Over the past few years I have seen a number of documentaries and essay films inspired by different ecclesial byways in the US. It has been interesting to track this trend alongside all the recent hub-bub about a growing Christian Film Industry – as this increasing number of documentaries is either a creative response to […]
In all these references in the essay to process, Abrams is talking about mystery for mystery’s sake, which doesn’t parallel art for art’s sake as much as it bisects it at an inopportune angle.
This spate of small essays on the topic of filmmakers distributing their own films by whatever means was born in a recent flurry of Twitter exchanges about the question. What are the boundaries of self-promotion? What is the relationship between audience and distribution? How do festivals shape the production of cinema? These aren’t questions that […]
Film Studies For Free has been a favorite blog for a while precisely because of announcements like this. Starzmedia, one of Herzog’s key distributors, has posted eight of Herzog’s early and mid-career films on YouTube. These include the well seen Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, Little Deiter Needs to Fly, Woyzeck, and My Best Fiend – but also […]
Though he has many similar sequences in his work (e.g. the beginning of Heart of Glass, most of Fata Morgana), O’er the Land almost becomes the obverse of Herzog’s ecological cinema. It chooses to look when Herzog speaks. Its poetic edits undo the more patently coherent way Herzog places characters within the wilderness Stratman simply catalogs.
Almost everything the internet knows about Hollis Frampton.
You may reach a point in your life where you look around yourself and wonder: When did the bomb drop? You are feeling survivor emotions, thinking victim thoughts, haunted by the specter of an anonymous trauma. You look through the hum at those close to you, your brother, your lover, your children, and you can […]
It is silent cinema with a hyper-realized Bazinian sense of wonder. Or a Ricoeur rubik’s cube that can be emplotted across a variety of planes.
It resembles the pithy call and response of Hiroshima, mon amour, but can only script Simon’s solitary, confused, anguished voice. He has arrived at the end of the landslide, immobilized. His recitation of “stucke, stucke” in these final moments of darkness calls to mind the use of the word to refer to the corpses of Nazi victims in train, cars and camps.