Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSHard Truths.Mike Leigh’s forthcoming Hard Truths will reunite him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, star of Secrets and Lies (1996). It will be the British director’s first film set in the present day since Another Year (2010).Jia Zhangke has divulged some details of We Shall Be All, now in the early stages of post-production. In production off and on since 2001, the film will be his first feature since Ash Is Purest White (2018). “I travelled with actors and a cameraman to shoot, without a script, without any obvious story,” the director told Variety. “This is a work of fiction, but I have applied many documentary methods.”Robert Bresson’s rarely seen Four Nights of a Dreamer is being restored by MK2 Films, set for a spring release.
- 2/28/2024
- MUBI
Mk2 Films, the Paris-based outfit behind Justine Triet’s Oscar-nominated “Anatomy of a Fall,” is set to restore Robert Bresson’s “Four Nights of a Dreamer,” a romantic drama which competed at the Berlinale in 1971 and disappeared from screens in 1985.
MK2 Films, the division of a major arthouse cinema chain in France, will digitize “Four Nights of a Dreamer” in 4K and will bring it to global theatres in 2024.
“Four Nights of a Dreamer” is the 10th film directed by Bresson and the only one which wasn’t restored. His other credits include “Mouchette,” “Au Hasard Balthazar” and “Pickpocket.”
Inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “White Nights,” “Four Nights of a Dreamer” revolves around a meeting on the Pont Neuf between a dreamy young man and a distraught young woman who will confide in each other over four nights. It stars Guillaume des Forêts, Isabelle Weingarten, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer. The film...
MK2 Films, the division of a major arthouse cinema chain in France, will digitize “Four Nights of a Dreamer” in 4K and will bring it to global theatres in 2024.
“Four Nights of a Dreamer” is the 10th film directed by Bresson and the only one which wasn’t restored. His other credits include “Mouchette,” “Au Hasard Balthazar” and “Pickpocket.”
Inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “White Nights,” “Four Nights of a Dreamer” revolves around a meeting on the Pont Neuf between a dreamy young man and a distraught young woman who will confide in each other over four nights. It stars Guillaume des Forêts, Isabelle Weingarten, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer. The film...
- 2/16/2024
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
Above: Poster by Frank Stella for the 9th New York Film Festival.Compared to the 32 films in the main slate of this year’s New York Film Festival, not to mention the seemingly hundreds of others playing in sidebars, the 1971 edition of the NYFF, half a century ago, was a lean affair. With only 18 films, down from 78 just four years earlier, the ninth edition of the NYFF was, according to its director Richard Roud, a “belt-tightening festival, a year of consolidation.” In fact, the financially strapped festival almost didn’t take place that year. A New York Times article published midway through the event mentions that “outside the 984-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater, there is only one poster announcing the festival [one assumes it was the beautiful Frank Stella poster above] that is quietly and modestly taking place inside.” A far cry from the glorious phalanx of digital billboards currently beaming outside Alice Tully Hall and the Elinor Bunin Center.The...
- 10/6/2021
- MUBI
Roy Andersson’s “About Endlessness” and Tsai Ming-liang’s “Days” are among the highlights of the Masters and Auteurs section of the upcoming Hong Kong International Film Festival. The festival will hold screenings in front of live audiences next month.
It had originally been scheduled to take place in March, but was postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak. The 44th edition will now run Aug. 18-31.
“Endlessness” earned Andersson the best director award at the Venice festival last year. While another selection, Pedro Costa’s “Vitalina Varela” earned the top prize at the Locarno festival last August.
Other films in the section include: “Balloon” by Pema Tseden; “Ema” by Pablo Larrain; “It Must Be Heaven,” by Elia Suleiman; “Marghe and Her Mother” by Mohsen Makhmalbaf; and “The Cordillera of Dreams” by Patricio Guzman.
The festival says that it expects to round out the section with other titles by Bruno Dumont,...
It had originally been scheduled to take place in March, but was postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak. The 44th edition will now run Aug. 18-31.
“Endlessness” earned Andersson the best director award at the Venice festival last year. While another selection, Pedro Costa’s “Vitalina Varela” earned the top prize at the Locarno festival last August.
Other films in the section include: “Balloon” by Pema Tseden; “Ema” by Pablo Larrain; “It Must Be Heaven,” by Elia Suleiman; “Marghe and Her Mother” by Mohsen Makhmalbaf; and “The Cordillera of Dreams” by Patricio Guzman.
The festival says that it expects to round out the section with other titles by Bruno Dumont,...
- 7/8/2020
- by Patrick Frater
- Variety Film + TV
A review of "The Devil, Probably" by Mireille Latil-Le-Dantec. Originally published in Issue 77, July-August 1977, of Cinématographe. Translation by Ted Fendt. Thanks to Marie-Pierre Duhamel.
"I challenge you all now, all you atheists. With what will you save the world, and where have you found a normal line of progress for it, you men of science, of co-operation, of labour-wage, and all the rest of it?
With credit? What's credit? Where will credit take you? [...] Without recognizing any moral basis except the satisfaction of individual egoism and material necessity! [...] It's a law, that's true; but it's no more normal than the law of destruction, or even self-destruction. [...] Yes, sir, the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in humanity! The devil has equal dominion over humanity till the limit of time which we know not. You laugh? You don't believe in the devil? Disbelief in the devil is a French idea,...
"I challenge you all now, all you atheists. With what will you save the world, and where have you found a normal line of progress for it, you men of science, of co-operation, of labour-wage, and all the rest of it?
With credit? What's credit? Where will credit take you? [...] Without recognizing any moral basis except the satisfaction of individual egoism and material necessity! [...] It's a law, that's true; but it's no more normal than the law of destruction, or even self-destruction. [...] Yes, sir, the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in humanity! The devil has equal dominion over humanity till the limit of time which we know not. You laugh? You don't believe in the devil? Disbelief in the devil is a French idea,...
- 3/31/2014
- by Ted Fendt
- MUBI
News.
According to Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi has wrapped his second feature under house-arrest. Eric Kohn reports via Indiewire. Steven Spielberg's long-anticipated Lincoln debuted on Monday at a secret screening at the New York Film Festival. Fandor has collected some of the first reactions. Lynne Ramsay has secured financing with Scott Pictures for her follow-up to last year's We Need to Talk About Kevin. The film is Mobius and The Hollywood Reporter describes it as a "psychological action thriller set in deep space [in which] a captain consumed by revenge takes his crew on a death mission fueled by his own ego and will to control an enigmatic alien." So yes, it's Moby Dick in space. The Guardian has the full story. Indiewire reports that Olivier Assayas is already mounting his follow-up to this year's Something in the Air. Reuniting with Juliette Binoche, the film is tentatively titled Since Maria.
Finds.
According to Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi has wrapped his second feature under house-arrest. Eric Kohn reports via Indiewire. Steven Spielberg's long-anticipated Lincoln debuted on Monday at a secret screening at the New York Film Festival. Fandor has collected some of the first reactions. Lynne Ramsay has secured financing with Scott Pictures for her follow-up to last year's We Need to Talk About Kevin. The film is Mobius and The Hollywood Reporter describes it as a "psychological action thriller set in deep space [in which] a captain consumed by revenge takes his crew on a death mission fueled by his own ego and will to control an enigmatic alien." So yes, it's Moby Dick in space. The Guardian has the full story. Indiewire reports that Olivier Assayas is already mounting his follow-up to this year's Something in the Air. Reuniting with Juliette Binoche, the film is tentatively titled Since Maria.
Finds.
- 10/10/2012
- by Notebook
- MUBI
"The Devil, Probably [1977], one of the great Robert Bresson's greatest, and least-seen, movies gets a week-long run (April 20-26) in the midst of BAMcinématek's Bresson retrospective — resplendent in a new 35mm print and hailed by no less an authority than Richard Hell as 'the most punk movie ever made.'" J Hoberman for Artinfo: "Like all Bresson's movies, The Devil, Probably is a drama of faith so formally rigorous and uncompromising as to border on the absurd — a Dostoyevskian story of a tormented soul presented in the stylized manner of a medieval illumination. At once chic and austere, The Devil, Probably is a generic youth movie set in a Parisian student milieu where long-haired panhandlers play their bongos by the Seine while sinister nihilists mock religion by planting pornographic photos in church documents. Opening with a newspaper headline (Youth Kills Self In PÈRE Lachaise Cemetery), it unfolds in flashback...
- 4/21/2012
- MUBI
“We are still coming to terms with Robert Bresson, and the peculiar power and beauty of his films,” Martin Scorsese said in the 2010 book “A Passion For Film,” describing the often overlooked French filmmaker as “one of the cinema’s greatest artists.”
But while he may be revered by some as the finest French filmmaker bar Jean Renoir, outside hardcore cinephile circles he and his films are virtually unknown (perhaps regarded as too opaque or nebulous). Just consider the fact that almost every definitive book on the elusive director was published during the aughts to feel the full truth of Scorsese's statement about how we're still in the process of appreciating and understanding his life and work. Even Bresson’s actual birthdate is contested, adding further the ambiguities surrounding the director.
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen,” the meticulous Bresson once famously said, hinting at...
But while he may be revered by some as the finest French filmmaker bar Jean Renoir, outside hardcore cinephile circles he and his films are virtually unknown (perhaps regarded as too opaque or nebulous). Just consider the fact that almost every definitive book on the elusive director was published during the aughts to feel the full truth of Scorsese's statement about how we're still in the process of appreciating and understanding his life and work. Even Bresson’s actual birthdate is contested, adding further the ambiguities surrounding the director.
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen,” the meticulous Bresson once famously said, hinting at...
- 4/18/2012
- by The Playlist
- The Playlist
Right now is not a bad time for admirers of Robert Bresson. A traveling retrospective has made its way across numerous cities, and people who'd never gotten a chance to glimpse Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) now get to watch it on the big screen in a proper print. Furthermore, the critical and cinephilic culture surrounding Bresson's work is probably more alive now than it has been in a long time. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than the wider interest in (and affection for) the director's late color films, earlier misunderstood and dismissed in some quarters as odd aberrations which lacked the spiritual clarity or asceticism of the black-and-white work. It's for this reason that film culture can welcome a second, revised edition of James Quandt's crucial anthology, Robert Bresson.
There is simply no more essential book of material on Bresson to be found in the English language, unless...
There is simply no more essential book of material on Bresson to be found in the English language, unless...
- 4/9/2012
- MUBI
"The Romanian director Lucian Pintilie made his first film in 1965, the year Nicolae Ceausescu became general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party," writes Ao Scott in the New York Times. "Of the films he was able to complete in Romania, Reenactment [1968] stands among the exemplary works of its region and time. Subtle, difficult and brave, it represents a powerful statement of artistic honesty in a culture of official lies and evasions. Reenactment is included in a two-week retrospective that begins [today] at the Museum of Modern Art. This comprehensive program also offers American audiences a chance to sample Mr Pintilie's more recent films, among them Niki and Flo, a mordant almost-comedy from 2003 that represents a bridge — and also a battle — between the old Romania and the new. It will run for a week at MoMA, receiving a belated and welcome North American premiere." The series runs through March 12.
Los Angeles. "If...
Los Angeles. "If...
- 3/1/2012
- MUBI
Robert Bresson: The Over-Plenty of Life is a series we've been running in conjunction with the complete retrospective of Bresson's work that'll be touring North America through May. I thought I'd supplement Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's essays, Daniel Kasman's observations and Adrian Curry's collection of posters with a roundup of pointers to pieces on Bresson that have appeared over the past month or two. One of the occasions of the series, as I mentioned in the entry on the initial announcement (with its basic schedule of cities and dates) is the publication of an expanded and illustrated edition of series curator James Quandt's collection, Robert Bresson (Revised), so let's open this go round with notes on another book, Tony Pipolo's Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted his review for the Summer 2010 issue of Cineaste, in which he calls it…
one of the most careful and...
one of the most careful and...
