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L'homme atlantique.In 1981, coinciding with the release of Marguerite Duras’s seventeenth film, L’homme atlantique, Le Monde published a short text—“a warning”—by the writer and filmmaker: It has become customary for the majority of cinemagoers in France to act as though cinema is something that is owed to them, to protest and scream bloody murder at the appearance of films that weren’t made for them alone. Therefore, I would like to tell these viewers not to step foot in the cinema that is screening "L’homme atlantique," that there is no use in doing so because the film was made in total ignorance of their existence.Later that year, in an interview conducted by Anne de Gasperi, Duras doubled down on her exclusionary rhetoric. “My cinema is not made for people who love cinema. I didn’t think about those people for a second,” she said.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSOn the Adamant.The Berlinale wrapped up over the weekend. The Golden Bear was awarded to Nicolas Philibert’s On the Adamant, while other major prizes went to Christian Petzold, Philippe Garrel, Angela Schanelec, and Dp Hélène Louvart. You can browse the full list of winners on Notebook, and keep your eyes peeled for our reports.In other festival news: Ruben Östlund will preside over this year’s Cannes jury, and the full lineup has been unveiled for Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA’s New Directors/New Films.The pioneering Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye—the first African woman to make a commercially distributed feature film—died last week at the age of 80. Writer and programmer Yasmina Price recently surfaced a thread of archival material,...

Marguerite Duras was a renaissance woman. An author, playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker, her life and work spanned the 20th century and yet she is often forgotten by cinephiles, or at least remains something of a footnote, mainly known for her screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour and her novel The Lover, which was made into a film in 1992. But she also made almost 20 films, two of which are finally getting a well-deserved Criterion release, India Song (1975) and Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) While separated by a few years, the films could be considered companion pieces. Both look at the lives of women trapped in loveless marriages, who look to the outside for intellectual and physical stimulation. Both could be considered about female jouissance, or...

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

Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an ongoing correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.Pacifiction.Dear Leo and Danny,In my first correspondence, I wrote that the Competition got off to a slow start, and, well, maybe it never really did find its footing. Most critics, myself included, seemed to agree that the festival was on the whole an unmemorable one, especially in comparison to the strong 2021 edition, which no doubt benefited from a spate of pre-pandemic holdovers. There are of course exceptions. Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo was a genuine UFO, delivering images and sensations that I’d never quite seen or experienced, while Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castiang-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body) played something like a journey to inner space to match the Discovery’s journey to outer space in 2001: Space Odyssey, even...

No two ways about it: April’s a great month for the Criterion Channel, which (among other things; more in a second) adds two recent favorites. We’re thrilled at the SVOD premiere of Hamaguchi’s entrancing Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, our #3 of 2021, and Bruno Dumont’s lacerating France, featuring Léa Seydoux’s finest performance yet.

Ethan Hawke’s Adventures in Moviegoing runs the gamut from Eagle Pennell’s Last Night at the Alamo to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, while a 14-film John Ford retro (mostly) skips westerns altogether. And no notes on the Delphine Seyrig retro—multiple by Akerman, Ulrike Ottinger, Duras, a smattering of Buñuel, and Seyrig’s own film Be Pretty and Shut Up! That of all things might be the crown jewl.

See the full list of April titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.

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3 Bad Men, John Ford, 1926

Aar paar, Guru Dutt,...

In early December 1982, Yann Andréa, longtime lover of Marguerite Duras, decided to speak to Marie Claire journalist Michèle Manceaux about his relationship to the famous novelist and filmmaker who was 38 years his senior, mainly to gain more understanding about himself. He, a gay man, fell completely under her spell, at first for her writing, then for the person he wrote to for a year before she responded. He had met Duras at a post-screening Q&a of India Song and shyly approached her.

Swann Arlaud as Yann Andréa and Emmanuelle Devos as Michèle Manceaux give tremendous performances that circle around discoveries of deep personal truths in Claire Simon’s beautifully staged I Want to Talk About Duras (a highlight of the 59th New York Film Festival in the Currents programme). When they meet for the two audiotaped sessions one day apart, Duras, as an invisible presence,...

France has been a supreme force in the Oscars’ international feature race for decades. This year, three acclaimed films from women directors — Céline Sciamma, Audrey Diwan and Julia Ducournau — are believed to be at the top of the list to represent the country for the upcoming 94th ceremony, set to take place on March 27. Though France is the most-nominated country in the history of the category, it hasn’t walked away with the prize in nearly 30 years. Can that change this year?

The French submission is decided annually by the National Cinema Center. The committee will hold its first meeting on Thursday to pre-select a shortlist of films, with the producers being “auditioned” by the committee on Oct. 12, before the final choice is made. Sciamma’s “Petite Maman,” Ducournau’s “Titane” and Diwan’s “Happening” are believed to be the favorites for consideration. “Happening” was just acquired by IFC Films...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: aKasha.We've been alerted by the programming team at the Toronto International Film Festival that Sudanese filmmaker Hajooj Kuka (aKasha), along with five other artists, has been sentenced to two months in prison.Speaking of TIFF, Chloé Zhao's Nomadland won the disrupted festival's People's Choice Award. Other notable winners this year include Michelle Latimer's Inconvenient Indian, Chaitanya Tamhane's The Disciple, and Dea Kulumbegashvili's Beginning.The great French actor Michael Lonsdale has died at the age of 89. Lonsdale's career range was incredible, including Jacques Rivette's epic Out 1, the James Bond film Moonraker, Marguerite Duras's India Song, and Spielberg's Munich. His physically towering presence was one of the great connective tissues across international cinema.Recommended VIEWINGSpike Lee has been having a big year, first with Da 5 Bloods...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThis year, Mubi is proud to be partnering with the Locarno Film Festival to unveil A Journey in the Festival's History, a selection of 20 classic films from previous editions of the event, each hand-picked by past alumni. Directors including Lucrecia Martel, Lav Diaz, Miguel Gomes, and many others have chosen individual films from the festival’s rich history, from Michael Haneke’s haunting debut feature, The Seventh Continent to Kidlat Tahimik's The Perfumed Nightmare and Marguerite Duras' India Song. The Opening Night film of the New York Film Festival is Steve McQueen's Lover's Rock, one of five films McQueen directed for his Small Axe anthology. The festival will also be premiering two additional Small Axe films, Mangrove and Red, White and Blue. And at the top: The official poster for Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai,...

Like most film festivals this year, Locarno Film Festival will not be moving ahead as usual. However, they’ve found inventive ways to both celebrate filmmakers they’ve long admired and present films physically and digitally. After announcing a new initiative to support new films by Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso, Lav Diaz, Wang Bing, Miguel Gomes, and more, they’ve asked this class of talented directors to select their favorite films in Locarno history.

A Journey in the Festival’s History is devoted to Locarno’s 73-year history of showing the best in international cinema. Made up of twenty films, a selection will screen online for those in Switzerland as well as Mubi internationally. On August 5-15, they will also screen in person at Locarno’s theaters.

Lili Hinstin, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, said, “It would be an impossible task to present a review of the history...

Films by Roberto Rossellini, Chantel Akerman and Marguerite Duras feature in selection.

The Locarno Film Festival has unveiled the selection of 20 classic film titles that will be showcased in its A Journey In The Festival’s History sidebar as part of its special hybrid edition running August 5 to 15.

The line-up is part of the festival’s ’Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films’ edition which was created after it was forced to cancel its 73rd edition due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The titles have been selected by the directors taking part in its festival’s exceptional The Films After Tomorrow initiative...

High-profile filmmakers including Lucrecia Martel and Lav Diaz have contributed to a retrospective program for the Locarno Film Festival (August 5-15), selecting 20 titles from the event’s 74-year history that will have online and physical screenings next month.

Due to ongoing pandemic disruption Locarno shifted the majority of its festival online this year, though ten of the below list of titles will still have physical screenings in Switzerland. The entire program will be shown online for free in Switzerland by the fest, while it is partnering with streamer Mubi to stream the films outside of the country.

Ranging from 1948 (Locarno’s third edition) to 2018 (its 71st), the titles offer a broad insight into the fest’s history and are directed by filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, and Whit Stillman. The selectees are all participating in Locarno’s ‘The Films After Tomorrow’ initiative this year,...

“Americans live on ketchup and milk. I’m a whiz at geography.”

Cinema St. Louis’ 12th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festivalruns July 17-23, 2020. Individual tickets are $10 for general admission, $8 for Cinema St. Louis members and students with valid and current photo IDs. All-access passes are available for $25, $20 for Csl members. Ticket and Pass Purchaseinformation can be found Here. Regrettably, streaming rights to most of the films Cinema St. Louis planned to feature at the 2020 Robert Classic French Film Festival were not available to them. But they are pleased that they’re able to offer a trio of works from the original lineup: Marguerite Duras’ rarely seen “India Song”; a new restoration of Jacqueline Audry’s “Olivia”; and René Clément’s “Rider on the Rain,” which is part of their year-long Golden Anniversaries programming that features films from 1970. All films are in French with English subtitles.

Tom Stockman, editor of...

” Je t’aime bien, mon enfant… plus que tu ne crois. I love you, my child… more than you believe. “

Cinema St. Louis’ 12th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival runs July 17-23, 2020. Individual tickets are $10 for general admission, $8 for Cinema St. Louis members and students with valid and current photo IDs. All-access passes are available for $25, $20 for Csl members. Ticket and Pass Purchase information can be found Here

The 12th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — presented by TV5MONDE, sponsored by the Jane M. & Bruce P. Robert Charitable Foundation, and produced by Cinema St. Louis (Csl) — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s extraordinary cinematic legacy.

Because of the Covid-19 health crisis, the fest will be presented virtually this year. Csl is partnering with Eventive, which also handles our ticketing, to present the Virtual Festival. Filmswill be available to view on demand anytime from July 17-23. Access to...

"Indochina Song," by Enrique Vila-Matas, was originally published in El Urogallo, Issue 126, November 1996. It is presented here in English for the first time in a translation by Liam Hendry. Thanks to Mr. Vila-Matas for granting permission to translate and re-publish. Marguerite Duras's India Song (1975) is now showing April 4 - May 3, 2020 in the United States.1.Now, today, with everything already in the past and no way to go back, now that I am a man far removed from my younger self and have more time to think and to feel, I tell myself that everything could have been different and that I could have been closer to her, that I could have spent much more time with her during those days in the ‘70s when I knew her without truly knowing her, as, by not paying attention, I never noticed how heavily she drank—I thought that if she said...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Marguerite Duras's India Song (1975) is now showing April 4 - May 3, 2020 in the United States.The quintessential Marguerite Duras heroine suffers inwardly as the outside world shakes, its distant echoes gently, but inexhaustibly knocking at her front door. This woman appears in Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977), solemnly recounting the sallow conditions of her marriage as chirpy luau-inflected music from a neighboring party invades the room; she is in Nathalie Granger (1972), a film about women whose days are spent in relative silence doing yard work and staring out windows. News of external violence plays on the radio, and the appearance of a bumbling salesman unsettles the drudgery of their daily lives. The films of Marguerite Duras are adept at generating this particular tension, this conflict between the psychic world of the individual and the external one with its countless, unimaginable problems.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSChanges continue to ripple throughout the film industry: Following the cancellation of this year's SXSW, the festival has paired up with Amazon Prime and invited filmmakers of their lineup to take part in a 10-day "online festival," streaming on Prime for users in the U.S. Both Cannes and the Venice Film Festival have announced that neither will be moving forward with a digital festival, committing to plans for physical events for later this year. Recommended Viewingnhk World is offering its four part documentary, 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki, on its website for free. The series offers an exclusive look at the animation auteur's production of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.A new short film by Jean-Marie Straub, France Against Robots, has premiered on the Kino Slang blog. The film's title is...

