News

This week, we are pleased to introduce Rushes Extra, a new series of reported pieces that go beyond the headlines to take a closer look at developing stories from throughout the film world. In this first installment, Vikram Murthi reports from the picket lines of the New York cinema workers strike at Alamo Drafthouse.Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSFerris Bueller’s Day Off.Chinese authorities are reportedly considering “reducing or banning the import of US films” in response to President Trump’s global tariffs. Though US studio earnings in China have decreased as the country has invested in their own film industry, losing access to the world’s second-largest film market would be a major blow to the American film industry.The...

Every now and then, a film comes along that transcends its genre, reshaping the cinematic landscape and becoming something of a cultural phenomenon. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is one such movie.

Released in 1975, this thriller didn’t just win audiences over; it reinvented the concept of the summer blockbuster. But its influence didn’t stop there. Jaws secured a rare spot in the hearts of filmmakers worldwide, including one of the most celebrated animators of all time, Hayao Miyazaki.

A scene from Jaws | Credits: Universal Pictures

From the pulse-pounding score that sticks to your bones to the ever-tightening noose of suspense, Jaws was a cultural earthquake, setting the stage for the blockbuster era that would follow. And then there’s that shark. It didn’t just swim into our screens—it sunk its teeth into the very heart of Hollywood, leaving a legacy that continues to send ripples through the industry.

Revolution+1.On July 8, 2022, Shinzo Abe, who had been the longest-serving prime minister of Japan in its postwar years, was shot and killed in broad daylight in a country with barely any civilian access to firearms. The suspect was immediately arrested, and commentators from all over the world began to speculate about the killer’s motive. After a few days, the police revealed that the 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, who had built his own gun and tracked Abe’s movements, had not originally planned to kill Abe. In fact, the most high-profile political assassination in decades was carried out by a man who cared little for politics. Legendary Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi, sensing a story sure to be misconstrued by the press, immediately began production on a biopic—not of Abe, but of Yamagami. At the North American premiere of the film, Revolution+1 (2023), last July, he said that this quick turnaround was not intended to garner controversy,...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

The films of Kijū Yoshida are now playing in a massive retrospective. Read our piece on him here.

Roxy Cinema

A five-film retrospective of Matthew Modine (read my interview here) takes place this weekend, including work by Abel Ferrara, Alan Rudolph, and the man himself.

Museum of the Moving Image

A career-spanning Todd Haynes retrospective begins, with the director present on Friday and Saturday; Robert Altman’s Popeye plays on 35mm this Saturday and Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art

A massive Ennio Morricone retrospective begins, this weekend bringing Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy.

Anthology Film Archives

The films of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project are screening, while Joseph Cornell, Tony Conrad, and Bruce Conner programs run in Essential Cinema; a Hollis Frampton retrospective is also underway.

Film Forum

Michael Powell’s career-killing masterwork Peeping Tom plays in a long-overdue restoration,...

There was a time when Japanese filmmaker Kijū Yoshida was a cinephile’s mark of exquisite taste. While not entirely obscure, his work has been less-discussed than those of contemporaries Ōshima, Imamura, and Suzuki, even if he’s always been grouped among them as a key author of the Japanese New Wave.

In the early years of online cinephilia, mentioning Yoshida was a sort of a code, a way to signal that your knowledge about Japanese cinema from that era was a bit more nuanced. It is, in many ways, thanks to this interest that these films are more widely talked-about and now the subject of Film at Lincoln Center’s retrospective running from December 1-8.

My introduction to Yoshida’s cinema came courtesy Allan Fish, a self-taught critic who watched films (and TV) from all over the world and wrote vivaciously about the moving image on his blog Wonders in the Dark.

By Earl Jackson

For a long time, Japanese cinema of the 1980s was a closed book to me. I just could not engage with the soft-focus, candy-pastel dreamscapes, the ubiquitous permed hair for both sexes, the relentless innocence of the idols who seemed to have learned acting from hostage ransom videos, and the ramshackle macho veneer concocted with crayons and a bullhorn. But in 2004 I attended an immense and beautifully curated 1980s retrospective sponsored by the Japan Foundation held in an upscale shopping mall in Seoul. That intense exposure was a real education which included an introduction to the almost preternatural, haunting countercharm of Yusaku Matsuda, amplified by the devoted Korean Matsuda fans I met there.

In recent years, international attention to the work of Shinji Somai and Nobuhiko Obayashi has filled in vital pieces of the 1980s, however Matsuda's cult status in Japan has yet to spread beyond domestic screens.

It is with great sadness that we have just learned of the death at the age of 89 of Kiju Yoshida, considered as the Alain Resnais of the New Wave of Japanese cinema.

The Festival International des Cinémas d’Asie de Vesoul paid tribute to him, in his presence, during its 7th edition in 2001. Francophone and Francophile, extraordinary presence, demanding worker, faithful in friendships, these are the words that spontaneously come to mind to pay a last tribute to this giant of the seventh art, director of a considerable work among which “Coup d’état”, “Femmes en miroir”, “Flamme et femme”, “Histoire écrite par l’eau”, “Onimaru”, “Promesse”, “Éros + Massacre”, … Pax Aeterna.

Entrance to the Invisible Cinema at the Austrian Filmmuseum.In 1989, on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the Austrian Filmmuseum opened its famed “Invisible Cinema,” according to specifications laid out by filmmaker, theorist, and museum co-founder Peter Kubelka. Modeled after Kubelka’s original invisible cinema, built in 1970 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, the Filmmuseum’s version is a black box creation that, by allowing for the least amount of peripheral light possible, points the viewer’s focus directly at the projected image. It is, as far as seating, quality of projection, and immersive atmosphere, an essentially perfect cinema. It was one of the places I most eagerly hoped to visit upon my first trip to the Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale), which this year celebrated its 60th anniversary; luckily, as one of the the festival’s primary venues, the Filmmuseum is a frequent destination during the Viennale’s...

An important event of the 19th New Horizons festival will be Poland’s first retrospective of works by Terayama Shūji (1935-1983), one of the most prominent avant-garde reformers of Japanese cinema and theater.

Selected filmography:

Short films

1964 Ori / Kanshū (The Cage / Klatka / Więzień w klatce)

1971 Tomato Kecchappu Kōtei (Emperor Tomato Ketchup / Cesarz Tomato Ketchiup)

1974 Chōfuku-ki (Butterfly Dress Pledge / Motyl)

1974 Seishōnen no tame no eiga nyūmon (The young people’s guide to film / Wstęp dla młodzieży do wiedzy o filmie)

1974 Rōra (Laura / Laura)

1975 Shinpan (The Trial / Proces)

1975 Hōsō-tan (A Tale of Smallpox / Opowieść o ospie)

1977 Marudororu no uta (Les Chants de Maldoror / Pieśni Maldorora)

1979 Kusa meikyū (Grass Labyrinth / Labirynt Traw)

Features films

1971 Sho o suteyo machi e deyō (Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets / Rzućmy książki, wyjdźmy na ulice!)

1974 Den’en ni shisu (Pastoral: To Die in the Country <aka Pastoral Hide and Seek> / Wiejska ciuciubabka)

1977 Bokusā (Boxer / Bokser)

1981 Shanhai Ijin Shōkan (Fruits of Passion...

When an insurance company makes the announcement that the business is folding and they are letting the staff go, employee Takashi Kiguchi pleads for the future of his co-workers by putting a gun to his head and threatening suicide. However, before he can pull the trigger a work friend reaches for the gun, causing Takashi to only injure himself. The act of defiance does not go unnoticed though, and the press soon flock to meet the man who offered up his life for his fellow workers. When an insurance company hears about this story, they decide that he would be the ideal representative of their new ad campaign. Somewhat hesitant at first, Takashi soon becomes obsessed with the stardom that his new role is offering. Trying to use his voice for positive platform, he becomes obsessed with ensuring that everyone respects him and his actions.

Blood is Dry is screening...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

Films by Bonello, Rivette, Akerman, Carax, and more screen in “The Female Gaze,” a retrospective of female cinematographers. Read our piece on it here.

Metrograph

The rarely screened work of Yoshishige Yoshida gets a three-title outing, while a look at the films of actor and director Gérard Blain is underway.

Mubi will be showing the retrospective Philippe Garrel: Fight for Eternity from May 1 - July 5, 2017 in most countries around the world.Les enfants désaccordésQuestion: I must ask you here about one concept you discuss in your book, one that also might be thought of, next to the structural work, as another way to break from the story in the film. The concept is muzan, and I find it quite difficult to think of a proper translation of it into English. How do you employ this concept into your films, and does it, in fact, have anything to do with the way you wish to break away from the story?

Yoshishige Yoshida: I understand the word in itself, as you would understand the literal meaning of the kanji: something which expresses the impossibility of attaining stability or change for the better. Yes, I believe this is the meaning of the concept that I use.

Plus 17 More New Releases to Watch This Week on Blu-ray/DVD! Welcome to this week in home video! Click the title to buy a Blu-ray/DVD from Amazon and help support Fsr in the process! Pick of the Week Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism [Arrow Academy] What is it? The life of an early 20th century anarchist […]

The article The Japanese New Wave Comes to America With Arrow’s Kiju Yoshida Boxset appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Every film creates a world, and every filmmaker a universe. Some prove uninhabitable. Given the rarity of Kiju Yoshida’s films, the grandeur with which Arrow Films is presenting them, and the way they were talked about – three films “united by their radical politics and an even more radical shooting style”; “bleak but dreamlike” – I dove into this set quite curious and excited. I found Yoshida’s universe to be one of the most tumultuous I’ve yet encountered. Even oblique films tend to carry with them a bit of poetry and emotional momentum. I think especially of films like Last Year at Marienbad, The Mirror, Goodbye to Language, or Flowers of Shanghai, all of which are so exciting and riveting despite my not initially knowing what they were really about at all.

At least two of the films in this three-film set gave me no such pleasures; Coup d...

In this special episode of Off The Shelf, Ryan and Brian take a look at the best DVD and Blu-ray 2015.

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Follow-Up Ryan buys the Ernest and Celestine Blu-ray from Plain Archive Ultra HD Blu-ray Pre-orders Live, March 1st release: Fox, Sony, WB, Shout! and now Lionsgate Curzon Tarkovsky Ryan’s Top 10 List of 2015 Classics from the Van Beuren Studio (Thunderbean Animation) Thunderbirds: The Complete Series (Timeless Media Group / Shout! Factory) The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (Arrow UK) Twice Upon A Time (Warner Archive Collection) Journey to the Center of the Earth (Twilight Time) Watership Down (The Criterion Collection) Walt Disney Animation Studios: Short Films Collection (Disney) 3-D Rarities (Flicker Alley) Spartacus: Restored Edition (Universal) The Apu Trilogy (The Criterion Collection)

Honorable mentions:

Arrow Video: Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism, The Train, The Criterion Collection: The Fisher King, Moonrise Kingdom...

'The Beginning or the End' 1947 with Robert Walker and Tom Drake. Hiroshima bombing 70th anniversary: Six movies dealing with the A-bomb terror Seventy years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. Ultimately, anywhere between 70,000 and 140,000 people died – in addition to dogs, cats, horses, chickens, and most other living beings in that part of the world. Three days later, America dropped a second atomic bomb, this time over Nagasaki. Human deaths in this other city totaled anywhere between 40,000-80,000. For obvious reasons, the evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been a quasi-taboo in American films. After all, in the last 75 years Hollywood's World War II movies, from John Farrow's Wake Island (1942) and Mervyn LeRoy's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) to Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (2001), almost invariably have presented a clear-cut vision...

This week on Off The Shelf, Ryan is joined by Brian Saur to take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for the week of June 2nd, 2015, and chat about some follow-up and home video news.

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Episode Links & Notes

Follow-up

Ikarie Xb–1 is Czech, not Polish! Seiki Player

News

IFC and Paramount / Shout! Factory: The Duke Of Burgundy, Reality, Clouds Of Sils Maria, Yoshishige Yoshida pre-order up at Arrow UK Wac – 6/23 – Hugo The Hippo! + Wac reveals their Entire June Slate on their Youtube Channel Scream Factory to release Wes Craven’s Shocker Kl Studio Classics to put out The Oblong Box (Poe adaptation with Vincent Price and Christopher Lee) Cohen Media: Under The Sun Of Satan (no date yet) Sony Pictures Classics: The Salt Of The Earth (July 14th) Cinema Guild: Jauja (July 21st)

New Releases

Apollo 13 – 20th Anniversary Edition Beetle Bailey...

Dear Adam,

What a pleasure to be at another film festival with you. Despite the frenzy of activity, the audiences and the society of such events, I tend to find them lonely places, so much time in the dark with your own thoughts, so many single-minded scrambles from venue to venue, most conversations before the late hours being mere passing salutations or monosyllabic recommendations. The only other time I’ve been able to strike up a correspondence like this is with the inimitable Fernando F. Croce during Toronto’s film festival, and I count myself lucky to be able to resume this missive format with you. It’ll be good to have a place to chat, both out there, in Berlin, and here.

