Mubi Notebook #7

While cinema is a photographic art, many subjects and experiences fail to come across on film in the same way that we experience them in life, if they can be reproduced at all. Issue 7 is organized around this very theme of “the unfilmable,” which contributing editor Paolo Cherchi Usai explores in an introductory feature. UFOs, stuntwork, hypnosis, microscopic imaging, and speculative technologies of the future—all arise in these pages. A series of conceptual film scripts by Yoko Ono challenge the reader to make movies in their own imaginations; Guy Maddin shares stunning collages for a film of torrid psychosexual impossibility, and, in an era- and genre-spanning essay, Bilge Ebiri finds room to dream between film frames. Notions of “unfilmability” also prompt ethical questions: filmmaker Ing K recounts (and illustrates) her experiences facing censorship in Thailand. Elsewhere, an archivist working with Indigenous communities in Australia discusses the preservation of culturally sensitive anthropological films that still hold historical value. In original photography, artist-filmmaker Deborah Stratman shows us how an excess of light can transform an image (look no further than the magazine’s cover). Plus, in a bound insert, author Mark Leyner shares a novelistic treatment for a film that was never made, 8W, a singular and wildly funny prose fantasia. Kevin Jerome Everson contributes the next entry in our “Things a Filmmaker Should Know” series, and a scrapbook-esque feature on the preservation work undertaken by the Japanese Paper Film Project shows the radically different forms and formats that cinema can take.