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Books

Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder

On the History of Film Style pdf online

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

Film Art: An Introduction

Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages pdf online

Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies pdf online

Planet Hong Kong, second edition pdf online

The Way Hollywood Tells It pdf online

Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Figures Traced In Light

Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907–1934 pdf online

Video

Hou Hsiao-hsien: A new video lecture!

CinemaScope: The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses

How Motion Pictures Became the Movies

Constructive editing in Pickpocket: A video essay

Essays

Rex Stout: Logomachizing

Lessons with Bazin: Six Paths to a Poetics

A Celestial Cinémathèque? or, Film Archives and Me: A Semi-Personal History

Shklovsky and His “Monument to a Scientific Error”

Murder Culture: Adventures in 1940s Suspense

The Viewer’s Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film

Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory?

Mad Detective: Doubling Down

The Classical Hollywood Cinema Twenty-Five Years Along

Nordisk and the Tableau Aesthetic

William Cameron Menzies: One Forceful, Impressive Idea

Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong

Paolo Gioli’s Vertical Cinema

(Re)Discovering Charles Dekeukeleire

Doing Film History

The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema

Anatomy of the Action Picture

Hearing Voices

Preface, Croatian edition, On the History of Film Style

Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything

Film and the Historical Return

Studying Cinema

Articles

Book Reports

Observations on film art

The long right wall explained

Saturday | July 24, 2010   open printable version open printable version

When the Clouds Roll By (Victor Fleming, 1919); So Close (Yuen Kwai, 2002).

DB here:

Kristin will be posting a new entry in the next couple of days, but in the meantime, here’s news of another enhancement of this site. It’s the very lengthy list of categories you see on the right.

The blog will be four years old this fall, and we’ve written nearly 360 entries. Some of those are brief and ephemeral, like this one, but many are big. Several entries range over many topics or various periods of film history. Likewise, our festival reports often sweep across a range of directors, genres, and national cinemas. So we thought it was time to expand the categories pertaining to our posts.

We also thought that a finer-grained set of categories would let you see the scope of topics we’ve considered over the years. Maybe you didn’t know that Harold Lloyd or American indies or New Zealand cinema were some of our recurring concerns. In addition, the long right wall makes it easier to dig up older posts when a new film is released. For example, readers interested in Inception (about which I hope to write soon) can have a look at two substantial entries on other films by Christopher Nolan.

The result is the extensive, we hope not daunting, list of categories. These categories apply only to sustained discussions. If we merely mention Ford or screenwriting in passing, that doesn’t qualify for inclusion. Even if a director’s film earned a couple of paragraphs in one entry, we didn’t create a category for that person. That would have made the list enormous and cumbersome. What we have are the names and topics that frequently crisscross the blog entries. But of course the Search function enables you to locate every mention of any person, idea, or film you’re interested in.

We hope that this new wrinkle makes our blog more intriguing and helpful for our readers, whom we thank for their continuing support.

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010).

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