News

Believe it or not, we’re already at the point in the year where fall film festival announcements are being made. Yesterday afternoon, the first shot across the bow was fired when the New York Film Festival announced Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying as it’s Opening Night Selection. Getting a bit of a head start on things, Nyff is planting a flag, no pun intended, on this flick as an awards vehicle. Linklater nearly took home an Oscar for Boyhood, so he’s certainly due. Could this do it for him? Time will tell, but getting this prestigious slot at Nyff is a strong first step. There’s plenty of reason to be excited for this one. This film is a road trip tale, working as a sort of pseudo sequel to the classic The Last Detail. In the press release, Film Society described it thusly: “In Richard Linklater’s lyrical road movie,...

Go figure. I was recently wondering when we would start hearing about which big titles were playing in the main slots at the New York Film Festival. Then, yesterday morning we get word that the Opening Night spot at Nyff has been filled. That coveted position was announced to have been taken by Ava DuVernay and a surprise documentary of hers called The 13th. This will be the first documentary to play in this position, in the 54th incarnation of the fest. As the first Nyff opener to be a non fiction title, history has been made. Consider me very intrigued by this one. This has definitely shaken up how I expected Nyff to go, but that’s never a bad thing. DuVernay obviously broke through in a big way a few years back with Selma, and this seems like one that could only make her a higher profile and more diversely talented filmmaker.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th as the Opening Night selection of the 54th New York Film Festival (September 30 – October 16), making its world premiere at Alice Tully Hall. The 13th is the first-ever nonfiction work to open the festival, and will debut on Netflix and open in a limited theatrical run on October 7.

Chronicling the history of racial inequality in the United States, The 13th examines how our country has produced the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with the majority of those imprisoned being African-American. The title of DuVernay’s extraordinary and galvanizing film refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution—“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States . . . ” The progression from that second qualifying clause to the horrors of mass incarceration and...

If the languid summer tentpole season has you down, fear not, as the promising fall slate is around the corner and today brings the first news of what we’ll see at the 2016 New York Film Festival. For the first time ever, a non-fiction film will open The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s festival: Ava DuVernay‘s The 13th. Her timely follow-up to Selma chronicles the history of racial inequality in the United States and will arrive on Netflix and in limited theaters shortly after its premiere at Nyff, on October 7.

“It is a true honor for me and my collaborators to premiere The 13th as the opening night selection of the New York Film Festival,” Ava DuVernay says. “This film was made as an answer to my own questions about how and why we have become the most incarcerated nation in the world, how and why we regard...

Dheepan's shock Palme d'Or win at Cannes has received a mixed response from critics and film fans alike.

Twitter divided when Jacques Audiard's French refugee drama picked up the highest award at this year's Cannes Film Festival earlier today (May 24), with comments ranging from "least deserving" to "brilliant direction, deeply moving".

Digital Spy rounds up Twitter's reaction to this year's Cannes Film Festival winner.

Dheepan, a perfectly fine, unremarkable drama, is the most surprising Palme d'Or winner in recent memory, and certainly the least deserving.

— Justin Chang (@JustinCChang) May 24, 2015

And the Palme d'Or goes to...Jacques Audiard's Dheepan #Cannes2015 pic.twitter.com/l1Q5Bw4HSL

— Robbie Collin (@robbiereviews) May 24, 2015

Well like everyone else on here I didn't see Dheepan happening. Good film but no more. Far better out there this year.

— Stephen Mayne (@finalreel) May 24, 2015

Et la Palme d'Or... Audiard's Dheepan. What the....!!!!!!

— Jonathan Romney (@JonathanRomney...

"Le vieux Paris s’en va!"1

—Rallying cry, late 1800s

"Old Paris is no more (the form of a city

Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart)"

—Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” Fleurs du mal

Paris s’en va. Paris goes away. Paris disappears.

Two women lying next to each other on a bench, wake up. A hard cut to a shot of one of the women approaching a newspaper stand on a Parisian street. She scans the rack of postcards and chooses five with a picture of the Arc de Triomphe. The characters played by Bulle and Pascale Ogier in Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981) could be described as that classic French type, the flâneur, “masking under multiple impressions the void” felt within and around themselves.2 In Paris s’en va (1981), these unnamed characters appear more like spirits, ghosts awoken from a centuries-long slumber by the expansive...

News.

The lineup for the 66th Locarno Film Festival has been announced. Sections include the Concorso internazionale, (highlights which include premieres from Hong Sang-soo and Albert Serra and the long desired extended cut of Jacques Rivette's Va savoir), special Piazza Grande presentations, Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Fuori Concorso, and more. The various Jury members have also been announced, and heading the Concorso internazionale is Lav Diaz. David Hudson has more details for you over at Keyframe.

New issues now available on physical and digital shelves: Film Comment & Brooklyn Rail. Pitchfork's new film criticism sister site, The Dissolve, has opened its doors.

Finds.

Above: via Jonathan Rosenbaum, his introduction to Erich von Stroheim's Greed at the 2013 Greater St. Louis Humanities Festival. For Cinema Scope Online, Celluloid Liberation Front writes on Il Cinema Ritrovato Xxvii:

"Were we to emulate the Biblical terminology Il Cinema Ritrovato employs to describe one...

Italian actor, director and screenwriter Sergio Castellitto is to be honoured at the 66th edition of the Locarno Film Festival (August 7-17).

The tribute to Castellitto will include a conversation with him that is open to the public, and screenings of five films spanning his career: Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir (Who Knows?) (2001), Marco Bellocchio’s My Mother’s Smile (2002), Alessandro Angelini’s Raise Your Head (2009), as well as Love & Slaps (2010) and the Swiss premiere of Twice Born, directed by Castellitto.

