New Books, and More New Books
posted May 22, 2012
New books related to film and other moving-image formats continue to appear at a dizzying rate. On our book pages you can read all about them, and in some cases read about authors’ experiences in searching archives for research material, on film or other media. And, descriptions of many more are coming soon.
Whither the Easter Bunny?
posted April 8, 2012
Whither all the abandoned Easter bunnies? Jack-rabbit roundup, 1934. Bunnies, bunnies, bunnies. It’s a bunny fest. Forget bunnies as pets, buy your loved ones the mp3, instead. Alice in Wonderland, with rabbit, 1903 http://youtu.be/RjzrsimNn08
Babylon Revisited
posted March 14, 2012
Kenneth Anger’s galvanizing Hollywood Babylon, revisited, along with gossip’s role in maintaining the movies’ media and public image. In London, on March 21, Little Joe Magazine looks back, at the Cinema Museum in London.
Have Film, Need to Preserve It?
posted March 10, 2012
You find a box of reels of film in your shed. Perhaps Grandad left it there, or Granma when his credits rolled. What do you do? First up, you can go to resources like this: It’s the Washington State Film Preservation Manual of Low-Cost & No-Cost Suggestions to Care for Your Film. No-Cost is good.
New conference, workshop listings
posted March 4, 2012
Several new events are listed on our “workplace” page.
Films University Students Don’t Know About
posted February 27, 2012
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Gina Barreca, a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, remarks that although an extraordinary proportion of American college students are aspiring screen writers, their film literacy is, well, limited. She lists 40 movies that few if any of her students would seem to have
The Last Insider of Silent Hollywood
posted January 16, 2012
Naked-starlet chases, stolen story ideas and scripts, sex as humdrum as cleaning your teeth. Frederica Sagor Maas is dead at 111, but not before telling all about silent-era Hollywood. The prolific screenwriter first trained to be a doctor, and then a journalist, and after quitting Hollywood in disgust said she would have preferred to be
The Art of the Trailer
posted January 16, 2012
The art of the trailer. NPR’s Brent Baughman reports on those ninety-nine seconds cut from four hours of unfinished movie with visible green screens and the director yelling cues from off-screen.
The Birds in “The Birds”
posted December 30, 2011
Why did the birds in The Birds act so crazy? Well, because that suited Hitchcock’s design. But he drew inspiration from an actual ecological phenomenon and mystery that now appears to have been solved. Was it the plankton whodunnit?