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Guy Maddin on Stump The Guesser: “Kharms had so many ideas and we wanted them all …”

A standout decision by the Currents programming team for the 58th New York Film Festival, is to show Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s mysterious fairground short, Stump The Guesser, starring Adam Brooks, with There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways Of Showing A Man Getting On A Horse, Nicolás Zukerfeld’s tribute to Raoul Walsh. On the afternoon of the Autumnal Equinox, Guy Maddin joined me for a lively and in-depth e-mail exchange conversation, which touched on the costumes by Greg Blagoev (”Winnipeg's Mayakovsky!”), Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Robert Donat questioning Mr. Memory, and John Buchan (1st Baron Tweedsmuir), Ludwig Tieck, Thomas Mann's The Holy Sinner, Bertrand Tavernier and Pursued, Soviet absurdist Daniil Kharms, and the evolution of Stump The Guesser, starting with the Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne.

The Guesser...

Russian director Ivan Bolotnikov after several prizewinning documentaries made his feature debut in 2016 with “Kharms,” a biopic of renowned Russian absurdist author Daniil Kharms that travelled on the international festival circuit. His sophomore outing is ambitious upcoming drama “Palmyra” based on the true story of a former Russian military, a widower, who learns that his only daughter Maryam has been recruited by terrorists and run off to Syria.

The film, which is now completed, is produced by Proline Film Studios chief Andrey Sigle, who interestingly also composed the “Palmyra” score. It’s being presented to prospective buyers at both the Roskino Key Buyers Event: Digital Edition market and the upcoming Cannes virtual Marché du Film.

Bolotnikov and Sigle both took questions from Variety about the film.

Ivan, what drew you to the project?

Ivan Bolotnikov: The whole history of the human race is a history of wars. Today, it seems...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWe're saddened to hear that Anna Karina, one of the defining figures of the French New Wave, has died. Though primarily remembered as the muse of Jean-Luc Godard, Karina was a remarkable actor, writer, and filmmaker in her own right. Justin Chang of the L.A. Times recalls her toughness and charm as seen throughout her expansive career. Courtesy of Josh Martin, the Chinese Film Bureau has shared a promising updated on the long gestating anthology film Seven-Person Band (previously titled Eight & a Half). The omnibus film is produced by Johnnie To, and features "some of Hong Kong's most renowned directors," including the late Ringo Lam. Alex Ross Perry is set to adapt Stephen King's 1989 novel The Dark Half, which follows an author whose literary alter ego comes to life with grisly intentions.

St Petersburg International Media Forum closes inaugural edition with world premiere of Serena.

Francois Ozon’s latest feature The New Girlfriend was voted as the Best of the Fest by the audience at the inaugural edition of the St Petersburg International Media Forum (Spimf) which closed on Friday evening with the world premiere of Susanne Bier’s Serena, starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

However, neither director Bier, nor any of the talent were in St Petersburg for the film, which Volgafilm will be releasing in Russian cinemas on October 30.

Although there was no formal competition for Spimf’s film programme, a jury of local film critics was formed to give awards for what they regarded as the best film and TV series showing in the 2014 line-up.

Australian film-maker Anna Broinowsky’s documentary Aim High In Creation, which screened in the Kor-kor sidebar about North Korean cinema, was named best film, while the Press...

Willem Dafoe and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s first encounter last year was uneventful—aside from the two minutes of dead silence at the beginning. It’s an odd tradition director Robert Wilson observes at early table readings. “Everybody starts to breathe a little deeper … or shallower,” Baryshnikov says. “I think Bob is waiting for that moment when someone will get up and say, ‘No, I changed my mind! Not doing this!’ ”He didn’t, though that was just the tip of the weirdness iceberg. Starting June 22 at Bam, they will star in Wilson’s production of The Old Woman, based on a novella by Daniil Kharms, a Soviet writer who died in Stalin’s Gulag. Dressed nearly identically, in Kabuki-style whiteface, Baryshnikov and Dafoe perform a series of surreal vaudevillian scenes incorporating song and dance to relate Kharms’s tale. Baryshnikov, who had been eager to work with Wilson, “fell in...

Palace, Manchester; Globe; Rose Lipman Building, London

Manchester international festival has always been theatrically lively. This year's programme looks the strongest yet. It opens with a celebration, almost a flaunting of international experiment. Inspired by the absurdist gifts of Daniil Kharms, The Old Woman brings together, under the least flamboyant of titles, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Willem Dafoe and Robert Wilson.

There is no making sense of Kharms. That is his point. The Russian ironist and dandy, who hated old people and pets and was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes, wrote elliptical stories, often tragic in content and comic in expression, sometimes only a paragraph long. An author of children's books who disliked children, he was a victim of the Soviet Union's antipathy to the avant garde. Rounded up by the secret police, he died in a prison hospital in 1942. He was 36.

There is, it turns out, a way of making his work vivid,...

Palace, Manchester

The Manchester International festival is nothing if not daring. As proof, it kicks off its theatrical programme with Robert Wilson's visualisation of a surreal novella written in 1939 by the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms. It is performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe with superb finesse, and looks astonishing – yet, nearing the end of its 90 minutes, I found myself glancing furtively at my watch.

Kharms's story, adapted by Darryl Pinckney, takes us into the imagination of a writer who is haunted by the figure of an old woman, fantasises about killing her yet can never escape her presence. It's a startling fragment with echoes of Dostoyevsky, intimations of Ionesco and subversive hints that the old woman may symbolise the all-powerful Soviet state. But what we get in Wilson's production is a series of tableaux vivants framed by madcap vaudeville routines. Baryshnikov and Dafoe, with clown-white faces and skewiff hair,...

Leo Records was founded in 1979 by Leo Feigin, a Russian who had emigrated to England. Early in its history, back before the glasnost era, it was most noted for releasing avant-garde Russian jazz at a time when government authorities discouraged the style. As Alexander Alexandrov of Moscow Composers Orchestra says, "What the authorities really hated was free jazz and improvised music – for the reason we loved it, because it was a powerful symbol of individual freedom." Although somehow the Ganelin Trio's first album came out on the official Soviet record label, Melodiya, it was the group's many albums on Leo that earned both the band and Leo world-wide reputations.

Eventually Leo expanded enough that it even had offshoots: Leo Lab for new artists, Golden Years of New Jazz for vintage material. Especially notable from the latter are four superb four-cd sets comprising a series entitled Golden Years of the Soviet...

The Living Wake tells the story of a self important and undiscovered genius living his last day on Earth. Determined to control as much of his legacy as possible he decides to visit his friends and enemies, to make peace or to exacerbate rivalries, to culminate in a final bow at his own wake.

This dark comedy played the festival circuit a few years ago and is now finding its way out into the world on DVD, and in amongst the glitter strewn Hollywood fare it does the soul good to shine a light on the films that might otherwise be left on the shelves.

Speaking to IndieWire first time director Sol Tryon talked of his approach to the unconventional nature of the film,

I believe that all comedy, however absurdist in nature, is rooted in some form of realism and truth. Like all great parables, however outrageous they may seem,...