Blog, Blog, Blog
My friend, terrific filmmaker, and overall good dude is a raising money to complete his film on the rich history of baseball in Panama.
This project is serious. He received a Fulbright grant to start it. Let’s help him finish.
Graduate students from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania launched a new podcast this week. I heard the first episode. It told a well-researched story in the vein of This American Life, compelling with a human connection.
I am not going to lie and say I’m not jealous that we can’t do something like this at NYU.
Keep up the good work.
Jim and Neven from the Salt and Fat podcast devote an episode to discussing the role of food in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
This was one of the better analyses of Pulp Fiction I’ve ever heard (or read). Not only do they catalog the various restaurants in the film, they also analyze the meaning of the coffee shop and of Jack Rabbit Slim’s in the world of film (1990s Los Angeles in the shadow of the 1970s). They also do a great job of connecting the characters to their choices of food.
Brooklyn’s Light Industry is paying tribute to Chris Marker, who passed away last month. As I wrote earlier on this site, you can see two of his best known films on Hulu Plus, but this retrospective is much richer. It begins at 10:00 AM on August 26, continuing throughout the day, and ending with a midnight screening of The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004).
Next month, Yale University is hosting a film conference devoted to European filmmaking after the financial market crash of the late 1920s.and ensuing global economic depression of the 1930s.
The conference does not appear to have a website so I am reproducing the conference announcement, which I received via email, for anyone who might be interested.
September 14-15, 2012
Auditorium, Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, CT
All featured films screened on restored or archival 35mm prints (unless noted) with English subtitles.
In the history of Europe, 1930 was particularly marked by the impact of the Depression in the aftermath of the American stock market crash of 1929. This impact could be seen, for example, when Miguel Primo de Rivera, prime minister of Spain and head of a military dictatorship, was obliged to resign due to a financial crisis and by 1931 the king was forced to flee as republican and socialist parties won a big majority in local elections. In 1930 Germany also saw increased polarization in its political world as the communists, socialists and Nazis emerged as rivals in a struggle for power that culminated in the Nazi take-over of 1933. The Soviet Union, which was less directly affected by the Depression, saw a brutal collectivization campaign in this year and ominous show trials. The period around 1930 was also fateful for European film as sound film began to replace silent film at an accelerating pace. The conference will address the implications of this ongoing shift both in terms of its impact on filmmaking, production and distribution, and in terms of how the introduction of the talkies exacerbated the language barrier between and within European countries and became a severe problem in helping different cultures relate through film
3:00 PM Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (Kurt Siodmak, Germany, 74 mins. Blu-ray)
Preceded by Regen (Rain) (Mannus Franken and Joris Ivens, the Netherlands, 14 mins. DVD)
5:00 PM Komsomol (Patron of Electrification) (Michael Chanan Esfir Shub, USSR, 55 mins. DVD)
6:00 PM PANEL
8:15 PM Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, United Kingdom, 88 mins. 35 mm)
9:00 AM Die Drei von der Tankstelle (Three from the Gas Station)(Wilhelm Theile, Germany, 99 mins. 35 mm)
11:00 AM PANEL
1:00 PM Prix de Beauté (The Price of Beauty)
2:45 PM L’Age d’Or (The Golden Age) (Luis Buñuel, France, 60 mins. 35 mm)
4:15 PM David Golder (Julien Duvivier, France, 88 mins. 35 mm)
6:00 PM PANEL
8:30 PM Ze soboty na nĕdeli (From Saturday to Sunday) (Gustav Machatỳ, Czechoslovakia, 69 min. 35 mm)
Preceded by Bezúčelná procházka (Aimless Walk) (Alexander Hammid, Czechoslovakia, 9 mins. 35 mm)
Jonathan Sterne makes nine simple, yet thoughtful requests in order to make the academic search process more humane for potential job applications, especially for graduate students looking for junior-level employment.
Over the last couple of weeks, George Stoney (born 1916) and Chris Marker (born 1921), two documentary filmmakers with careers dating back to the 1950s but with very different filmmaking styles, passed away.
