Shorts, fests, etc, 9/15.

While the world of finance wobbles - meaning, most likely, that sooner than we'd like to think, we'll all be wobbling, too - a handful of cinephiles has had its eye on a potential sale that will hardly register on any banker's concerns today but may well mean a great deal for what Dave Kehr calls the "Lost Continent of Cinephilia." Today's the day Le Monde was planning to decide what to do with Cahiers du cinéma, whose circulation has dwindled to 23,000 copies. Le Monde will sell, most likely, but to whom? According to the petition posted by Andy Rector, 90 percent of the Cahiers staff favors Thierry Wilhelm, "an investor in Mediart who wants to see the magazine continue to evolve as it has under Jean-Michel Frodon and Emmanuel Burdeau." For more background, run this piece by Frédérique Roussel in Libération through Google's translator. So far, I haven't found any news newer than than that. Update (9/16).

Bernard Rose considers Ken Russell to be "one of the greatest British directors of all time." But that didn't keep him from, by his own admission, stealing Russell's Beethoven project out from under his nose. 14 years after Immortal Beloved, Rose meets Russell to talk about, among many other things, the latter's newly reissued autobiography, A British Picture.

Also in the Guardian, Paul Rennie on the poster for Brian De Palma's Scarface.

"Director Massoud Dehnamaki's iconoclastic 2007 film, Ekhrajiha, or The Rejects, struck a deep chord among Iranians accustomed to seeing the war that transformed the country as a noble cause fought by pious Muslim recruits," writes Borzou Daragahi, who also notes in the Los Angeles Times that "such a less-than-holy depiction of the men who fought the 'War of Sacred Defense,' as the 1980s conflagration with Iraq is sometimes called, was groundbreaking."

"There is a rich tradition of moviemaking in this region," writes Paul MacInnes in the Guardian from Kazakhstan:

Its golden age came at the height of the Soviet era where directors like the Kyrgyz Tolomush Okeev or Uzbekistan's Ali Khamraev were first trained at the VGIK school in Moscow, funded by groups like Soviet TV, and allowed to flourish. Like so much else though, when the USSR collapsed so did the entire system by which films were made. Industries across the former Soviet Republics shrank and cinema was no exception. It is only in recent years that it has even begun to recover. So it was with great excitement that [the Eurasia Film Festival] was able open with a gala screening of Tulpan, a Kazakh movie that claimed the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes this year.

At the Evening Class, Michael Hawley previews French Cinema Now, running October 8 through 12 in San Francisco.

"What are 12 Movies I've Never Seen and Desperately Want to See?" A list from Dennis Cozzalio.

The votes are in and the Cinematheque presents the results: "The Top 5 Fassbinder Films."

"Philip Roth has no love for movies of his books," reports Hillel Italie for the AP.

"The Obama v McCain race for the White House has been run before - NBC's The West Wing pitted a charismatic, non-white Democrat against a maverick, experienced Republican." The BBC's Janette Ballard.

Online browser window shopping tip. Christie's Vintage Film Posters auction happens Wednesday. Via Looker.

Online listening tip. Vinyl Is Podcast launches.

Online viewing tip. Via Andy Rector (we come full circle), Godard's trailer for this year's Viennale. October 17 through 29.

Posted by dwhudson at September 15, 2008 1:15 PM