News

Stars at Noon (2022).For any true connoisseur of modern poésie maudit, the prospect of Claire Denis adapting Denis Johnson comes with its own ineluctable gravity. The union of these two artists—Johnson, the late visionary poet and novelist, Denis the dark romantic-turned-French art house institution—affirms their long-apparent, subterranean resonances. Both have labored at the edges of their tradition in pursuit of its particular truth; both have elevated the lives of drifters and criminals to the station of saints. In recent years, even in her mellow late style, Denis still retains a coiled viper’s intensity and, with 2018’s High Life, she settled any doubts that a genuine star vehicle—let alone one shot entirely in her second language, English—could support her sensuous, elliptical filmmaking. Johnson, despite his cult following, has only been adapted for the screen once before, to mixed results.Denis's choice of material is characteristically heterodox.

The cast and crew of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. (Photo by Kathrine Narducci.) Still on the search for holiday gifts? Our first-ever Notebook Gift Guide has got you covered with our pick of everything from coffee table books and career surveys to movie merch and prints. Books And Magazinesa number of books by filmmakers themselves, some new and some republished in beautiful new editions, offer an eye-opening perspective into the medium. This year marked the 50th anniversary of Jerry Lewis’ The Total Film-Maker, his classic 1971 book about the entire production process, from “script to post-production.” The book is based on over 480 hours of a lecture series delivered at USC Film School, and the newly released 50th anniversary edition also includes “all-new, never-before-seen photos of Jerry on set.” Marguerite Duras’ newly translated The Darkroom contains the script for her 1977 experimental film Le camion (The Truck), a dialogue between Duras and Michelle Porte,...

"Your worst enemies are hiding inside..." Metrograph Pictures has debuted a new re-release trailer for an underseen film from Claire Denis' acclaimed repertoire called L'Intrus, which translates to The Intruder. This first premiered at the 2004 Venice & Toronto Film Festivals, then opened in France and America in 2005. The simple synopsis is too simple: An emotionally cold man leaves the safety of his Alpine home to seek a heart transplant and an estranged son. Metrograph reminds this is an adaptation of "an unadaptable essay by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy" and was a chance for Denis to push her "elliptical style to the extreme and [transform] the logic and laws of narrative." It's shot on Super 35 by cinematographer Agnés Godard, featuring music by Tindersticks. The film stars Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Katia Golubeva, and Florence Loiret-Caille. And if you need any more convincing, the film has lots of dogs in it. Take a look. Here's...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: George Segal and Elliot Gould in California Split (1974). Actor George Segal, a "defining face of 1970s Hollywood" known for his roles in films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Robert Altman's California Split, has died. The 2021 Jury and Special Award winners of the 28th SXSW Film Festival have been announced, with winners including Megan Park's The Fallout and Jeremy Workman's Lily Topples the World. Recommended VIEWINGFor the series A One-Woman Confessional: Eight Films by Cecilia Mangini, Another Gaze's streaming project Another Screen has also made available a video of Mangini and Agnès Varda's first meeting in 2011. Metrograph's official trailer for Claire Denis' L'Intrus, her 2004 adaptation of an essay by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The film will be available at the cimema's virtual theatre from March 26 to April 8. A fan-made...

The opening shot is of Katia Golubeva, playing the unnamed Angel of Death, lighting her cigarette as a disembodied voiceover, which still seems to belong to her, says “Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadow, hiding in your heart.” Claire Denis’s 2004 L’intrus is a film of internal threats. It places the inconsolability of self-alienation and the impossibility of ever escaping yourself into fraught relation with the porous borders of the body and refusals of sociality. One of the signatures of Denis’s cinema is her sensualist fixation on bodies, isolated but also integrated into space, offering them as moving surfaces that themselves tell stories and resist the stories imposed on them. Possibly both intruder and intruded upon, Michel Subor as Louis Trebor is the absent heart of L’intrus, his failing body catalyzing the narrative crisis surrounding his travels for a heart transplant. A crisis that is...

Photo by Darren HughesTHE Beau Travail Effect When Film Comment surveyed nearly 120 filmmakers, critics, and programmers for its “Best of the Nineties” feature in the January/February 2000 issue, only four people mentioned Claire Denis.. A year later Beau travail topped the magazine’s poll of the best films of 2000. The only evidence I’ve been able to find of a complete Denis retrospective in the English-speaking world during the 1990s was one organized by Linda Blackaby at the 1997 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. Whereas between 2000 and 2003—following Beau Travail’s festival tour of Venice, Toronto, New York, Sundance, Berlin, and on and on—Denis was the spotlight of retros at the Cinematheque Ontario (courtesy of James Quandt), the National Film Theatre London, the Dublin International Film Festival, and the Northwest Film Forum. There were certainly others. This is not to suggest that Denis was unknown before Beau travail. Her first...

Binary StarsWhen I was in college, I learned a particular story about the concept of the aesthetic. It was a drama that featured a lot of now-familiar players: Kant, Hegel, and Marx; Nietzsche and Heidegger; Benjamin and Adorno; Jameson and Eagleton; Kristeva and Derrida. Despite the myriad ups and downs of the very concept of art, its relative or absolute autonomy, or its capacity or incapacity for social critique, there remained a general set of constants. One of them was the idea that art, as a space somewhat set apart from the needful things of daily life and especially the instrumentalist thinking of the marketplace, might offer, if not a possible glimpse of a future utopia, at least a clearing for contemplation. Today, an aesthetician is not necessarily a theorist. He or she is also someone who specializes in the treatment of skin. This may seem somehow frivolous, but the connection is real,...

Partycrashers is an on-going series of video dispatches from critics Michael Pattison and Neil Young.Partycrashers has never exactly been metronomic in its regularity, but even by our eccentric standards the timings of the last few editions has been... erratic: five months between our report from the Curtas festival of Vila do Conde, northern Portugal, in July 2016 and the year-end pre-Christmas round-up recorded in Newcastle, then an 11-month "hiatus" until our report from the Post/Doc festival of Porto, northern Portugal, then a gap of less than two weeks before this year-end pre-Christmas round-up recorded in Newcastle. We may be unpredictable chronologically; geographically somewhat less so, it seems.And, as has become something of an unwanted Partycrashers tradition, we have—the last twice—been bedeviled by technical mishaps, perhaps an inevitable consequence of our ingrained "one-take" preference (we're more Eastwoodian than Kubrickian in this regard). The camera used for our...

The 2017 Locarno Film Festival recently wrapped its 70th edition, where several aspiring film critics participated in the latest edition of the Locarno Critics Academy, an international workshop to educate promising writers in the craft and discipline of contemporary film criticism. This year’s participants will contribute essays on highlights from the festival. Here’s an overview of their backgrounds and interests.

Name: Jaime Grijalba Gómez

Age: 27

Twitter handle: @jaimegrijalba

Home: Santiago de Chile, Chile.

Cinematic area of expertise: Chilean cinema, film festivals, horror cinema

Best movie you’ve seen in 2017: El mar la mar

Favorite book (or piece of writing) about film: Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematographer”

I’m taking part in the Locarno Critics Academy because… I want to think that criticism today still has a role that goes beyond those interested in film or in making them. It has a role in society, and I want to find it.

Rabbit holes within rabbit holes, the experimental corners of film festivals are zones to lose yourself into. Freed from conventional narrative requirements, they offer different ways of experiencing cinema—unusual textures and rhythms, raw materials molded into perplexingly new compositions, assertive visions that seem to leave iridescent marks on the viewer's corneas. Striking as they are, these avant-garde works often prove difficult to catch in the whirlwind of multiple film programs, leaving the adventurous cinephile to seek these titles on laptop monitors when they should be watched on the big screen for their full, visceral effect. Which makes this week's retrospective of the New York Film Festival's Projections program (sponsored by our very own Mubi) all the more valuable: a chance for audiences to encounter innovative artists and approaches that, as the festival notes put it, “expand upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be.”It's...

With so few events during which to premiere new and important avant-garde films in North America—among them, the recently wrapped Wavelengths section of the Toronto International Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Fest, and the San Francisco Cinematheque's Crossroads series—the shift that has occurred at this year's New York Film Festival is one well worth noting. This weekend, the inaugural Projects program will debut. Previously known as "Views from the Avant-Garde" and programmed by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith (though last year's titanic program was done by McElhatten alone), this sidebar more akin to a festival-inside-a-festival of film and video works has been re-named "Projections" and in its first year is programmed by a returned Smith, Film Society of Lincoln Center's Director of Programming Dennis Lim, and Aily Nash.

The section encompasses 13 programs over a single weekend during the festival, including a handful of feature length films and numerous shorts,...

Ridley Scott's Robin Hood showed in Cannes this past May, and one year later we might get a Hood-like eighteenth century hero in Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s fourth feature. Taking a page from Abdellatif Kechiche, Cineuropa reports that Ameur-Zaïmeche (director has seen his previous two films Bled Number One and Dernier Maquis shown on the Croisette) will once again go in front and behind the camera in Les Chants de Mandrin - a French/Belgian/Spanish co-production that started shooting this week. The cast includes Sylvain Roume, Abel Jafri, Sylvain Rifflet, Salim Ameur-Zaïmeche, Christian Milia-Darmezin, Kenji Meunier, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Nolot. Les Chants de Mandrin opens with the execution of famous outlaw Louis Mandrin, a popular hero of the mid-eighteenth century, this sees the historical figure and his companions set out on a new, risky smuggling campaign in the French provinces. Protected by their weapons, the smugglers organise illegal...

Since her 1988 debut Chocolat, Claire Denis has established herself as one of France's most respected film directors, with a wide-ranging body of work and a taste for danger. Her latest film, White Material, which stars Isabelle Huppert, draws again upon her colonial African childhood, and its violence has sparked

controversy in the French press. Not that she cares…

One of the lingering charms of the Left Bank of Paris in the 21st century is that, although much of the area has long since surrendered to chain stores and fast-food joints, the streets between Boulevard Saint-Michel and rue Mouffetard are still dotted with fleapit cinemas with names such as L'Accattone, Studio Galande and Le Champo. On any given afternoon – to take a random sample from the programmes on offer in these places last week – you can take in Battleship Potemkin, a Buñuel retrospective, a lesser-known Fellini, or Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar...