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Franz Kafka’s The Trial seems straightforward enough as you read it, and yet the words don’t quite seem to take you anywhere. There’s an effect in the novel of dense nothingness: Kafka’s brilliance was for a pared-down prose with complex resonances that deliberately strand the reader. In a 1998 English translation issued by Schocken Books Inc., the translator in his preface discusses the thorniness of recreating in English from German how the word “assault” is used in various tenses to link the protagonist’s slander, his arrest, and his relationship to a typist. One could spend years attempting to parse the bottomless intricacies of The Trial, and people have. Kafka achieved a prose that deconstructs the convoluted legalese that societies adapt in an effort to divorce situations from common sense and decency via labyrinths of language, and thus controlling the populace.

Orson Welles is a counterintuitive fit for The Trial,...

If the eponymous mid-’50s southwestern town in Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” resembles the iconic “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955), it’s no coincidence. Oscar-winning production designer Adam Stockhausen (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”) found John Sturges’ neo-Western, shot in CinemaScope on the edge of Death Valley, a valuable reference for planning the landscape for this Pirandello-like play-within-a-tv-show-within-a-movie conceit.

“Absolutely, that was an influence,” Stockhausen (“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”) told IndieWire. “We started right with the credits introduction with the moving train and then, of course, crossing with the little white sign. Generally, we were looking at ‘Black Rock’ for overall how the town’s [located] in the landscape. But also we’d go in and look at tiny details, too. How the tar paper was nailed to the roof of the gas station, and we ended up using it for the way we wrapped the tar paper around the motel cabins.

Orson Welles had a knack for beautiful compositions. Sure, his career might've been filled with turbulence, but even a quick glance through the action-director's filmography illustrates just how skilled he was behind the camera. In fact, he even topped our list of the best filmmakers who never won an Academy Award for directing (though he did snag an Oscar for co-writing "Citizen Kane").

Welles was also famously in favor of shooting films in black-and-white rather than color. This surely led to much of his films' visual strength: The stylistic choice cut down on unnecessary color clashes, which in turn led to striking, visually unified images. That high-contrast look is also a big part of why black-and-white films are still made to this day.

Yet Welles' personal rationale for avoiding color film was relatively unusual, even if it undoubtedly showed respect for his fellow actors. As the multi-hyphenate explained to Peter Bogdanovich...

Master Gardener. “Gardening,” Joel Edgerton muses early into Master Gardener, “is a belief in the future, that things will happen.” Every installment in Paul Schrader’s untitled contemporary trilogy, which this new film brings to a close, seems engineered to test that conviction, an unwavering optimism that amounts to an act of faith. As Ethan Hawke’s Reverend Toller in First Reformed (2017) and Oscar Isaac’s William Tell in The Card Counter (2021), Edgerton’s Narvel Roth is the latest addition to the director’s pantheon of “God’s lonely men,” solitary and spiritually broken drifters searching for a redemption that seems to lie forever beyond their reach. Anyone remotely familiar with Schrader’s work will find plenty of recurrent tropes and themes here, so much so that Master Gardener almost toys with self-parody. But these motifs do not register as facsimiles. Schrader, age 76, is now clearly making “late films,” and...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Marlon Brando and Willy Kurant on the set of The Night of the Following Day (1969). The great Belgian cinematographer Willy Kurant has died. During his illustrious career, Kurant worked on films including Agnès Varda's The Creatures, Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Feminin, and Orson Welles' The Immortal Story. David Cronenberg has confirmed the title of his next feature film, Crimes of the Future. Sharing the same title as his film from 1970, the film is set to star Kristen Stewart, Lea Seydoux, and Viggo Mortensen.Robert Haller, the Anthology Film Archives Director of Libraries, has also died. As Afa points out in its tribute to Haller, "with 35 years at Anthology all told, only Afa’s founder Jonas Mekas could claim seniority over Haller!⁠⁠" After more than 100 years, Technicolor Post has announced its integration into Streamland Media's postproduction services,...

Danish writer Karen Blixen, whose memoir “Out of Africa” and short story “Babette’s Feast” were both turned into Academy Award-winning films, is now the subject of another big-screen makeover with an adaptation of her short story “The Immortal Story” set to be penned by Argentina’s Daniel Rosenfeld and Lucía Puenzo.

Argentine-French actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (“Bpm (Beats per Minute)”) and Leonardo Sbaraglia have signed letters of intent to head up the cast, along with an international actor and actress, which have yet to be confirmed, Rosenfeld told Variety.

Director-producer of Idfa player “Piazzola, the Years of the Shark,” which won best documentary at Argentina’s 2018 Academy Awards, Rosenfeld has purchased rights to the story, which was adapted by Orson Welles in 1968.

Rosenfeld is currently writing the screenplay adaptation with Puenzo, one of Latin America’s most courted film directors and showrunner on Amazon’s “La Jauría,” produced by Fabula and Fremantle.

Above: French grande for Capricious Summer. Artist: F. Dervanore.As the 56th New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, I wanted to look back half a century to the 6th edition of the festival. Uppermost in everyone’s minds in September 1968 was Czechoslovakia, which, after a brief seven months of liberation known as the Prague Spring, had been invaded less than a month before the festival began, by Warsaw Pact tanks and troops intended to suppress reforms. Whether it had been planned before the Soviet invasion, the 6th New York Film Festival notably opened and closed with Czech films: Jiri Menzel’s Capricious Summer and Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball. It also featured Jan Nemec’s previously banned 1966 film A Report on the Party and the Guests which had been released in ’68 under the reformist president Alexander Dubček and shown as a special event on Czech national...

Jeanne Moreau, a legend of French cinema and one of the French New Wave's leading actresses with roles in Jules & Jim and Elevator to the Gallows, died this weekend at the age of 89.

French authorities confirmed that the actress died at her Paris home; no cause of death was revealed, the BBC reports.

French president Emmanuel Macron tweeted of Moreau, "A legend of cinema and theater … an actress engaged in the whirlwind of life with an absolute freedom."

Pierre Lescure, president of the Cannes Film Festival, said in a statement,...

In this episode of CriterionCast Chronicles, Ryan is joined by David Blakeslee, and Scott Nye to discuss the Criterion Collection releases for August 2016.

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Episode Links Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words (2015) Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words on iTunes Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words: A Full Picture of a Life – From the Current Ingrid Bergman, Filmmaker – From the Current A Taste of Honey A Taste of Honey (1961) A Taste of Honey on iTunes A Taste of Honey: Northern Accents – From the Current Morrissey’s Taste for Shelagh Delaney – From the Current 10 Things I Learned: A Taste of Honey – From the Current Woman in the Dunes Woman in the Dunes (1964) Woman in the Dunes on iTunes Watch Woman in the Dunes | Hulu Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and...

In this episode of Off The Shelf, Ryan and Brian take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for the weeks of August 30th, 2016 and September 6th.

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Episode Notes & Links News Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) Star Trek: The original Series – The Roddenberry Vault Blu-ray The Skull Blu-ray Olive Films Announce November Titles The Bruce Lee Premiere Collection Blu-ray: The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, Game of Death 50% Off Arrow DVDs & Blu-rays | Barnes & Noble Amazon.com: Middle-earth Limited Collector’s Edition (Blu-ray + DVD): Various: Movies & TV American Buffalo (1996) Going Out Of Print September 12th!! – Screen Archives Entertainment Links to Amazon

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Arrow: Season 4 Barbarosa Chimes at Midnight Destiny The Immortal Story The Jungle Book The Night Manager Star Wars Rebels: The Complete Season 2 Disco Godfather Evils of the Night Eyewitness Hangmen Also Die! People of the Mountains Sid And Nancy...

David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

L’enfance nue (translated into English, “Naked Childhood”) consists of a series of sharply observed and well-chosen moments in the troubled life of Francois Fournier, a ten-year old ward of the French foster care system. Director Maurice Pialat made his feature debut, with the support and assistance of Francois Truffaut and Claude Berri, among others, presenting a story that some might find reminiscent of The 400 Blows but without the romantic charm and lovable mischief we associate with Antoine Doinel. (There are no picturesque romps through the streets of Paris or heroic-epic pilgrimages to the ocean in this one, though there is a mad dash tracking shot of a kid nursing a sprained wrist after he’s tossed to the ground following his assault of one of his peers.) Here, the cast is populated by ordinary people in the most quotidian situations,...

David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

This subdued hour long late-career enigma from Orson Welles initially feels a bit sad and anti-climactic when it’s presented as his “final completed fictional feature” (as stated on the back of the new Criterion Collection release.) A quiet, languidly paced adaptation of an Isak Dinesen short story, there’s very little action to stimulate the senses much of the time, with most lines delivered by actors sitting down, standing still and speaking rather quietly. When the tension ramps up a bit toward the end, the self-conscious art house touches run a great risk of falling flat and coming across as unintentionally comical. But the excellent 4K restoration, a well-curated selection of supplemental features, and above all else, the compelling presentation of a great man and cultural innovator entering his artistic decline makes the new Blu-ray package of The Immortal Story...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit the interwebs. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Captain America: Civil War (Russos)

In seeking to create an expansive multi-film universe, Marvel has managed to both bless and curse each of its subsequent films. The blessing comes in the form of a character development that takes place over the course of films and phases instead of scenes and acts. Characters who we met eight years ago have grown and changed before our eyes, and...

NEWSGene Wilder, we'll miss you. We have always had—and will always have—tremendous affection for the presence of this wonderfully funny, sweetly sorrowful actor.The San Francisco Cinematheque is holding a fundraising auction, "an annual convergence of visual and media arts to support their 56th year of exhibiting innovative experimental moving-image art." You can bid online.Recommended VIEWINGWhat is Japan 1984 – 7 Betacam Tapes? Celluloid Liberation Front writes at Sight & Sound about "never-before-seen video material shot by Michelangelo Antonioni in Japan." Watch it online at Belligerent Eyes through September 2.With Bertrand Bonello's highly anticipated Nocturama set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Le CiNéMa Club is now streaming Madeleine Among the Dead, a 2014 "sketch" from the director: "Bonello wanted to tell Hitchcock’s Vertigo from the perspective of Madeleine."The excellent documentary A Fuller Life, about legendary director Samuel Fuller, is purchasable through this website.Frankly not our...

Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story (Orson Welles)

The crowning achievement of Orson Welles’s extraordinary cinematic career, Chimes at Midnight was the culmination of the filmmaker’s lifelong obsession with Shakespeare’s ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff. Usually a comic supporting figure, Falstaff—the loyal, often soused friend of King Henry IV’s wayward son Prince Hal—here becomes the focus: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero played by Welles with looming, lumbering grace.

The Immortal Story, one of Orson Welles's final films as a director, is a fascinating look into not only the necessity of storytelling, but also his own obsessions with truth and illusion. From the very beginning of his career as a performing artist, Welles was pushing the edges of what was expected and acceptable in entertainment. From his mass hysteria inducing radio performance of Hg Wells' The War of the Worlds in 1938, to the dangerously subversive Citizen Kane in 1939, all the way through to his oblique treatise on the nature of truth in storytelling and magic F For Fake in 1974, Orson Welles was never satisfied simply telling a story, it needed to say something about the form in order to gain his...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Orson Welles' French TV show with Jeanne Moreau is a near-masterpiece, directed with assurance and style. It's the filmmaker's first color feature, and his last completed fictional feature. The Immortal Story Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 831 1968 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 58 min. / Histoire immortelle / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date August 30, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles, Roger Coggio, Norman Eshley, Fernando Rey. Cinematography Willy Kurant Film Editors Yolande Maurette, Marcelle Pluet, Françoise Garnault, Claude Farny Music selections Eric Satie Based on a novel by Isak Dinesen Produced by Micheline Rozan Written and Directed by Orson Welles

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray of The Immortal Story took me completely by surprise. I bailed out of a viewing long ago on Los Angeles' 'Z' Channel cable station, mainly because it looked terrible -- grainy and washed out. I thought I was watching a faded print that had been blown up from 16mm.

In my most recent post to this column (of Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses), I mentioned that I would skip the next film on my chronological list, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell, because I had already podcasted about it not that long ago. But I changed my mind. That decision was partially driven by a mistaken assumption on my part that the next title on my list, namely Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story, was about to get a new release from Criterion the following Tuesday. Actually, that disc won’t hit the market for another couple of weeks, not until August 30, which is too long for me to just let this column sit idle. The reason that I thought that The Immortal Story‘s Blu-ray debut was imminent was because I’ve seen pictures of review copies in circulation and Criterion started yapping about Orson Welles in The Current earlier this month,...

David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

Stolen Kisses was Francois Truffaut’s third exploration of the character Antoine Doinel, to whom we were introduced when he was a child in The 400 Blows and was glimpsed a few years later in a short segment Antoine and Colette that was part of an omnibus film titled Love at 20. Here we see Antoine as a young man, as he stumbles into adulthood working a variety of unskilled entry-level jobs, impulsively falling in love and gliding from one scrape with authority into another as he seeks to find his way through the world. The tone of this film is lighter, more overtly a romantic comedy, and seemingly inconsequential in terms of enduring substance and social commentary when compared to The 400 Blows. It could have been easily plausible to make this same movie with a lead character of a different name,...

This time on the Newsstand, Ryan is joined by Scott Nye and Arik Devens to discuss a few pieces of Criterion Collection news.

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Topics & Links The August 2016 Criterion Collection Line-up Cat People cover art Ugetsu restoration shows at Cannes, very favorable response Seattle listeners – Scarecrow Video is holding a 50% off sale on select titles through the 31st Cannes Film Fest – Sundance Selects picked up new Ken Loach movie, “I, Daniel Blake”; Amazon making a big mark McCabe & Mrs. Miller McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) – The Criterion Collection McCabe & Mrs. Miller on iTunes McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) – IMDb McCabe & Mrs. Miller – Wikipedia The making and unmaking of McCabe & Mrs. Miller The art of the deal in McCabe & Mrs. Miller AFI: 10 Top 10 McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) – Rotten Tomatoes Cover by Jon Contino (his first) Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words Ingrid Bergman...

★★★★☆ Made for French television in 1968, Orson Welles' The Immortal Story is a beguiling and hypnotic meditation, on art and artifice, and the trickery and magic of storytelling. Adapted from a short story by Danish writer Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), it tells the tale of an elderly and wealthy merchant Mr. Clay (Welles), who gets his meagre amusement from having his accountant (Roger Coggio) read over the account books of his many interests and companies as he slowly trundles towards a somnambulant death in a dusty corner of Macao.

This month on the Newsstand, Ryan is joined by David Blakeslee and Scott Nye to discuss the September 2015 Criterion Collection line-up, as well as the latest in Criterion rumors, news, packaging, and more.

Subscribe to The Newsstand in iTunes or via RSS

Contact us with any feedback.

