2001-2010

Review
“Geoff King’s important book stands with the best scholarship I have seen on this vital, constantly evolving subject.” — —David Sterritt, author of The Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Review

“In its dialectical relationship with the commercial mainstream, the independent film is distinguished by its more complex or decentered narrative structure. This hardheaded study, full of stats and stories, starts with the industrial context in which the US’s independent cinema has operated, especially since the mid, 1980s — an institutionalization that, according to King, makes it ‘easy to over — romanticize an earlier and supposedly purer notion of independence.’ The study springs to life in its close analyses of individual films and directors. It is even more valuable for its treatment of minor works than for its insights into the work of John Cassavetes and David Lynch, especially on the distinguishing formal devices. One chapter applies genre theory to this diversity.Read More »

From the preface:

How do films work? How do they tell a story? How do they move us and make us think? This book argues that shot-by-shot analysis is the best way for film students to learn about and appreciate the filmmaker’s art. Having taught film studies for many years, Marilyn Fabe has learned that viewers trained in close analysis of single film sequences are better able to see and appreciate the rich visual and aural complexity of the film medium. Close analysis unlocks the secrets of how film images, combined with sound, can have such a profound effect on our minds and emotions.Read More »

A great Greek short with a shocking climax.
Screened in competition at the Venice film Festival. Read More »

Quote:
A thrilling, comprehensive guide to New York’s buzzing downtown underground post-punk scene. Director Scott Crary kicks things off with the birth of No Wave in the late 1970’s, providing an angular rush with a priceless collection of live performances from Suicide, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, the Theoretical Girls and DNA. From this initial explosion of artistic energy, the film moves through the 1980’s, passing the torch to Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo of Sonic Youth and Michael Gira of Swans, before crashlanding in the noisy Now! of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice, Liars, A.R.E. Weapons and the Gypsy stylings of Gogol Bordello. Interviews connect the threads between the past and the present, an ever-fertile scene is defined, celebrated and trashed with equal amounts of enthusiasm, and the creators of some of the most challenging rock music of all-time get to explain what they do, why they do it and where it’s all heading. – palmpictures.comRead More »

Summary: What happens when the camera rolls in the bathrooms of three couples, the most private place imaginable? In Mustafa Altıoklar’s movie, three couple’s most intimate ups and downs of their relationships are laid bare.Read More »

The fruit of years of painstaking study, Pat Brereton’s Hollywood Utopia is a landmark in the emerging field of ecological media criticism. The more urban human societies become, the more our media reflect upon the landscapes, the animals and the fragile unities of our planet. Of no media formation is this more true than of Hollywood, as Brereton argues in this meticulously researched and carefully organised work. Far from trashing the planet, Hollywood films have, Brereton claims, a tradition stretching back to the 1950s of care and concern for humanity estranged from its roots, and a world at risk of destruction. Through innovative analyses of Jurassic Park, Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, Star Trek, Terminator 2 and Blade Runner among countless older and newer films, Brereton traces a utopianism often overlooked in traditional film criticism. Not only films with explicitly Green agendas like Emerald Forest and Medicine Man, but in films noted for far different qualities exhibit the saving grace of nature.Read More »

Description: Couldn’t find any usable information about this lesbo-arcadian short by Michel Houellebecq around on the web, except that, following its release, endless accusation of misoginy ensued. Go figure.Read More »

Table of Contents
Preface 9
Introduction
European Cinema: Conditions of Impossibility? [2005]

National Cinema: Re-Definitions and New Directions
European Culture, National Cinema, the Auteur and Hollywood [1994]
ImpersoNations: National Cinema, Historical Imaginaries [2005]
Film Festival Networks: the New Topographies of Cinema in Europe [2005]
Double Occupancy and Small Adjustments: Space, Place and Policy in the New European Cinema since the 1990s [2005]

Auteurs and Art Cinemas: Modernism and Self- Reference, Installation Art and Autobiography
Ingmar Bergman – Person and Persona: The Mountain of Modern Cinema on the Road to Morocco [1994]
Late Losey: Time Lost and Time Found [1994]
Around Painting and the “End of Cinema”: A Propos Jacques Rivette’s
La Belle Noiseuse [1992]
Spellbound by Peter Greenaway: In the Dark … and Into the Light [1996]
The Body as Perceptual Surface: The Films of Johan van der Keuken [2004]
Television and the Author’s Cinema: ZDF’s Das Kleine Fernsehspiel [1992]
Touching Base: Some German Women Directors in the 1980s [1987] Read More »

Quote:
A young man and woman have a sensual, one-night stand in a motel room where they confide in each other about their troubled lives.Read More »