Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
“Over the past 17 years, the number of women directing the top 250 grossing films declined by 2%, according to a new study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University,” Variety reports.
Watch a one-hour documentary roundtable with Laura Poitras (Citizenfour), Orlando von Einsiedel (Virunga), Steve James (Life Itself), Nick Broomfield (Tales of the Grim Sleeper), and more:
For Criterion, Peter Matthews discusses the recently released The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant:
Elder camp devotees may remember how, in the title sequence of George Cukor’s 1939 The Women, the all-female players are cruelly compared to dumb animals. Norma Shearer is a placid doe, Rosalind Russell a meowing tabby, and Joan Crawford a snarling leopard. That ardent Hollywood cinephile Rainer Werner Fassbinder would offer his own rendition of the bitchy comedy as Frauen in New York, made for West German TV in 1977. But already five years earlier, he had contemplated savage fauna in a monosex universe. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) begins with two house cats on a staircase, their small motions of eating and grooming intermittently visible under the credits. The shot tacitly references Cukor’s opening gambit, anticipating a story where elegant surfaces hide tooth-and-claw instincts. Then, marking the passage from nature to culture, the camera deserts the felines and enters Petra’s bedroom. Hereafter, spontaneous life yields to an extravagantly contrived mise-en-scène. As if transfixed by an inner emotional theater, the characters will forever strike hieroglyphic poses of love, enthrallment, anger, and pain.
Watch a previously unreleased video for Beastie Boys and Nas‘ Too Many Rappers, directed by Roman Coppola: