‣ Film restoration is a kind of magic, one that takes center stage at an annual festival in Bologna celebrating movies that have been brought back to life. Anthony Lane reports for the New Yorker:
One of the earliest duties of any restorer is to round up the copies or portions of a film, in a variety of states, that have been scattered far and wide. For the latest restoration of “The Gold Rush,” this entailed reaching out to United Artists’ Japanese division; the Bundesarchiv, in Germany; the British Film Institute, in London; MoMA and the gem film library, in New York; the Blackhawk collection, at U.C.L.A.; and the Filmoteca de Catalunya, in Spain. From the first of these sources came a duplicate negative (“dupe neg,” in the lingo of the trade), which supplied almost seventy-seven per cent of the material. From the last of them came a positive print, which provided a mere .07 per cent, lasting fewer than five seconds—the lone anchovy, so to speak, that you lay atop your spectacular sandwich, having raided the fridge for every possible ingredient.
The hunt for movies that are missing, believed lost, or absent without leave is one of the more demanding thrills of the restorer’s mission. It can be a matter of salvation. Cecilia Cenciarelli, a co-director of the Bologna festival, remembers flying to Taipei in 2009 in search of films by the Taiwanese director Edward Yang, who had died in 2007. There she found reels of “A Brighter Summer Day” (1991), one of his finest films, left in an office in a “big black garbage bag. The elements were there, covered in mold.” The movie had become, as Cenciarelli said to me, “an urgent patient,” and the job of resuscitating it was shared by the Cineteca and the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, which was created by Martin Scorsese in the year of Yang’s death. The same partnership dealt with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s “Memories of Underdevelopment,” a startling Cuban movie from 1968—“It grabs my heart every time I watch it,” Cenciarelli says. Colleagues in Cuba told her that it was “liquefying under our eyes.” The regime of Fidel Castro was still in place, and just getting the movie out of the country was an adventure. A guy with a visa had to fly the decaying reels to Mexico City, taking up three seats on the plane.
‣ Guyanese-British artist Frank Bowling, now 91 years old, speaks with Prospect‘s David McAllister about the “map” paintings for which he’s best known. Though he can’t travel to see them on view at the São Paulo Biennial, he says, “I’m visiting South America all the time in my dreams and daydreams”:
“Growing up in British Guiana on the edge of South America, next to Venezuela and Surinam bordering Brazil, I always thought of this as being one terrain, a kind of landmass made up of coastline, bush, savannah, that kind of thing,” Bowling tells me. “I made a couple of paintings referring to Mount Roraima, this ancient mysterious mountain that is in Guyana; but the thing is that Roraima is also in Brazil and in Venezuela.”
In September we find the continent surrounded by a dazzling red field, glowing orange, gilded by blue and, fittingly, without borders. “I think this painting really comes off because of the colours,” Bowling says. “There was a dark outline around the map shape from the screenprint, but the blue that I painted on makes a marvelous outline in a surprising way. All the maps I’ve worked with have an outline, but in this one it stands out deliberately; it’s neater. I remember trying to flatten out the paint as the printing process indicated, to make it three dimensional in paint rather than in fact.
“I didn’t know I had it in me to make such a blue,” Bowling adds, “a blue that resembles the kind of mechanical device used for printing, but that’s the spontaneity of it all. With that outline, the map comes off as a sort of painted image, like it’s jumping! There’s something very three dimensional about this work, even though it is flat as a pancake; the feeling one gets from it is of something real in that space.”
‣ The Riyadh Comedy Festival — an art-washing event for the Saudi government — features a mixed-bag lineup of comedians who are shamelessly pandering to an authoritarian regime for what must be a ton of money. Defector‘s Samer Kalef has the story:
The names involved are scattered across a range from “not surprising at all” to “wait, really?” There’s a contingent of people you knew weren’t going to say no: Jeff Ross, Kevin Hart, Chris Tucker, Russell Peters, Sebastian Maniscalco. They might as well rename this shit the Back Taxes Tour. The co-headliner combo of Louis C.K. and Jimmy Carr on Oct. 5 is to be expected. Then you get to names like Bill Burr, Pete Davidson, Aziz Ansari, Mo Amer … man, they must be getting a lot of money.
And what might that number be? Tim Dillon, a comedian who was scheduled to perform in Riyadh but was nixed for making a joke about slavery in Saudi Arabia on his podcast, claimed he stood to make $375,000 off doing one show there. Earlier this month, when he was defending his decision, he said that comedians in a higher “bracket” were being paid around $1.6 million each, and lower-tier talent was getting $150,000. “They’re paying me enough money to look the other way,” Dillon said. “Do you understand?”
There’s plenty of rationalization to go around. For at least the past month, some of these comedians have discussed why they did or didn’t take the money. Seth Simons’ newsletter Humorism transcribed some of these excuses found on—where else?—their various podcasts.
