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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

Off to Yurrp; but first….

Wednesday | June 23, 2010   open printable version open printable version

Photo by Marc Vernet.

DB here:

Over the last few weeks we’ve added a fair amount of material to this site. As Kristin and I pack for our annual trip to Cinema Ritrovato (Ford! Godard! Donen! Capellani! 1910!), in what we Americans know as Yurrp, I thought I’d mention them. All can be found in the left column, but I’ll link to them too.

First, more on the Danish cinema of Dreyer’s earliest days. As background to my recent essay on Dreyer’s first film, I’ve revised and updated an essay on style in Nordisk films of the 1910s. Even if you don’t want to read it, I think you’ll find it pretty to look at, and most of the (many) illustrations come from rare 35mm prints. Thanks to Dan Nissen and Lisbeth Richter Larsen, who edited the first version and gave me permission to publish this new one here. Thanks as well to archivists extraordinaire Thomas Christensen and Mikael Brae for their help during my visits to Copenhagen.

Second, I’ve added pdf extracts from two of my books. There’s the introduction to The Way Hollywood Tells It, already kindly flagged by Catherine Grant of Film Studies for Free. I’ve also added two bits from Poetics of Cinema. There’s the somewhat polemical introduction, and there’s the piece I wrote on eye behavior in film performance. Yes, I’m already known as Professor Blinky. But read before you condemn. Maybe you’ll even be enticed to read the rest of the books. I can dream, can’t I?

Most quietly, we’ve added a facile Print command so you can make hard copies of any of our entries, including our most ancient ones.

One of our many summer tasks is to go back through our early entries and clean them up, fixing photos, restoring what broken links we can, etc. Mark Minett has been diligently combing our blogs and we’ll try to shape them up….after we get done watching movies at Bologna, and then Brussels. From there I hope to file a report on my visit to the Musée Hergé, which is holding a Joost Swarte exhibition. (Swarte is one of my favorite cartoon artists.) Of course Brussels also boasts the remarkable annual festival Cinédécouvertes, which is showing many new titles, including Godard’s Film Socialisme. I am so there.

Thanks as usual to our web tsarina Meg Hamel for her efforts in putting up all this stuff, not to mention putting up with me. Next week, some observations from Bologna.

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