This year, for the first in many, I have optimistically opted to visit the Berlin International Film Festival rather than attend the International Film Festival Rotterdam, mainly...

Behind The Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, USA)

Competition

The third in our series of Cannes dialogues between Adam Cook and Daniel Kasman is on Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra, which screened in Competition.

Daniel Kasman: The political body: Soderbergh's supposedly final film continues his run of digital features focuses on the existence and commerce of, as well as the impact on, the body in contemporary society. In Behind the Candelabra, it is in Liberace's (Michael Douglas) precise control of his public and private image in dress and look, and in the figure of Scott (Matt Damon), who becomes his lover, then boyfriend, then essentially his husband in an evolving relationship that starts nearly as prostitution and later involves plastic surgery, drugs for bodily upkeep, and, in general for both men, concerns the impact of their aging bodies on their relationship and luxury lifestyle. The bodies of this public figure (publically straight,...

News.

The lineup for the 52nd Semaine de la Critique as well as the 2013 Selection for Quinzane des Réalisateurs in Cannes have been announced. Also from Cannes: Kim Novak is set to be a guest of honour to mark a screening of the recently restored Vertigo. Above: The omniscient Twitter has revealed the first image behind the scenes of Abel Ferrara's new film featuring Gérard Depardieu as Dominique Strauss-Kahn. David Cronenberg has begun casting his next project, Maps to the Stars. The first names involved? Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson and Sarah Gadon. Two of Mubi's very own are in different (early) stages of realizing film projects. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has started shooting Ellie Lumme (production pictured above), having partly funded it via GoFundMe. Also head over to Vishnevetsky's blog for updates. Meanwhile, Kurt Walker (co-director of programming for Mubi Canada, Australia & New Zealand) is crowd-funding over at Indiegogo...

On the other side of my content filled posts for Sound on Sight, I manage a semi-popular Tumblr blog called Obscure and Offbeat Cinema. There is virtually no written content and the vast majority of what I present are screenshots taken from films that I’m watching or planning to watch. Though a popular film will sneak in now and then, the focus remains on films that are off the beaten path. With over 3000 images posted in 2012, I thought it would be interesting to single out my favourite shots seen for the first time this year and share them with you. This link is quite obviously unique to my own cinematic experience of 2012, as well as my own personal quirks and aesthetic obsessions, so you might not agree with all of the choices. I also warn, this list may not be Safe for Work and in the case of objectionable...

Doubtless there was no more fitting one-two-three punch at Cannes than Holy Motors – Cosmopolis – 11/26 The Day Mishima Chose His Fate, films from an austere netherworld of profound disturbance, loneliness, searching, questing. Kôji Wakamatsu's piercingly precise digital feature on the path Yukio Mishima took that ended in 1970 with him (and his most loyal followers) taking hostage the commandant of Japan's Self Defense Force, listing his demands and pleas to a jeering gathering of troops, and finally committing ritual suicide produces a shock when shown among these three speculative and fantastic films, as well as next to the generally uncommitted politics of the festival this year.

The Day Mishima Chose His Fate comes as contradistinction to Wakamatsu's 2008 masterpiece on the failed radical left movement in Japan, United Red Army, here treating with a respect bordering on the severe the passion of Mishima and followers in their dissatisfaction with and anger at the...

"After a period in which versions of Austen hogged our screens, the Brontës have fought back," writes Boyd Tonkin in a piece for the Independent that begins, by the way, with a brief but rousing history of Charlotte's detestation of Jane Austen. "Released today, Andrea Arnold's savagely uncompromising Wuthering Heights joins a line of adaptations of Emily's only surviving novel that began in 1920 (a lost work by Av Bramble) and went on to include renderings from directors as varied as William Wyler — with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon still the ranking Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw to many fans — and Yoshishige Yoshida, Luis Buñuel and Jacques Rivette. Earlier this year, Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska as the uncowed governess and Michael Fassbender the sulphurous Mr Rochester, offered a rather smoother ride through another much-adapted book, albeit one that shares with Arnold — and the Brontës — a rapt attention...

The Brontës are often dismissed as up-market Mills & Boon. But with the release of two films this autumn, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, they look set to rival even Jane Austen in the public's affections

Ours is supposed to be the age of instantaneity, where books can be downloaded in a few seconds and reputations created overnight. But the Victorians could be speedy, too, and there's no more striking example of instant celebrity than Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë posted the manuscript to Messrs Smith and Elder on 24 August 1847, two weeks after the publisher had expressed an interest in seeing her new novel while turning down her first. Within a fortnight, a deal had been struck (Charlotte was paid £100) and proofs were being worked on. In the 21st century a first novel can wait two years between acceptance and publication. Jane Eyre was out in eight weeks, on 17 October, with Thackeray...

Reviewing Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower is not an easy task for me. I wasn't even aware of the Japanese New Wave movement before watching it, but once I learned it drew from similar inspirations as the French New Wave I wasn't in the least bit surprised considering the one name that never escaped me while watching Pale Flower was Jean-Luc Godard. The comparison, however, was more of a feeling, more of a sense of directorial presence and control and the styles seem to simply match up. I also noticed hints of The Third Man and Sweet Smell of Success in the noir atmosphere, wet stone and dark shadowy corners of the night.

The experimental score by Toru Takemitsu also stands out and as you begin to make your way through the slim, but informative special features even more corners of this world will begin to reveal themselves that you hadn't even noticed before.

"Romanian films set in the era after the fall of Communism suggest the nation suffers a hell of a hangover from the ideology," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "For instance, Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective attacks draconian drug laws left over from the old regime. Tuesday, After Christmas presents a very different vision of Romania. Its characters can afford to buy expensive Christmas gifts; one of them picks up a 3,300 Euro telescope. It may not be entirely accurate to call the film apolitical, but the most political thing about it is its avoidance of Eastern European miserabilism and its depiction of people who could be living much the same lifestyles in Western Europe."

Damon Smith introduces an interview with director Radu Muntean for Filmmaker: "Tuesday, After Christmas, which premiered at Cannes last year, opens on a dreamy scene: sunlight bathes a naked couple, middle-aged Paul (Mimi Branescu) and pretty,...

0639 Caves of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, USA)

If you’ve been waiting for a truly creative, for a truly auteur use of 3-D, here it is. (And now maybe we can forget about this "trend" or "solution" or "manufactured craze," yes?) Werner Herzog's exploration of caves and cave paintings is a natural fit for the aesthetic, finding in the digital pseudo-depth of the variable recesses and oscillating torchlight of the Chauvet cave in southern France an eerie, alien space. The techno-aesthetic helps re-wire our brain to finally see a bit of the world as Herzog sees it, a powerful expression of the singularity of human kind and the magnificent mystery of its existence on earth. The cave paintings themselves are, in a way, 3-D compositions painted upon and utilizing the contours of the cave walls to mimic energy and movement. The cave’s opening collapsed long ago to seal...

Deep inside Olaf Möller’s After Victory program is Fighting Soldiers (1939), the kind of wartime soldiers-on-the-front documentary that might not get a second glance if it was American. But it’s not; it’s Japanese, directed by Fumio Kamei, and as such it reveals moving images of Japanese soldiers that are shocking precisely because they are so ordinary. This may too be why Kamei eventually fell afoul with the authorities, as Fighting Soldiers is also a rich document of the interstitial life of the soldiers, the morning drills, the marches and mechanized troop movements, the cleaning, sleeping, reading letters, sitting around. Despite the title, these soldiers don’t fight, they live and work, and Kamei, assisted by camerawork both lyrical and material, often utilizing long takes and direct sound, by Miki Shigeru (who was shooting films for Kenji Mizoguchi during this same time), pays a respectful and moving homage to...

After seeing Kiju Yoshida’s debut film Good for Nothing (1960), we can add the filmmaker’s name to the rare list of studio directors whose first films signal immediate, restless talent, vision fully formed, grasp of cinematic tools and expressions already mature. While other Japanese New Wavers were trying to capture a youth audience through filming flighty takes on the too young and too irresponsible, Yoshida aims squarely at the malaise of post-college new adults and the newfound prospect of becoming a tired salaryman in your twenties. Or salarywoman—because as tightly hued as Yoshida’s picture is of lean, exasperated men fidgeting for meaning in their impassive apathy, Good for Nothing devotes just as much time to its female heroine—out of her 20s but wants to be no simple lover, housewife, or member of society, and is just as beset with a need for fulfillment and meaning. With...