‣ In the United States, Tuesday marked the fifth National Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools. Reporter Jourdan Bennett-Begaye (Diné) spoke with survivors and their families about the generational trauma spurred by the violent institutions and taking collective steps toward healing for ICT:
Since 2021, the organization has informally observed Sept. 30 as the National Day of Remembrance for those who attended U.S. federal Indian boarding schools, survivors, their communities, and their families. This year the organization recognized it a bit early to coincide with the National Congress of American Indians’ Tribal Unity Impact Days in Washington, D.C.
Klein, the first vice president on the organization’s board of directors, uses her experience and voice to encourage other survivors to speak up.
The organization has been traveling around the country to permanently document the experience of boarding school survivors, the Oral History Project, as part of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative that was started by former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo.
Klein, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, recently traveled to the northwest for the project and witnessed five generations in one family speaking up, including the 90-something-year-old great-great-grandma.
“I think it’s the first time some of them really spoke with feeling, of their feelings with each other and helped understand some of what some people might call dysfunction,” she said. “But I think we’re used to functioning that way. … You know, it’s not necessarily dysfunction.”
‣ Jane Goodall, the singular conservationist whose studies of chimpanzees redefined how we interact with the natural world, passed away yesterday at age 91. Revisit this 2021 interview with her by Zoë Lescaze and James Liu for the Tortoise, the Turtle Conservancy’s journal, about the connections between justice for humans and justice for nature:
JG: The only way that we can protect these important forests and other environments is by working with the local people, and that’s something that we at Jane Goodall Institute began back in 1994. It’s a very holistic program, because if people are living in dire poverty, as so many in Africa are, you know, you’re going to destroy the environment, because you need to have more land to grow food, because your population’s growing, or you need to make charcoal to get some money.
ZL: What has surprised you most over the course of your career?
JG: I think what’s surprised me most is the fact that I’m making a difference. And I only say that because I get told it every day. “I came to your lecture and I promise now to do my bit,” from children. “You taught me that because you did it, I can do it too.” And a lot of it goes back to my amazing mother, who supported my crazy dream of going to Africa when I was 10, when everybody else told me it was impossible, because I was just a girl, because I didn’t have money. So the fact that I have become this kind of weird icon, which was nothing to do with me—it just happened—I think that’s the biggest surprise that I’ve had. I see myself as just me.
‣ Smithsonian Magazine‘s Margherita Bassi reports on a stunning hybrid Blue-Green Jay bird species, likely a consequence of climate change, that was recently spotted in Texas:
In the mid-1900s, the Central American green jays populated an area that just barely reached into south Texas, and the blue jays from the eastern United States went only as far west as Houston, meaning the two species almost never existed in the same space. In the decades since, however, the tropical green jays have spread farther north, and temperate blue jays have spread farther west, leading them to interact around San Antonio.
“Shifts in species’ ranges are creating novel ecosystems and previously unobserved species interactions,” the researchers write in a study describing the hybrid bird, published earlier this month in the journal Ecology and Evolution. “Documenting and understanding these novel interactions between species is an emergent priority of global ecological importance.” This newly documented hybridization “joins a growing list” of ever more surprising results of climate change-driven range expansions, the team adds.
‣ Several chefs weigh in on the pasta shapes they love and hate in a report by Vox‘s Alex Abad-Santos — whose pasta opinions I endorse, save for his hostility toward farfalle:
Chefs will tell you that ridges, ruffles, and pockets are fantastic for chunky sauces, hence rigatoni’s premier status. When it comes to noodles, most shine in thinner, glossier, olive-oil based or seafood (think: vongole) sauces. But the greats can punch above their weight. Bucatini’s hollow middle basically turns it into a straw, great for any and everything, but especially for something like a silky carbonara, with all of its bits of guanciale leveling it up to the status of king among kings.
For Scott Ketchum, the CEO and co-founder of the Sfologini pasta company, it’s his job to think about pasta all day.
Back in 2021, Ketchum, Sfoglini, and Sporkful podcast host Dan Pashman made news for creating cascatelli, a new pasta shape that emphasizes sauce capture and mouth feel. The secret behind cascatelli and all very good pastas, Ketchum says, is an edged ruffle and some kind of pocket that can hold a sauce’s other ingredients.
“We made two ridges that are perpendicular from the surface — this was the hardest thing to do with that shape because it’s tough engineering-wise for a pasta,” Ketchum told Vox. “But that created this trough down the center, which is kind of like a pocket shape, but that holds all the sauce in between.”
‣ The Global Sumud Flotilla, a group of boats led by activists to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, was intercepted by the Israeli military today. Earlier this week, a little girl named Shahed drew her view of the fleet from the shore:
‣ Museum memberships just aren’t what they used to be, huh?:
‣ Beware of artspeak, a risky side effect of taking your boyfriend to a museum:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
