from the London Indian Film Festival.

Joseph Cedar's Footnote. See the Cannes roundup.

Mark Cousins's The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Trailer (scroll down about halfway).

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. Premieres tomorrow (Friday) in Venice.

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's The Kid with a Bike.

As promised, here are some more of my favorite posters by the amazing Stenberg brothers.

The enormous 81 inch square poster for Miss Mend (Boris Barnet & Fyodor Otsep, Ussr, 1926) promises the thrills and spills (as well as a fair share of capitalist indifference) of this epic, four hour long adventure serial, which is one of the few films promoted by the Stenbergs that has actually survived. Set partially in an imagined America, the film was based on a serialized detective novel written by Marietta Shaginian under the yankee nom-de-plume "Jim Dollar." The film, which follows three reporters and an American office girl attempting to stop a biological attack by a cabal of western business leaders determined to wipe the Soviet Union off the face of the earth, was one of the most popular Soviet films of the 1920s although it was condemned by the Soviet press of the time as lightweight "Western-style" entertainment.

After a few words about "ice cream that's supposed to taste like movies" (no, really), editor Gary Morris introduces the latest edition of one of our favorite film journals, Bright Lights:

 

Matt Brennan leads off this issue with a deep-sea dive into the "body politic/body politics" trope, in the process giving readers something in short supply today: hope. Lesley Chow also shows a bold optimism in mining culture for its treasures in a provocative piece on cinema experimentalists Chris Marker, Alexander Sokurov, and José Luis Guerín. Our buddy Dave Saunders reminds us of the pleasures of Buñuel in Mexico and Béla Tarrin Edinburgh in a rather enchanting piece.

If Boris Barnet is not a household word in your house, you should consider moving. The brilliant Boris is the subject of a lengthy, authoritative profile by new contributor Giuliano Vivaldi, and you'll be running to the nearest Russian cinematheque after you've read this one.

Soviet state-run cinema was fast, furious and fun before the dead hand of Stalin called time on experimentation and entertainment

A fast and furious chase, full of physical gags and gangsters, with jokes at the expense of American imperialism. A hallucinatory horror, where ordinary objects take on a life of their own, scripted by a literary theorist. A bed-hopping love triangle, simmering in a cramped flat. A big-budget science fiction spectacular, full of futuristic sets and bizarre, revealing costumes. A workers' strike, depicted via special effects and pratfalls. A film about film-making itself, with no plot, no words, no narrative, which is somehow the most thrilling film you'll ever see. A film about collective farming with full-frontal nudity and inscrutable, poetic metaphors. A film about mutinous sailors that manages to accidentally invent the action film as we know it.

This is Soviet cinema in the 1920s. An almost entirely state-run cinema,...

After a screening of Boris Barnet's By the Bluest of Seas, (somewhat marred by a drug-addled psychopath's running monologue from the seat behind me) a friend remarked that the actors in Soviet-era comedies always look terribly anxious, like they're going to get shipped to Siberia if they're not funny enough. The idea stuck with me, and I'm still in search of the perfect Russian comedy of the communist years, the one that actually makes me laugh. Laugh happily.

My Grandmother (Chemi Bebia) isn't quite the one, but it's gloriously inventive and freewheeling, and deserves to better known. Confirming the idea that any halfway funny film made in a dictatorship would immediately get banned, it was made in 1929 but suppressed until 1976, at which point it was restored and rereleased, the abuses it satirizes having become by then so endemic that the state itself no longer saw the point in denying them.

The new wave 40 years early. The soft side of Jean-Pierre Melville. Nicole Kidman makes the unmakeable. Somewhere out there is an alternative history of film – David Thomson unearths 10 lost works of genius

Erotikon (1920)

Forget 1920, this is an absolutely modern comedy about romance and sex, directed in Sweden by Mauritz Stiller. We should remember that when MGM brought Greta Garbo from Sweden in the mid-20s, she was almost baggage in the deal that hired Stiller, one of the sharpest and most sophisticated of silent directors, but a man who would be crushed by Hollywood. Stiller needs to be recovered (like his contemporary, Victor Sjöström), and Erotikon has an instinct for attraction and infidelity that simply couldn't be permitted in American films of the same period. It's also marvellous to see that, nearly 100 years ago, Swedish cinema was in love with its country's cool light and with actresses as warm but ambiguous as Tora Teje,...