- 2/7/2012
- MUBI
Asked by Sight & Sound to name the ten greatest films of all time, Robert Bresson submitted the following, somewhat notorious list:
1. City Lights
2. City Lights
3. The Gold Rush
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
There are two ways in which Robert Bresson is rarely spoken about: as a comic filmmaker (though, as the above demonstrates, he could be pretty damn funny) and as someone whose work displays the influence of other directors.
Let's begin with that second point. Going back to some of the earliest defenses—as well as the earliest dismissals—of his work, Bresson has largely been described as a filmmaker "without precedent;" his detractors from the 1940s to the 1960s complained that his films didn't work the way movies were supposed to, and his supporters were more than happy to praise his films for the exact same reasons (Jacques Becker, for one, took the pages of L'Écran français to defend the poorly-received Les dames du Bois de Boulogne...
1. City Lights
2. City Lights
3. The Gold Rush
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
There are two ways in which Robert Bresson is rarely spoken about: as a comic filmmaker (though, as the above demonstrates, he could be pretty damn funny) and as someone whose work displays the influence of other directors.
Let's begin with that second point. Going back to some of the earliest defenses—as well as the earliest dismissals—of his work, Bresson has largely been described as a filmmaker "without precedent;" his detractors from the 1940s to the 1960s complained that his films didn't work the way movies were supposed to, and his supporters were more than happy to praise his films for the exact same reasons (Jacques Becker, for one, took the pages of L'Écran français to defend the poorly-received Les dames du Bois de Boulogne...
- 1/13/2012
- MUBI
The phrase "the over-plenty of life" comes from J.M.G. Le Clezio—specifically, his introduction to Notes on the Cinematographer, Robert Bresson's slim, indispensable volume of aphorisms and jottings. I've chosen it at as the title for this series of essays—which will appear here over the course of the next seven weeks, as a full Bresson retrospective, programmed by the Tiff Cinematheque, plays first at Film Forum in New York and then at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago before heading back to the Tiff Lightbox in February—because I feel that it conveys an attitude toward Bresson's work that's much more accurate than the bleak, "Jansenist" and (worst of all) "transcendental" Bresson familiar from the last few decades of English-language film criticism.
Le Clezio's introduction is written in a very distinctily French mode of film-writing, one which is imminently quotable in individual parts but...
Le Clezio's introduction is written in a very distinctily French mode of film-writing, one which is imminently quotable in individual parts but...
- 1/6/2012
- MUBI
A tonic for the New Year: for the next two weeks Film Forum is running a near-complete retrospective of the films of Robert Bresson programmed by the Tiff Cinematheque. The posters for Bresson’s films are a fascinating grab-bag of styles, verging from melodrama to minimalism to symbolism to the wildly inappropriate (see the Italian Mouchette), as designers tried to express and occasionally subvert Bresson’s celebrated and increasing austerity. My favorite may well be this lovely, witty French grande for Pickpocket, illustrated by the great Christian Broutin (best known for his iconic Jules and Jim posters). But there are plenty of other standouts, most especially Raymond Savignac’s series of playful cartoons for Bresson’s final three films: Lancelot du Lac, The Devil, Probably and L’Argent, and the stunning Czech surrealism for Une femme douce.
I present my favorite Bresson posters, a couple per film if possible, in chronological order.
I present my favorite Bresson posters, a couple per film if possible, in chronological order.
- 1/6/2012
- MUBI
The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson will be the first complete retrospective of Bresson's work in North America in 14 years. Tiff Cinematheque has announced today that the series "features a restored print of his acclaimed first feature Les Anges du péché (1943), a metaphysical thriller set in a convent, and new prints of key titles struck especially for the occasion of this retrospective such as the controversial Le Diable probablement (1977), which was prohibited to viewers under the age of eighteen in France as an incitement to suicide; A Man Escaped (1956), a work of resolute beauty that rigorously elevates the gruelling routines of prison life; Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), legendary for being unavailable in North America for almost two decades; and his last masterpiece, L'Argent (1983), a terse and chilling indictment of capitalism and modernity."
While the retrospective will run at Tiff Bell Lightbox from February 9 through March 18, it'll...
While the retrospective will run at Tiff Bell Lightbox from February 9 through March 18, it'll...
- 12/13/2011
- MUBI
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