Shownotes Topics The September Criterion Line-up (and the delayed announcement) Orson Welles Updates: Issa Clubb at the University Of Michigan, Chimes At Midnight, It’s All True, The Immortal Story, Othello New titles rumored: In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks), The Decalogue, The Graduate, Valley Of The Dolls / Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, Janus Films: A Poem Is A Naked Person theatrical run, poster, trailer, etc. Last month’s E-mail newsletter drawing: empty coat (Young And Innocent?) The Apu Trilogy poster is now available from the Criterion store Episode Links The September Criterion Collection line-up … Blind Chance (1981) Gérard DuBois Breaker Morant (1980) Mister Johnson (1990) Sean Phillips.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Landon’S Take:

Orson Welles is celebrated as one of the foremost visionaries in the history of American filmmaking. He’s also renowned as the perennial artist against the system. While both of these factors make Welles perhaps the ideal auteur – someone satisfied with nothing less than a perfect articulation of his individual vision within the collaborative medium of filmmaking – it also presents some unique problems in examining works that were taken away from him.

The classically celebrated auteurs of studio era Hollywood (e.g., Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock) were known for creating individuated worldviews across their body of work either despite or even because of the strictures inherent in Classical Hollywood filmmaking. This was not Welles, who from his rise to infamy with the 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast to his first studio feature made a name by challenging the assumed utilities of a medium. Neither could...

The late career of Joseph L. Mankiewicz—who is getting a sidebar retrospective, The Essential Iconoclast, at the New York Film Festival—is fascinating. While many of his contemporaries floundered as the rules of filmmaking changed, formally and in every other aspect, he found ways, for a while at least, to carry on telling the kind of stories he liked, with the kind of people he liked, in the way he liked. Sleuth (1972) could probably have been made earlier—the amorality and venality of the characters might well have passed the censor, since vice can be said to be punished. The filmmaking is a little less sure-footed than we expect from Mankiewicz, though: he should have been the perfect director for a two-hander full of arch talk in elegant surroundings, but his attempts to keep the visuals lively sometimes seem forced.

There Was a Crooked Man (1970), is more problematic, illustrating...

Orson Welles, Ruth Warrick, Citizen Kane Orson Welles on TCM: The Third Man, The Lady From Shanghai Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am The Tartars (1961) A barbarian army attacks Viking settlements along the Russian steppes. Dir: Richard Thorpe. Cast: Victor Mature, Orson Welles, Folco Lulli. C-83 mins, Letterbox Format 7:30 Am Tomorrow Is Forever (1946) A scarred veteran presumed dead returns home to find his wife remarried. Dir: Irving Pichel. Cast: Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, George Brent. Bw-104 mins. 9:30 Am Moby Dick (1956) Epic adaptation of Herman Melville's classic about a vengeful sea captain out to catch the whale that maimed him. Dir: John Huston. Cast: Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, Leo Genn. C-115 mins, Letterbox Format 11:30 Am The V.I.P.S (1963) Wealthy passengers fogged in at London's Heathrow Airport fight to survive a variety of personal trials. Dir: Anthony Asquith. Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jourdan.

In December of last year I reviewed the initial ten books in the excellent Masters of Cinema collection from Cahiers Du Cinema, published in the UK by Phaidon Press and I’ve been sent two of the next batch to be released. Here Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles are under the spotlight, the other new books focus on Billy Wilder, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

Jérôme Larcher takes us through Chaplin’s extraordinary life, pausing at key points to survey the cinematic and social landscape. His major works have their turn under the spotlight, with Chaplin’s iconic characters deconstructed with The Tramp in particular commented on by Andre Bazin and Chaplin himself.

As Chaplin was at the forefront of cinema through its early development it is the story behind the scenes, battles with outlandish figures from old Hollywood and the discovery of a muse in Edna Purviance there is...

At its most bizarre—and it does get bizarre—Queen Of Kings: The Immortal Story Of Cleopatra seems like it’s best described by Owen Wilson’s character in The Royal Tenenbaums: “Everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is… maybe he didn’t.” Sub in Cleopatra for Custer and “at Alexandria after being defeated by Octavian” for “Little Bighorn,” and Queen Of Kings comes into focus. Specifically, the book presupposes that maybe she turned into a shape-changing, vampiric avatar of revenge, thanks to botching a spell summoning the destructive goddess Sekhmet. Maybe this led to ...