Stoney was someone who made documentary films than just about anyone else who has lived, but his teaching at NYU liberated his most recent work. Because he earned income from teaching, he could afford to make documentary films about topics of his choosing, not simply because they paid the bills. He could document a conversation with the philosopher and activist Paulo Friere, Finding Friere, or he could be an active agent in community television. His life is documented in George Stoney: A Life on Film and the generically named George Stoney Documentary, two shorts both available on YouTube.
Marker was more of a film essayist than a visual documentarian: he used the documentary form to explore deeper, more philosophical themes that were not always inherently visible. Because of the stylistic complexity and multimodal narration of his films, Marker has been a darling of film scholars, and he shows up on many film studies syllabi. I showed Sans Soleil in a spring 2011 version of my History of Cinema III course at Queens College.
If you haven’t seen any of Marker’s films, there are high quality streaming versions on Hulu Plus of his two most popular films, courtesy of the Criterion Collection: the science fiction short La Jetée from 1962, and the fictional memoir and essay film Sans Soleil from 1983.
These two luminaries of the documentary from will be celebrated at December’s Visible Evidence XIX Conference in Canberra, Australia.
Starting today, my Sony Blu-ray player, which was what we used to stream Hulu Plus on my HDTV, will join my DVD player and VHS recorder as electronic bricks because Hulu Plus arrives on Apple TV.
Since 2009, I have watched a total of three Blu-ray disks at home, and although they looked beautiful, there was never an easy supply of Blu-ray disks. At the time, there were not many Blu-ray titles available on Netflix, which also charged a $3 monthly surcharge for Blu-ray disks, and there were no remaining video stores in my neighborhood. Even today, the Blockbuster Express kiosks only carry a very small selection of Blu-ray titles.
Eventually, the Blu-ray deck became a streaming player for Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Amazon. Most of my Netflix viewing is with the Apple TV because of the better interface and much lower latency. The Blu-ray player will not start playing video for almost fifteen seconds, while the Apple TV (and Roku for that matter) are much faster.
Now, with Hulu available on the Apple TV, I can’t see myself using the Blu-ray player much after this. I mean, after all, why would I buy/rent video from Amazon if I can’t watch with my iPad?
If you wouldn’t mind, could you subscribe to Hulu Plus using my affiliate link? Thanks.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
The Arclight Cinema in Hollywood is going to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Cinerama widescreen process by screening a bunch of films in the three-strip process. While this process could envelop the audience, it was also very expensive to produce and project. The process would be surpassed by anamorphic processes, such as Cinemascope or Vista Vision, that used only one camera and the same 35mm film stock and projection systems as before.
My cousin is getting married that weekend in Los Angeles so if I can go, I might head to Hollywood for a screening or two. In fact, I am tempted to sneak out of the reception to go to the 11:00 PM screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey on Friday the 28th.
A brief tour of Flickr today revealed that the Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation took a tour of the recently renovated Palace Theater in Downtown Los Angeles.
The Palace opened up just over 101 years ago as a part of the Orpheum vaudeville chain. In fact, that was its name until they opened a newer and larger theater at 842 S. Broadway, in 1926, where a newly remodeled Orpheum stands today. At the current Palace Theater, you can still find signs of the Orpheum affiliation. For example, in the painted sign indicating its part of the Opheum family in this photo from Flickr user “jericl”.
You can also see it in my photo from June 2011.
Sarah and I visited the Palace last June, for the theater’s centennial. To commemorate the occasion, there was a screening of Sunset Boulevard that was part of the Los Angeles Conservancy’s “Last Remaining Seats” series.
I’m thrilled to see that organizations dedicated to historic preservation, such as the Historic Theater Foundation and the Conservancy, have been breathing new life into this particular theater. There are not many theaters—that I know of—in the downtown Los Angeles area of this age. Most have been torn down by now or converted beyond recognition.
