And now, for our next trick… Issue 9 of Notebook magazine invites readers to journey through the intertwined histories of magic and cinema, uncovering screen wonders both spiritual and secular. Cover by @julien_langendorff. Discover how magical the movies can be. Subscribe at the link in bio.

William Andrews writes on the life and career of Masao Adachi, an iconic director—labeled as a provocateur, a radical, and a terrorist—whose filmography encompasses sexploitation, underground cinema, experimental documentary, biopics, and dark comedy.

"The past is never really past at Disney, where the breakthroughs of previous generations are kept forever young at heart with new innovations—which are often primarily economic in nature..." Mark Asch (@MarkAschParody) writes on Disney's autoremake cycle.

On the occasion of MUBI Editions' publication of “The Faust Bible,” @adriancurry shares the story behind the original poster for F.W. Murnau’s 1926 film →

"Katō’s experiments with framing, depth, obstruction, and widescreen space did not reject genre conventions. They transformed them from within..." Olivier Ronat writes on Japanese director Tai Katō, subject of a new retrospective at the @cinemathequefr.

"The siren is usually imagined from the perspective of those drawn towards her... yet the film turns our attention instead to the strangely pathetic position of the siren herself." Cynthia Dong encapsulates Céline Sciamma's debut feature in one shot.

"Realism is not real life, but a stylistic decision—a deceptively liberal one, at that—frequently used and abused to insist that a fictional world is actual rather than manufactured. The circumstances that lead to the Gheorghiu family being investigated and prosecuted in Fjord are so psychologically fraudulent, so clearly avoidable—if only a single one of these characters could act outside of the fate that [Cristian] Mungiu has prescribed for them, the entire conflict would collapse—that the film only functions as a sadistic exercise in engineering doublethink in an audience that it knows has already made up its mind..." Blake Williams (@Astrostic) on FJORD:

"When l discovered the images of D’est, it was like a love affair..." As a new retrospective begins @MoMAFilm, revisit editor Claire Atherton—a close collaborator with Chantal Akerman, Éric Baudelaire, and more—in conversation with Laura Davis.

“In the Dark (2000) is one of one, but it also laid a foundation—modest but solid—for a distinctly millennial subgenre predicated on the same contradictions between social collapse and elite control explored in Salo (1975) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). In these films, the more things fall apart below a certain level, the tighter the grip grows at the top. Call it cabal-core, where evil lurks behind closed doors, embedded into the language, structure and aesthetics of bureaucracy itself...” Soraya Sebghati (@SorayaSpaghetti) writes about the history of “cabal-core,” i.e., conspiracy-based horror films about elites pulling the strings of society while it collapses:

"A work of surprisingly experimental temperament for a filmmaker best known as the nouvelle vague’s staunch traditionalist, Élisabeth exposes just how ill-fitting that reputation has always been..." Oliver Evans writes on Rohmer's newly translated novel.

Jia Zhangke is set to direct a road movie, MAMMA DUNHUANG, starring Zhao Tao as a woman who makes a continental journey from Dunhuang in western China to the sea on the eastern coastline. Discover this week’s essential film finds in the latest Rushes.

"What ensued was a months-long collaboration to turn the drastically underfunded 2021 Kino Lorber release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from a disaster-in-waiting to the best home video release of the film since the 1990s... The result was a release that—despite a highly compressed turnaround time, virtually nonexistent budget, and compromised source materials—was nonetheless a largely accurate approximation of the 1967 international cut of the film in reasonably high fidelity. At last." Devan Scott (@SadHillDevan) writes on the amateur film preservationists on a mission to rescue classics from revisionist restorations:

"The most notable bumpers at the festival are supposed to present the audience back to itself as common-sense people who like movies but are normal about it..." Vadim Rizov (@vrizov) writes on pre-show ads at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Following BUCKING FASTARD's Venice premiere, Werner Herzog sat down with @LeonardoGoi to discuss his creative and writing process, the “voodoo of locations,” and his attempts to find new, unfading images in our screen-infested world.

"I wrote a story on Anita G., but when I made the film, I returned to the actual person and portrayed her. The film is not the same as the short story. I made the film in the exact prison where this Anita G., who is a real person, was imprisoned. My sister knew this young girl. So the film begins again from the bottom. It does not transform the literature into film, but tries to dig once more and to tell a story with pictures, music, etc., independent from the short story." As a new restoration premieres at #NYFF64#, revisit director Alexander Kluge on YESTERDAY GIRL:

"Call it cabal-core, where evil lurks behind closed doors, embedded into the language, structure and aesthetics of bureaucracy itself..." Soraya Sebghati (@sorayaspaghetti) writes on films that link societal collapse to elite control.

"The standard equation, the one Eisenstein had formalized, was something like: image plus image equals a meaning. The collision of two images producing a third image, the idea that lives in the gap. In his youth, Pelechian looked at this equation and felt, without being quite able to articulate it yet, that something was missing, or rather, that something was present in it that should not be. The addition sign. The joining. He did not want to join images. He wanted to separate them. To place them at a distance from each other and see what lived in that distance, in that interval, in the space between things that the eye and the mind could not help but try to cross. Not montage as collision, but montage as separation." Revisit Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal on the films of Artavazd Pelechian:

"When an informal network of amateurs questions the work of industry standard-bearers, it is rarely a matter of raw technical superiority but rather a fundamental difference in constraints..." @SadHillDevan writes on piracy-based film preservation.

"... with [Luc] Moullet perched on the eve and [John] Wilson in the midst of the current era of the city—­­increasingly privatized and stylized as a playground for the rich and powerful and a panopticon for the poor—there is a shared insistence that the urban space can still be used from the ground up, with imagination and against power." Revisit Ruairí McCann (@langsmonkey) on "How To with John Wilson" and the fiercely independent films of Luc Moullet: