Links & Looks: February 3, 2023
Panahi RELEASED; New Reviews: Hansen-Løve, Shyamalan, Dhont; Walter Hill & Other Books. Also: On Perseverance And Writing; "The Miracle Of Crispy Cheese"
Directorial style. M. Night Shyamalan on the viewfinder.
I wrote about Knock At The Cabin; and One Fine Morning and Close and plucked only a few highlights of Chicago’s stellar weekly repertory showings.
Notes on a few books about movies—Tarantino’s “Cinema Speculations”; "Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson's "Hollywood: The Oral History”; The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: a Memoir," assembled from conversation with Paul Newman; but special admiration for Walter Chaw’s festschrift for writer-director-producer Walter Hill, who just turned 83 (and released his most recent picture, Dead For A Dollar, only last year.) The foreword is by his friend a frequent screenwriting collaborator Larry Gross, who writes,
From the beginning, some of the salient features of Walter Hill's art have been a robust physicality, a dark clarity and coherence, and more than a touch of melancholy... Like many old-school American filmmakers, and despite strong evidence to the contrary, he never refers to himself as an artist. He much prefers the idea that he practices a craft. He once said to me, “More of a potter than a painter. You get the draft right, the art takes care of itself.”
More here.
Jafar Panahi, imprisoned by the brutal Iranian regime, is on hunger strike. His wife, Tahereh Saeidi, posted this statement on Instagram on February 2.
UPDATE: “On the third day of Jafar Panahi's dry strike; with the efforts of his family, respected lawyers, cinema representatives, Panahi was temporarily released from Evin Prison.” (These Iranian film and theater workers are among those who remain imprisoned by the authoritarian regime.)
On July 20, in protest against the arrest of two of our beloved colleagues, Mr. Mohammad Rasulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad, together with a group of filmmakers gathered in front of Evin prison, and it was decided that a number of us and the lawyers of the detained colleagues entered the Evin courthouse and peacefully We were talking with the relevant authorities and the relevant investigator when an agent came and took me to the judge of branch 1 of Evin's sentence enforcement. The young judge said without introduction: "We were looking for you in the skies, we found you here.”
“You are under arrest!" In this way, I was arrested and transferred to Evin prison for the execution of a sentence that had been issued for eleven years. According to the law for which I was arrested in 1988, after more than ten years of non-execution the sentence is subject to the passage of time and becomes unenforceable. Therefore, this arrest was more like banditry and hostage-taking than the execution of a judicial sentence.
Even though my arrest was illegal, the respected lawyers succeeded in violating the ruling issued in 1990 by resuming the proceedings in the Supreme Court, which is the highest authority for judicial cases, on the 15 October 2022, so that they can go to the same branch for retrial… While we have seen that it takes less than thirty days from the time of arrest to the hanging of the innocent youth of our country, it took more than a hundred days to transfer my case to the branch with the intervention of security forces…
Legally, I was still kept in prison with repeated excuses and every day by the security agencies. What is certain is that the behavior of the bully and extra-legal security institution and the unquestioning surrender of the judicial authorities once again show the implementation of selective and tasteful laws.
It is only an excuse for repression. Even though I knew that the judicial system and the security institutions have no will to implement the law (which they insist on), but out of respect for my lawyers and friends, I went through all the legal ways to get my right. Today, like many people trapped in Iran, I have no choice but to protest against these inhumane behaviors with my dearest possession, that is, my life.
Therefore, I firmly declare that in protest against the extra-legal and inhumane behavior of the judicial and security apparatus and this particular hostage-taking, I have started a hunger strike since the morning of the 12th of Bahman, and I will refuse to eat and drink any food and medicine until the time of my release. I will remain in this state until perhaps my lifeless body is freed from prison.
With love for Iran and the people of my land, Jafar Panahi
”We Are Always Writing Stories,” 2010/Photo: Ray Pride
Writes Stephen Marche in his brief, forthcoming “On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer”:
THE MOTIVES OF PERSEVERANCE, I think I should point out, are all probably stupid. Perseverance is a form of what the Buddhists call attachment. A life of blessed inconsequence is probably superior. Money and bloody-mindedness are better sources for perseverance than the love of writing, that's for sure. Writers are often proud of how much they hate writing. I find it bizarre. You don't hear guitar players whining about how much they hate playing the guitar. But the sheer joy of writing well, the affiliation with controlled language, the booming resonance of the Word to the horizon of being, the chance to play the glamorous instrument, English, the unsolvable labyrinth of tone and significance that lead to fleeting recognitions, apparent even in this miniature essay, to see that Li Bai and Herman Melville would have commiserated, to know that Ovid and James Baldwin walked in the same dark woods—that love of language won't keep you working.
Melissa Clark on “The Miracle Of Crispy Cheese”:
Back in the ’90s there was a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan called Frico Bar, which specialized in the eponymous crispy cheese wafer from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy. The restaurant was only a few steps from The Times’ office, and my editor took me there when I was still a fresh-faced freelancer. My first frico was an epiphany. A nibble brought forth a combination of the browned corners of a casserole, the seared Cheddar that oozes from a grilled cheese sandwich, and the singed strands of mozzarella stuck to a pizza pan. That one bite turned my culinary world upside down.