Locarno artistic director Carlo Chatrian said: ”This recognition of actor and director Sergio Castellitto is a way to honour a career that has bridged two distinct eras in Italian cinema - that of the ‘sacred monsters’ (Monicelli, Ferreri, Mastroianni…) and the new (Amelio, Bellocchio, Virzì) - before finding his own creative trajectory.

“Whether in the service of Italian or foreign filmmakers, or involved in his own productions, Sergio Castellitto represents the kind of quality Italian cinema...

Jacques Rivette is perhaps the most unsung among the masters of the French New Wave but also the one who remained truest to the original tenets of the movement. His films are often beset by seeming contradictions – they are intellectually demanding but often playful; they are rigidly structured and enacted – like filmed theatre – but frequently also incorporate extended sequences with improvisation. All these contradictions, it would appear, can be resolved if one proceeds from the recognition that Rivette is not an artist exploring the world through investigations of history/politics, the human soul/ psyche or even the artistic impulse; he is, rather, preoccupied with the issue of narration. To phrase it differently, all his films have something to do with people trying to understand the world by constructing narratives around it. In Rivette’s films ‘narration’ often takes the shape of theatrical performance which means that the central dichotomy in...

Mesmeric, subtly comic and weirdly gripping, this drama set in gorgeous Lisbon is one of the year's best. By Peter Bradshaw

Elegant, eccentric and absolutely captivating, this is simply a gem. It's a film with a heartfelt love of Lisbon – beautifully and calmly photographed – and with serene, almost eerie self-possession in its long, slow takes and stylised, decelerated speech. Director Eugène Green uses direct sightlines into camera in the manner of Ozu, and the mannered minuet of his dialogue clearly owes a good deal to Manoel de Oliveira. It produces the dream-like impression of a classical drama transplanted into a contemporary setting. Leonor Baldaque plays Julie, a French actor in Lisbon to shoot a movie based on the 17th-century tale of a nun seduced by a soldier. She becomes aware of spirits from the past arising before her and within her. Green's camera is perpetually trained on Julie's delicate face: an intense portraiture.

Avant-garde French cinematographer at the heart of the new wave

For 45 years, the French cinematographer William Lubtchansky, who has died of heart disease aged 72, put his talents at the disposal of the most challenging, intellectually inquiring, uncompromisingly brilliant film directors who emerged with the French new wave. Lubtchansky worked with Jean-Luc Godard (six times), although they fell out, made up and fell out again; the husband and wife team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (11 times); and Jacques Rivette (14 times).

Although these directors differed in their approaches and sensibilities, they were united in their irreverent, generally unsentimental treatment of character, their existential attitude to society and to human behaviour, and their experiments with filmic space and time. They questioned cinema itself by drawing attention to the conventions used in film-making and quoting from the other arts. They presented an alternative to Hollywood by consciously breaking its conventions while at the...

Note: This is our first review in a smaller series of coverage from the 2010 San Francisco International Film Festival.

One of my favorite living film directors is Jacques Rivette. Rivette was once part of the original "French New Wave," a group of film critics for Cahiers du Cinema that decided to turn director and make their own films. The group also included Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. The other four achieved some measure of fame, but Rivette was always the "outcast" of the group. He was the most "experimental." He completed three "New Wave" style films in the 1960s, the latter of which, L'amour fou (1968), ran over four hours. and followed them with his monumental Out 1 (1971), which ran nearly 13 hours. (The film has rarely been shown, and I keep hoping for a DVD box set someday soon.)

After that came arguably his most beloved film, though...

In many ways, Cannes' parallel sidebars (Director's Fortnight, Critic's Week and I'm including Un Certain Regard here) are the hardest sections to forecast - the high volume of films from all corner of the globe and the actual number of available slots makes it perhaps more difficult to predict than the actual Main Competition predictions.. - In many ways, Cannes' parallel sidebars (Director's Fortnight, Critic's Week and I'm including Un Certain Regard here) are the hardest sections to forecast - the high volume of films from all corner of the globe and the actual number of available slots makes it perhaps more difficult to predict than the actual Main Competition predictions (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV). Like other major film festivals, Cannes has their own labs, promoting new talent and I'm expecting to see some of the Atelier names to preem their work at...

• #77.The Duchess of Langeais (Ne touchez pas la hache) Director: Jacques RivetteScreenwriters: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent and RivetteProducers: Roberto Cicutto, Martine Marignac, Luigi Musini, Ermanno Olmi and Maurice Tinchant Distributor: IFC Films The Gist: Based on Honore de Balzac's novella, Antoinette (Balibar) is the Duchess of Langeais, a married coquette who frequents the most extravagant balls in 1820’s Paris. At one such event she meets the handsome, brooding general Armand de Montriveau (Depardieu), who recounts his death-defying adventures in Napoleon’s army. Fact: Jeanne Balibar also starred in Rivette's Va Savoir. See It: Film was one of the most talked about from the Berlin Film Festival in 07'. Release Date/Status?: Day and date IFC films release on February 22nd. ...

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• Well past his prime, there is no slowing down for Jacques Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse, Celine and Julie Go Boating). A filmmaker from La Nouvelle Vague has found suitor for his latest – a Berlin 2007 film festival entry will most likely find itself on the 08’ slate for subtitle-friendly indie distributor. THR reports that IFC Films have picked up the period/costume film that is known as Ne touchez pas la hache (which translates as “don’t touch the hip”) but receives an English translation of The Duchess of Langeais.Based on Honore de Balzac's novella, this tells the story of Antoinette, the Duchess of Langeais, is a married coquette who frequents the most extravagant balls of 1820s Restoration Paris, where hypocrisy and vanity reign. The alluring Antoinette orchestrates a calculating game of seduction with handsome young general Armand de Montriveau. His passion frustratingly unfulfilled, Montriveau seeks his revenge . . . The

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