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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

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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

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Proof! and a minor mystery

Sunday | July 27, 2014   open printable version open printable version

DB here, sort of:

Even doggedly determined readers of this blog may not have seen the codicil to my infuriatingly long entry on The Grand Budapest Hotel. I revisit those remarks now, only because coming back from my trip to Yurrrp, I have evidence of a version that many cinephiles may not see. Here’s what I appended to the old post:

Flying here the other evening, I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel on the plane, just to see what adjustments might have been made. (“This film has been modified to fit this screen and edited for content.”) Surprisingly, the aspect ratios were all preserved. The cuss words were cut out, as was the fellatio shot (but not the guillotined fingers). The most startling change was that the painting of female sexual congress had become a big, blank white one in the Rauschenberg mold. Was it an alternative shot for the airline version, or was the naughty one digitally whitewashed?

Flying back, diligent film researcher that I am, I took a shot of the bowdlerized image. My questions remain. I could imagine it as an Anderson joke, but also as a default for a censorious post-production.

Sorry about the image quality. No way to take a frame enlargement.

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