Shooting Down Pictures

To think that it’s been over a year since the YouTube shakedown of 2009, when I temporarily lost my account during a particularly zealous effort to manage the content on YouTube containing copyrighted material, such as my video essays.  Well here we are a year later, and if anything there is even more copyrighted stuff to be found on the site – and we’re not just talking videos like mine that re-appropriate media, but entire feature films.

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Due to unforeseen circumstances the screening of Love Streams has been postponed to a later date. Will announce once it is scheduled.

Fantasmagorie (1908) by Émile Cohl

100 Important Directors of Animated Short Films:  Background

This list of 100 important directors of animated short films was assembled in late 2008 to serve as a complement to “Brief Encounters,” a proposed list of 250 great short films (both animated and live-action) which was to be developed by the folks at the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? website.  Unfortunately, that 250-film list is in limbo, leaving our list without a home.

The “100 Important Directors of Animated Short Films” list is not intended to be comprehensive.  These are simply 100 directors whom we feel are important and deserving of increased recognition by film lovers.  For each director, we selected three “highly recommended” movies.  In addition, we included a category of “TSPDT 250 Greatest Shorts” to highlight any of these directors’ films which were tentatively slated to place on the abandoned Brief Encounters list.

This project was facilitated by Lee Price (lee-109) on the IMDb Classic Film message board.  Project team:  Lee Price, Robert Reynolds (Illtdesq), Jorge Didaco (jdidaco), Bill Kamberger (bkamberger), and Rob Tomshany (RobT-2), with additional input from animation fans on the IMDb Classic Film message board. Continue Reading »

While video essays have been the majority of my creative output for the past couple of years, I still keep a hand in other types of video production, especially when it’s for a good cause. I just received word that a video I produced for the Sikh Coalition has been accepted to the Spinning Wheel Film Festival in Toronto, September 25-27. The video, “From the Classroom to the Capitol” was produced for the Sikh Coalition’s first annual awards gala earlier in August.  It was posted on the Coalition’s YouTube page this week, and apparently the Spinning Wheel Festival caught it and liked it enough to add to their program.

I’ve been involved with the Sikh Coalition and the Sikh community for several years now, most notably through the production of a short documentary “Dastaar: Defending Sikh Identity.” I’ve done a lot of work with the Coalition in building up their capacity to make videos on their own, thanks to a grant from Manhattan Neighborhood Network. The Sikh community remains one of the most misunderstood people in the U.S. and the victim of ongoing bias and hate attacks, often violent ones. The Sikh Coalition has done much since 9/11 to combat prejudice, defend people’s civil rights and educate the nation at large about the Sikh identity. I am extremely proud to be involved in these efforts.

Here’s the new video “From the Classroom to the Capitol”:

It’s been exactly two years since Ingmar Bergman passed away at the age of 89, leaving us with dozens of films, many of which are considered among the greatest ever made. On the anniversary of his death, it’s my privilege to present a compilation of the most valuable resources on Bergman available online, as well as ten of the most illuminating quotes about him, from filmmakers, scholars, and Bergman himself.

This array of information was compiled by a longtime friend on the IMDb Classic Film Boards who goes by the handle Antonius Block. Back when I was a regular on those boards Antonius was widely regarded as the person to go to about all things Bergman. Back then I was a bit of a Bergman naysayer, and Antonius patiently weathered many a row with me over some of his favorite films. Over time I’ve come to appreciate Bergman’s special qualities, much of which is reflected in the links and text that Antonius has resourcefully assembled:

I can’t believe I haven’t posted about these wonderful podcasts and interviews available on the dGenerate Films website, especially given that I’ve worked so much on preparing, recording and editing them. But yes, I’ve started a new series of podcast interviews over there called CinemaTalk, an ongoing series of conversations with esteemed scholars of Chinese cinema studies. These conversations are presented on dGenerate in audio podcast and/or text format. They are intended to help the Chinese cinema studies community keep abreast of the latest work being done in the field, as well as to learn what recent Chinese films are catching the attention of others. This series reflects dGenerate’s mission to bring valuable resources and foster community around the field of Chinese film studies.

The first one we did was with the one and only Chris Berry, Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. I spoke with Chris about various topics from his current work and areas of focus, to comparisons between contemporary Chinese cinema and the Fifth Generation filmmakers whom he helped to champion in the 1980s and 1990s, to which recent Chinese films that have excited him the most.

You can go here to listen to or download the podcast audio, as well as read the full transcript.

Next we interviewed Lu Xinyu, Professor and Director of the Radio and TV Department, School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.  Professor Lu is widely regarded as the leading scholar on independent Chinese documentaries.  Her influential book Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement (Beijing, SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2003) was the first book to systematically theorize the New Documentary Movement in China from the beginning of 1990s.  She spent the past academic year as a visiting scholar in the department of cinema studies at New York University.

In this interview conducted by dGenerate’s Yuqian Yan, Lu Xinyu told us about her current work during her visit in New York and how she was attracted to independent Chinese documentary from an aesthetic and humanist background.  Starting from Aristotle’s poetic concept of “tragedy”, she led us to understand the New Documentary Movement as a unique art form that depicts the tragic life of ordinary people in the rapidly changing Chinese society.  The interview was conducted in Chinese.  Click here to listen to the audio and read a full English transcript.

I must also mention the outstanding series of blog articles the site has been getting from Shelly Kraicer, programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival and passionate expert on Chinese Cinema. He’s already posted three essays, each of them both informative, insightful and fun to read. They are titled, “An Independent Scene, Thriving Miles from Main Street,” “Does China’s Past Have a Future?” and “Between the Cracks of Capitalist China.” By all means check them out.

Back in the good old days my brother and I would go to the local cineplex on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and watch as many as five movies in a five hour stretch. Typically we’d see one film in its entirety, bracketed by random snatches of other films that we didn’t pay to watch but were easy enough to sneak into. It was our way of sampling as many movies as we could for our money; the cinematic equivalent of the all-you-can eat Asian buffets that my value-obsessed mother compulsively takes us to.

So when BAM unleashed the latest of what has become an annual tradition, the BamCinematek All Night series, I took it as an opportunity to relive a bit of my moviegoing past – and best of all, I didn’t have to break the law. As part of its sprawling CinemaFest still going on now, BAM opened up all four of its theaters from 11:15 to the early dawn, each playing as many as three features back-to-back. The films were programmed to a different theme for each screen: Diana Ross, Scientologist actors, marijuana-inflected narratives and 2000s arthouse cinema, respectively. Fueled by a 16 oz. Red Bull (pictured below) I spent five hours hopping from one theater to another, just to see what kind of impressions and comparisons would come up. Here’s how it went down (I only wish I had thought sooner to take photos of the screen to illustrate my points):

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to let you know that I’m on Twitter. You can follow me at alsolikelife.

Here’s my summary report for Spout. The reports elsewhere of the festival’s crappiness were somewhat exaggerated, and symptomatic of complacency on the part of several unintrepid critics and journalists. Really, why waste readers’ time by saying that the festival was a waste of your time? Like you expect us to feel that much pity about you being flown out, put up and paid to write about your awful experience? And what does that say about you that you, a professional film watcher, can’t be bothered to go out and find the good stuff? Personally, it really wasn’t that out of the way to discover some great films. Even with the not-so great films, there were interesting things to be said of them.

To that point, here are capsules on all 30 films I watched in Berlin, spread over three entries on The Auteurs Notebook, and ranked within each. Vive la cinema!

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/549
http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/540
http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/531