Rushes | Los Angeles Wildfires, the Best Films of 1934, Help Craig Baldwin

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.

NEWS

Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974).

• Wildfires continue to devastate the greater Los Angeles area, having killed 25 people and destroyed more than 1,400 homes, schools, businesses, and institutions.
• A number of disaster relief and emergency resource funds are positioned to help those affected, including the California Community Foundation Wildfire Recovery Fund, the California Fire Foundation, the Entertainment Industry Community Fund, and finally the Motion Picture & Television Fund. GoFundMe has also organized a Wildfire Relief Fund and hosts a number of individual verified fundraisers that will continue to be updated.
• The nomination voting period for the Oscars, which was supposed to end on January 12, has been extended through January 17, with nominations to be announced on January 23. (The Academy will also donate a portion of the money allocated to the nominees luncheon to relief efforts.) The Writers Guild, the Producers Guild, and the American Society of Cinematographers have also delayed their nomination announcements to unspecified dates. The Critics Choice Awards have also been postponed, and many film premieres have either been delayed or canceled.
• Meanwhile, the vast majority of Hollywood productions remain unaffected by the fires, as studio lots have been untouched and most location shoots are conducted outside of California, in states with large tax incentives. “It has become a business where the edifices are based in Los Angeles, but much of the work happens in other places—and that in itself raises questions as people try to rebuild their lives,” said industry veteran Terry Press.

REMEMBERING

Anti-Clock (Jack Bond, 1979).

• Jack Bond has died at 87. The British director is known for his collaborations with Jane Arden on three avant-garde films in the 1960s and ’70s: Separation (1967), directed by Bond; The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), directed by Arden and produced by Bond; and Anti-Clock (1979), codirected by Bond and Arden. He later collaborated with the synth-pop group Pet Shop Boys on It Couldn’t Happen Here (1988), a musical based on music from the band’s first two records. He also worked extensively in documentary, directing episodes of The South Bank Show (1978–2010, 2012–23) and a feature-length film chronicling the comeback of new-wave star Adam Ant.
• Roger Pratt has died at 77. The British cinematographer is known for his longtime collaboration with Terry Gilliam, whom he met when he worked as a clapper loader on Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). He went on to photograph Brazil (1985), The Fisher King (1991), and 12 Monkeys (1995). He also worked alongside Mike Leigh early in his career, shooting Meantime (1983) and High Hopes (1988), and filmed four features for Richard Attenborough. He was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair (1999).

RECOMMENDED READING

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024).

• “If A Complete Unknown largely reiterates the Dylan myth, however, that is likely to please the man himself. Dylan has always had a great reverence for myths and very little respect for myth-puncturers (i.e., the press).” For The Nation, Sam Adler-Bell unpacks the new Dylan biopic from the perspective of a fan who prefers his idol not be tied down.
• “With its clean lines and precise assembly, it’s nearly devoid of fundamental practicalities, and, so, remains an idea for a movie about ideas, an outline for a drama that’s still in search of its characters.” For The New Yorker, Richard Brody examines Brady Corbet’s Golden Globe–winning epic The Brutalist (2024) and finds it wanting.

• “One of his key concepts was what he termed ‘Real TIME/SPACE’: while narrative cinema could try to produce an illusion of real time, it was much rarer for it to attempt the illusion of ‘real space’, for a film to be experienced by the viewer in the space where it was produced.” For Sidecar, Maria Palacios Cruz pays tribute to the memory of British avant-garde artist Malcolm Le Grice, who died last month.
• “This is my first time without [David’s] advice, though I know there are films on this new list with which he would have heartily agreed, others that he would agree are important enough to include, and one or two that he would be dubious about.” For David Bordwell’s blog, Observations on Film Art, Kristin Thompson takes up the mantle of publishing a top-ten list of films from 90 years ago, an annual event undertaken by her late husband eighteen years ago.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

The Greeks Had a Word for Them (Lowell Sherman, 1932).

• Montreal, through January 19: Panorama-cinéma presents the first Montreal Critics’ Week, planned on the model of those which accompany the major festivals in Berlin, Cannes, and Venice, with a nightly program of screenings followed by extended panel conversations, though in this case without a larger institutional armature. “It cannot be done in the same way that it is usually done,” coprogrammer Mathieu Li-Goyette says of the festival’s format.
• New York, through January 30: MoMA presents the 21st annual To Save and Project festival, celebrating newly restored films from archives around the globe. Some highlights include James Bidgood’s underground film Pink Narcissus (1971), Lowell Sherman’s pre-Code comedy The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932), and the original version of Shoulder Arms (1918), a World War I comedy by Charlie Chaplin.
• Trondheim, NO, through March 16: Kunsthall Trondheim presents Man’s World, an exhibition by Sin Wai Kin featuring three interconnected video installations on the constructedness of narrative.
• New Plymouth, NZ, through April 27: The Len Lye Center presents Interlaced: Animation and Textiles, “the first major exhibition dedicated to the reciprocal relationship between these two artforms.”  

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Le Cinema Club presents Parade (1952), a rarely screened short film by Charles and Ray Eames to kick off their series “dedicated to films for children that adults can also enjoy.” 
• David Ehrlich has released his annual video countdown of the best films of the year alongside his charity fundraiser for the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016).

• “The path from muse to icon to martyr is well trod.” Rafaela Bassili surveys the efforts of Pablo Larraín to inscribe such a path onto the lives of three of prominent women of the previous century: Jackie Kennedy, Princess Diana, and now Maria Callas.
• “There is so much clarity in this moment, in which we see right through a person into everything that made them.” Sam Bodrojan identifies many such moments across the filmography of Mike Leigh, up to and including Hard Truths (2024).
• “A perceptible authenticity runs through their films like an undercurrent: a serious gamer can recognize the sensibility of another.” Matt Turner’s latest Cutscenes column looks at the work of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, whose latest feature, Eat the Night (2024), is premised upon the final days of a massive online game.
• Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias shares preliminary drawings for the first 30 minutes of Pepe (2024).

WISH LIST

• Piretti Editore has published Michael Guarneri’s Conversations With Wang Bing, a collection of interviews with the Chinese director on the ways his work highlights the joys and repressive struggles of Chinese life.
• The independent Southeast Asian film magazine MARG1N, based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was established last year, and it’s finally rising to the top of our reading piles. The first issue is dedicated its first issue to “Khmer and Filipino perspectives on piracy as part of our cinema culture.”

EXTRAS

Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (Craig Baldwin, 1992).

• Underground filmmaker and programmer Craig Baldwin has been battling throat cancer for the past few months. Baldwin’s friends have started a fundraiser to help offset his expenses.