Cinema St. Louis presents the 12th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival which takes place April 10th – 26th 2020. The location this year are both Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 E Lockwood Ave) and Washington University’s Brown Hall Auditorium, Forsyth & Skinker boulevards.

The 12th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — presented by TV5MONDE and produced by Cinema St. Louis — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. This year’s featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the 1980s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

The fest annually includes significant restorations, and this year features a quartet of such works: Diane Kurys’ “Entre Nous,” Joseph Losey’s “Mr. Klein,” Jacqueline Audry’s “Olivia,” and the extended director’s cut of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Betty Blue.”

The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way,...

Dear Fernando,Minotaur is the kind of film we’re able to see at such a big festival as Toronto only because adventurous programming strands like Wavelengths have the patience to present their unique tempo within the hectic atmosphere of the surrounding festivities. And its tempo is indeed unique, evoked through the opiated, satin haze of its digital photography. Two young men and a young woman, bohemian occupants of a Mexico City apartment, lounge, inactive and increasingly beset by a crushing sleepiness. Long takes in widescreen fragment their flat, making its space mysterious and jagged. The few other people who interact with this somnolent trio are all helpers, servants or delivery men, the dialog almost all functional, except for excerpts of a book read out loud periodically about a misremembered or perhaps never-happened meeting. You feel echoes of Last Year in Marienbad and also perhaps Marguerite Duras’s India Song,...

Journal d’une femme de chambre

Director: Benoit Jacquot // Writers: Benoit Jacquot, Helene Zimmer

French auteur Benoit Jacquot tends to get overlooked, though his recent international success with Berlin premiered Farewell, My Queen (2012) seems to have boosted his status, even though he’s been making excellent films since the 1970s and used to serve as Assistant Director to Margeurite Duras (India Song; Nathalie Granger). He’s worked several times with Isabelle Huppert (The School of Flesh; Keep It Quiet; False Servant; Villa Amalia) and Isild Le Besco (A Tout de Suite; Deep in the Woods), and generally tends to favor female perspectives. His latest, 3 Hearts, competed in Venice and starred Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Chiara Mastroianni. We’re thrilled to see he’s following in the footsteps of Jean Renoir and Luis Bunuel with an update of Octave Mirabeau’s Diary of a Chambermaid, reuniting him with the exciting Lea Seydoux,...

With 4K digital restoration and re-release of Alain Resnais' 1959 classic, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Film Society of Lincoln Center announces a series devoted to the film works of a Nouveau Roman giant Marguerite Duras who provided the screenplay for the film. Duras, along with Alain Robbe-Grillet, was part of the Left Bank film movement and hugely influential for coming of  French New Wave.Putting a big emphasis on mood and dialogue, Duras' elliptical stories have long been well regarded and respected by the film giants like Resnais and Godard. The film series presents 10 features and 3 shorts, 9 of which she directed - notables include, India Song, Le Camion, Natalie Granger, Madmoiselle (dir. Tony Richardson), Moderato Cantabile (dir. Peter Brook) and Every Man for Himself...

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

Honorary Award: Gloria Swanson, Rita Hayworth among dozens of women bypassed by the Academy (photo: Honorary Award non-winner Gloria Swanson in 'Sunset Blvd.') (See previous post: "Honorary Oscars: Doris Day, Danielle Darrieux Snubbed.") Part three of this four-part article about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Honorary Award bypassing women basically consists of a long, long — and for the most part quite prestigious — list of deceased women who, some way or other, left their mark on the film world. Some of the names found below are still well known; others were huge in their day, but are now all but forgotten. Yet, just because most people (and the media) suffer from long-term — and even medium-term — memory loss, that doesn't mean these women were any less deserving of an Honorary Oscar. So, among the distinguished female film professionals in Hollywood and elsewhere who have passed away without...

India Song: Park-wook’s English Language is Stylized Creepy and Kooky

South Korean master Park Chan-wook returns with his English language debut, Stoker, a heavily stylized mystery thriller that’s a grotesquely decorated façade with a heart as cold as ice. Based on a screenplay by actor Wentworth Miller (and contributing writer Erin Cressida Wilson), and featuring a dazzlingly assembled cast, there’s a conglomeration of odd elements at hand here, creating a final product that feels as banal as it is strange, and as foreign as it is mainstream. Presenting itself as a densely constructed narrative, the film instead reveals itself to be a simple tale made more complicated by the way it’s edited together. Operating mostly on its significant use of slow burn narrative and creepy details, it reaches a fast boil in its final frames, which may be too little and too late for most audiences.

Hope everyone in the U.S. had a nice holiday weekend! I’m thankful I actually got this week’s edition done, even though I guess most folks were busy as I only have a few links:

This week’s Must Read is an oldie, but a goodie. And by “oldie” I don’t mean two weeks ago in Internet time! This is an article from 1948 by filmmaker Lewis Jacobs that is considered the first substantial history of American avant-garde filmmaking called “Experimental Cinema in America.” It was published in the Hollywood Quarterly and is broken down into a couple chapters, exploring the typically little written about period of 1921-41, then gets into the post-war boom of Deren, Anger, etc., as well as a brief bit on Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking Cinema 16. Plus, lots of great pictures!Here’s some Dirty Pictures for you to look at. Plus, Cockfighter and...

In 2006, before I started The Playlist film blog, out of boredom I began what I called the The Playlist Soundtrack Series. A sort of "If I Were _______ (insert filmmaker's name here)" type thing. The concept was naive and simple: choose a handful of music-savvy filmmakers whose work I admired and create imaginary soundtracks for movies they hadn't made, based on their taste and music they might conceivably use one day. It began as nothing more than a fun exercise for me, as I had time on my hands back then.

Eventually, I had amassed a half a dozen of these soundtracks in various states of completion, and to host them somewhere I started The Playlist blog in 2007. It then became a place to discuss music in film, soundtracks, etc., and when that topic was outgrown slightly (after a while you tend to hit all the classic film and soundtrack bases...

Outsider Films On India, London

This fascinating series offers rarely seen artist eye views of India, revealing much about both the country and the people doing the looking. Roberto Rossellini's semi-documentary India Matri Bhumi, from 1958, captures the contrasts of the modernising nation in mystical imagery, just as Alain Tanner's 1966 documentary Chandigarh looks beyond Le Corbusier's architecture at the everyday humanity, while Marguerite Duras's avant-garde drama India Song comes on like a Calcutta-set answer to Last Year At Marienbad. On the other hand, Fritz Lang's European-made epic The Tiger Of Eschnapur is a campy slice of 1950s exotica. More up to date are Mark Lapore's 1990s experiments in "visual anthropology".

Tate Modern, SE1, Sat to Mon, tate.org.uk/modern

Starlite Urban Drive-In, London

There were good reasons why the drive-in cinema never caught on in Britain – limited space, limited car ownership, unlimited rain – but that...

Brett Ratner has 'remixed' Bollywood melodrama Kites, an idea which could spice up any number of dull movies about India

In the 1990s, Harvey Weinstein rightly took a lot of flak for buying up award-winning foreign movies and recutting them savagely, then releasing them in America as if they were still the same moves. To me this was far more corrupt and dishonest than those cynical old exploitation producers of the 50s who would take a murky Japanese monster movie, add a cheap American actor in newly shot scenes; dub the dialogue into badly synched, poorly written English; cut footage; change the title to Octopus-Robot From Outer Space; and release it in an imaginary, all-new format like "Awesome-Scope!" These guys knew they were trash-merchants, but Weinstein called what he did "art".

Nowadays, the process has been tarted up, made vaguely respectable and is called a "remix". And oddly, I couldn't be happier.

"I fell hard for the films, novels, plays, and essays of Marguerite Duras roughly thirty years ago and then spent the decades between then and now resisting the sensuous beauty of their imagery, the tough-minded, spare elegance of their prose, and their rigorous morality." Amy Taubin for Artforum: "When I complied with the ridiculous ritual of drawing up for various publications lists of the greatest films of the twentieth century, her masterpiece, India Song (1975) did not appear. It should have been among the first five."...