In the summer of 1997, I attended a film editing master class in Rockport, Maine. The Rockport media workshops are prestigious, attracting students from all over the world. In my class there were people from the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, and at the first meeting, we were each asked to introduce ourselves to the group.
Although radio broadcasting arrived more than two decades after the birth of cinema – and movies were the dominant form of entertainment in North America for the first half of the century – radio was in some ways a far more important and influential medium. Looking back from the perspective of our wired (and wireless) […]
Kim Longinotto and Marc Isaacs are two English documentarians whose subjects differ widely, but who share a fascination for the small details of people’s lives.
I’ve recently been catching up on some documentaries by favourite filmmakers which have been waiting on the shelf for a while, beginning with a trilogy about a horrific crime and an apparent miscarriage of justice. With the release of part three of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost Trilogy, I decided to refresh my […]
Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing comes as close as may be possible to making genocidal violence comprehensible.
It’s interesting that Criterion has released Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) so soon after Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1962). The two films, separated by an ocean, by different cultures and by almost a decade, represent two distinct approaches to the same essential problem: is it possible for film to capture […]
The late ’50s saw the biggest technology-based shift in movies since the coming of sound (the next big shift would be the arrival of digital technology several decades later). New highly portable equipment not only altered the way movies were made, it also altered creative choices and even content. New lightweight cameras and sync sound […]
I usually only have time to write once a week for this blog, and my occasional obligations to Blogcritics (i.e. the free review copies I get through them) have pushed me into the habit of doing reviews more often than more general posts about broader topics (which was what I actually anticipated when I started […]
After three years of steady releases, for some reason the BFI suspended their Flipside series last May. Now, after an eleven month break, they’ve released two new titles, as unexpected as anything which has come before. In John Krish, they’ve returned to a filmmaker familiar from a number of previous BFI releases, while in B.S. […]
Growing up in England during the late 1950s and early ’60s, my experience of British film was a mix of now-forgotten B-movies, coarse comedies (I loved the Carry On films, which seem all but unwatchable now), and occasional big productions (Zulu remains a vivid childhood memory). Hammer horror was tantalizingly out of reach, restricted to […]