scanners (Free subscription) | 08/25/2008
(Continuing the discussion, "Yes, but is it art'): I labeled the above short film ("close up") a critical essay / dream sequence, which is what I intended when I made it. But pretend you saw it at a film...
GreenCine Daily (Free subscription) | 08/24/2008
"Two films literally changed my life. The first one made me decide to become a cinematographer and the desire to see the second one made me travel to New York, which became my home and where I later made...
Invisible Cinema (Free subscription) | 07/27/2008
Our eyes see very little and very badly** – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope…now they have perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to explore...
DVD Times (Free subscription) | 06/25/2008
DVD Video Review: The BFI's third release of Man With a Movie Camera - Anthony Nield sees what's different this time around.
DVD Times (Free subscription) | 06/22/2008
News: BFI have announced the UK DVD release of three titles on 23rd June 2008. Released in addition to the Bill Douglas Trilogy are Syndromes and a Century - Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul's surreal fifth feature is a Buddhist meditation on the m...
ReverseBlog (Free subscription) | 05/13/2008
A major contradiction of Jean-Luc Godard's 60s films is that for all their difficulty, abrasiveness, unconventionality, and “distance,” they are largely pleasurable works. We routinely speak of Godard's subversive tendency, but until he went full on Maoist and created...
Limitless Cinema (Free subscription) | 04/23/2008
THINGS EXPERIENCED IN JANUARY 2008 A.FILMS 1.CORN IN PARLIAMENT: LE GENIE HELVETIQUE (2003, Jean-Stephane Bron, Switzerland, A+) 2.HEART (1955, Kon Ichikawa, A+) 3.SATANTANGO (1993, Bela Tarr, A+) 4.TURTLES ARE SURPRISINGLY FAST SWIMMERS (2005, Miki Satoshi, Japan, A+) 5.REGULAR LOVERS (2004, Philippe Garrel, A+) 6.MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929, Dziga Vertov, A+) 7.THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS (1976,...
Richard's blog (Free subscription) | 04/16/2008
Look up Dziga Vertov and his ideas, then look at this video. Thinking of the documentary makers and their discussion about catching life unawares, getting real life to happen without the person knowing. It’s the creative treatment of actuality. That’s more Griersonian (if I remember right). Everyone has a camera on them and certain of us stream it from where we are. Now it’s time for the...
Tativille (Free subscription) | 04/16/2008
In spite of his own insistence that director Boris Barnet might be “heretically counterproposed” as the “greatest of all Russian filmmakers,” [1] and the consent of no less an authority than French critic and filmmaker Jacques Rivette who once proclaimed that “Eisenstein apart… Barnet must be considered the best Soviet filmmaker,” [2] British author and film critic Gilbert Adair concedes that Barnet...
Limitless Cinema (Free subscription) | 04/09/2008
My sixteenth poll is inspired by coincidences. Recently I have watched a few films concerning leftists, communists, or life under communism—HAVANA: THE NEW ART OF MAKING RUINS, RED PSALM, NOW LET US PRAISE AMERICAN LEFTISTS, and PERSEPOLIS (2007, Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud, A+), which has some very interesting supporting characters who are communists. I have no knowledge in politics, and I...
Donal Foreman (Free subscription) | 04/06/2008
So my thesis is finished (and online—you can read it here.) If I have one minor misgiving about the finished piece, it’s that I had to cut the following section from its very end. It seemed a little indulgent and redundant given the focus of the thesis—but still, it sums up why this project meant a [...]
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 02/10/2008
Photography: In trying to praise revolutionary communism, Alexander Rodchenko captures the contradictions of the Soviet system
"E pur si muove!" (Free subscription) | 02/03/2008
When a loved one dies, you get all sorts of weird stuff. I just became the owner of my father's entire collection of bow ties. But what for? I wear ties all the time, that's true, but only cravats. I also got a couple of bags of photographs. There is a theory that seeing a photograph of a thing is an indirect way of seeing that thing. Just as I can see you by seeing an image of you in a mirror, so...
Daddy Dialectic (Free subscription) | 01/28/2008
The Barista: Had she been born in Russia in 1906, she would have become the muse of Constructivists and Bolshevik poster-artists. Slim and angular and dark, she never loses her knowing smile; you imagine her in vivid red and black on the walls of St. Petersburg and Moscow, beckoning the masses toward revolution. After the revolution, she would have been arrested, tried, and sent to Siberia, where she...
The Irish Times (Free subscription) | 01/11/2008
Apple iTunes, Movielink and are the largest film download services, but none of them is available yet in Ireland. If you'd rather watch TV programmes than feature films, most networks now host their own programmes online.
