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Books

Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder

On the History of Film Style pdf online

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

Film Art: An Introduction

Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages pdf online

Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies pdf online

Planet Hong Kong, second edition pdf online

The Way Hollywood Tells It pdf online

Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Figures Traced In Light

Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907–1934 pdf online

Video

Hou Hsiao-hsien: A new video lecture!

CinemaScope: The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses

How Motion Pictures Became the Movies

Constructive editing in Pickpocket: A video essay

Essays

Rex Stout: Logomachizing

Lessons with Bazin: Six Paths to a Poetics

A Celestial Cinémathèque? or, Film Archives and Me: A Semi-Personal History

Shklovsky and His “Monument to a Scientific Error”

Murder Culture: Adventures in 1940s Suspense

The Viewer’s Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film

Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory?

Mad Detective: Doubling Down

The Classical Hollywood Cinema Twenty-Five Years Along

Nordisk and the Tableau Aesthetic

William Cameron Menzies: One Forceful, Impressive Idea

Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong

Paolo Gioli’s Vertical Cinema

(Re)Discovering Charles Dekeukeleire

Doing Film History

The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema

Anatomy of the Action Picture

Hearing Voices

Preface, Croatian edition, On the History of Film Style

Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything

Film and the Historical Return

Studying Cinema

Articles

Book Reports

Observations on film art

Home for the holidays

Tuesday | December 20, 2011   open printable version open printable version

Pina. Photo Laurent Philippe.

DB here:

Kristin and I sometimes write about a film at a festival long before it reaches commercial distribution. As the year ends, we thought some readers might be interested in catching up with what we wrote about items now making the rounds of art theatres and film festivals. These are notes, not really analyses, but we try to introduce some ideas along with our judgments. All of these are films we admire considerably.

On Pina. Academy Award nominee for best documentary.

On The Skin I Live In.

On Once Upon a Time in AnatoliaTurkey’s Foreign-Language Academy Award submission.

On Mysteries of Lisbon. Coming to DVD and Blu-ray in January. DB’s tribute to Raúl Ruiz is here.

On A Separation. Iran’s Foreign-Language Academy Award submission. DB also wrote on About Elly, an earlier film by Asgar Farhadi that deserves distribution, if only on DVD.

On This Is Not a Film. We wrote about Panahi’s perilous situation exactly a year ago here.

On The Turin Horse (above). Hungary’s Foreign-Language Academy Award submission. For more on Tarr, check the links on the right.

Coming up next week: Our annual year-end review of the ten best films of ninety years ago.

After the New Year starts, we’ll continue the series of entries about how digital cinema is changing film culture, with pieces on arthouse and repertory exhibition, film festivals, and home consumption of films. Plus observations on actors’ hands, film directing as problem-solving, some peculiarities of film reviewers, and other matters of weighty and not-so-weighty consequence.

In the meantime, we wish our readers the best for the holidays!

 

Meet Me in St. Louis.

 

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