screentime links
---Red and Yellow and The Wes Anderson Collection, Chapter 8: The Grand Budapest Hotel
---"There are people (e.g., Kaplan, 2012) who want to open up a long overdue conversation about slavery in the United States, but who insist that the proper way to do so is with sober, serious ruminations on the historical realities of slavery and its aftermath: not with foul-mouthed, blood-soaked bits of commercial entertainment. We’ve got nothing against sober, serious debates about racial politics—the nation could stand to have more of those—but we cannot fully accept this particular line of argument.
For starters, we reject the assumption that popular culture is an inappropriate ground on which to wage serious political struggles. 'The popular,' after all, is one of the major sites where such battles have been waged for decades: far too long now to pretend that it doesn’t matter in this regard (Berlant, 1996; Grossberg, 1992; Hall, 1981; Kipnis, 1992; Penley, 1997; Radway, 1997; Rodman, 1996). It’s true that 'the popular' isn’t the only place where such debates need to occur, and that many (though by no means all) of the necessary solutions to the problem of systemic racism need to be implemented in other spheres. But if anti-racist critics refuse to fight on this turf, then they—we—are effectively ceding it to the other side. Which, in turn, almost certainly means that we will lose those struggles. 'The popular,' after all, is often the site where people’s hearts (rather than their minds) are won or lost. And we will not win the fight against racism simply by appealing to people’s intellects.
We also reject the assumption that this conversation can only take place in polite, bourgeois language and contexts.[8] We’re not interested in chaotic free-for-alls, where everyone shouts as loudly as they can, nobody listens, and nothing is ever resolved. But the topic at hand is ugly, brutal, and painful. It demands a sense of outrage and anger—especially if we’re still struggling with the topic 150 years after the formal end of slavery—and to pretend otherwise is to diminish the scope and the importance of the problem.
Django is not a perfect film, nor is it a perfect representation of either the horrors of U.S. slavery or the realities of black resistance. But then again, no such perfect representation exists. Or could. For all of its faults, Django puts a much stronger, much more forceful condemnation of institutional and structural racism in the public eye than anything that, say, Barack Obama has managed to accomplish from the White House. We don’t believe that Django can fully resolve the political problems at stake here—that’s an impossible burden to place on any single film—but we do believe that it pushes the conversation along in valuable and productive ways." --Heather Ashley Hayes and Gilbert B. Rodman
---Action Women Movie Montage
---Mirrors of Bergman
---"Coppola doesn’t make teen feelings into allegory for auteur integrity. She’s interested in them for their own sake, and their own aesthetic terms: their bigness, their haze, how they’re communicated like a fever." --Sophia Nguyen
---"How to Make Video Essays" by Catherine Grant
---"Are we in the center?"
---“My relationship to the cinema was still rough, as it was constituted in an anarchic way. I knew contemporary films, but I had some terrible gaps, and I especially ignored all of cinema’s theory and this history: I’ve never even read Bazin. On the other hand, I was bringing my own ideas, with their naïve convictions, which, due to being at the dawn of a new period, wasn’t a problem, since everything was to be reinvented. And it was passionate to arrive at Cahiers when they had to start over: it took years to put everything back together. We made special issues on screenplays, actors, French and American cinema, just reconnect with what was going on.” --Olivier Assayas
---Gone Girl: Back Again
---Cinephilia and Beyond considers On the Waterfront
---Danny and the Wild Bunch
---"In a digital landscape built on attention and visibility, what matters is not so much the content of your updates but their existing at all. They must be there. Social broadcasts are not communications; they are records of existence and accumulating metadata. Rob Horning, an editor at the New Inquiry, once put it in tautological terms: 'The point of being on social media is to produce and amass evidence of being on social media.' This is further complicated by the fact that the feed is always refreshing. Someone is always updating more often or rising to the top by virtue of retweets, reshares, or some opaque algorithmic calculation. In the ever-cresting tsunami of data, you are always out to sea, looking at the waves washing ashore. As the artist Fatima Al Qadiri has said: 'There’s no such thing at the most recent update. It immediately becomes obsolete.'" --Jacob Silverman
---Fassbinder's filmmaking tips
---"The film I wanted to make was less a story and more of a meditation. A film of graphic images and sounds that would work by suggestion, in which most scenes would be done from one angle, in one continuous take, without informational shots or dialogue or the usual emotional rhetoric of cinema." --Pawel Pawlikowski
---trailers for Ex Machina, Mad Max: Fury Road, Saint Laurent, Self/Less, Suite Francaise and Dark Places
---editing Don't Look Now
---“I don’t really like working. I work very hard at idleness. I’m able to spend months without doing anything and I’d like to end by doing nothing. I don’t know." --Luis Bunuel
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