Word Pictures

At Moving Image Source:

The films of David Gatten brand the brain and the retina with equal force. They consist partly of cerebral puzzles and partly of lyrical reveries, and their central drama lies in the space between, where facts transform into poetry and transient experiences are assimilated into systems of knowledge...

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Animal Love

At Alt Screen:

POPULAR LEGEND SAYS that Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby was a critical and commercial disaster on its first release—a reception that makes for a neatly ironic contrast to the film’s subsequent status as Golden Age classic...

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Internet Connoisseurship

At Art21's blog:

Since the 60s, cinephilia—obsessive movie love—has proved to be a particularly popular, durable, and visible form of connoisseurship...

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David Holzman's Diary

At Fandor:

“In Truth or Dare, there is a moment when Warren Beatty upbraids Madonna: ‘She doesn’t want to live off-camera,’ he says to the camera, and turns to her. ‘Why would you say something,’ he asks, ‘if it’s off-camera? Tomorrow, if they’re not here, what’s the point of existing...

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Cory Arcangel

At Art21's Blog:

New media artist Nick Briz has defined a “new media one-liner” this way:

The new media one-liner is a sub-genre of new media art. Enthusiasts and practitioners of the new media one-liner are drawn to the practice by its “reference-pleasure.” Reference-pleasure refers to the satisfaction one receives from experiencing a new media one-liner whose “one-line” is a reference to some aspect of either Internet/digital culture or media arts history/critical theory...

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Google Street View

At Art21's Blog:

In her essay “Certainties and Possibilities,” Janet Malcolm offers a brief genealogy of what she sees as a particularly American form of street photography. Malcolm starts by talking about European photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, and Brassaï, saying that these artists...

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Migrating Forms

At Alt Screen:

AT THE BEGINNING of Michael Robinson’s These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2010)—one of the films playing in Anthology Film Archives’ annual Migrating Forms Festival, which starts today—a blue-eyed Egyptian goddess discovers an androgynous dancer cutting a rug in a palace interior...

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Hide/Seek, Culture Wars and the History of the NEA

It was just a matter of time.

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Compilation Nation

At Moving Image Source:

According to Know Your Meme—an increasingly important database of meme histories that recently sold for an undisclosed seven-figure sum to Cheezburger Networks, a company that, despite or perhaps because of its absurd name, is starting to gain a lot of power on the Internet—the term supercut was first used by blogger Andy Baio in April 2008...

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The Pale King

At The L:

A salient formal device David Foster Wallace used throughout his career was the onslaught of confusing details that slowly accrue and congeal and eventually reveal a well-planned and moving whole. He did this on both a micro and macro level...

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Heaven and Earth and Television Magic: The Cinema of Jesse McLean

At Cinema Scope Online:

Toward the end of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the narrator travels to Israel and forms an uneasy acquaintance with a young woman named Ruth. The episode is contrived so that Roth can stage a symbolic dialogue...

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New York Public Access

At The L Magazine:

As public access television was established between 1969 and 1971, it gave rise to many of the utopian hopes we now find associated with the web: consumers would become producers, robbing the entertainment-industrial complex of its monopoly on our imagination...

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Your Last Ten Days to Catch Elisabeth Subrin's Shulie at the Jewish Museum

At the L:

“Photography evades us,” wrote Roland Barthes, “What the Photograph produces to infinity has occurred only once; the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” And the same could be said of cinema...

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Zoom Out, Pan Around

At Moving Image Source:

In "Rendering Outside the Frame: Film Performance and Installation Art," Scott Stark remembers the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980s as a time when:

The film department paid attention to film history and film aesthetics, but it was rare for a film teacher to talk about filmmaking in relation to art history, painting, sculpture, and performance art...

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Moments of 2010

A critic's poll, at Moving Image Source:

Animated gifs constitute one of the richest genres of what's been called digital folk culture; the store of home-brewed, computer-based creative work that, like traditional folk culture...

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