• Next practices in digital: a report from the Association of Art Museum Directors (freely downloadable) with 41 examples of recent digital initivatives in American art museums – lots of great ideas.
• Brave New Camera: a trailer for what looks like a fascinating documentary about the impact of digital photography, connectivity and vast storage systems (I’ve wanted to make essentially this for television for the past five years, but couldn’t interest commissioners); background and additional clips are at The Creators Project here.
Sometimes there are links between them, oftentimes there are not.
• The new new museum: Jerry Saltz for New York magazine riffs on the recent history of art museums and makes you long to see the new Whitney in Manhattan.
• A night at the museum: for Reverse Shot at the Museum of the Moving Image, Fernando F. Croce writes about Tsai Ming-liang’s extraordinary film Face (Visage, 2009, above), for which this is the trailer:
Sometimes there are links between them, oftentimes there are not.
• The A-Z of Carl Dreyer: terrific anthology from Matthew Thrift at BFI about the demanding work of the great Danish director, including his little-known study of the sculptor Thorvaldsen (1949, above).
• Seeing Istanbul again: Orhan Panuk’s translator Maureen Feely writes for The New York Review of Books about the Turkish writer’s vision of the city where he lives.
• Sophia Loren and the Italo-American songbook: apart from being hugely enjoyable, this essay is an object lesson in how to assemble – without commentary – comparatively obscure film extracts to explore an idea, in this case the creation of trans-national identity in ’50s’ cinema; from Bristol PhD candidate Sarah Culhane.
Sometimes there are connections between the three things, oftentimes there are not.
• The wonderfully elusive Chinese novel: a fascinating discussion from The New York Review of Books in which Perry Link takes off from a review of The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 5: The Dissolution to consider wider questions about Chinese literature and translation.
• Alec Soth on photographing “the cloud” in Silicon Valley: it’s more than a year old, but this is a solid SFMOMA video about the wonderful photographer making images of something entirely insubstantial.
Sometimes there are connections between the three things, oftentimes there are not.
• The River – a new authenticity: a very fine essay by Ian Christie for Criterion on Jean Renoir’s 1951 feature shot in India (above).
• The catastrophe: a rather extraordinary piece by Oliver Sacks in The New Yorker on the late Spalding Gray, who I knew slightly and admired immensely.
• Bruce Springsteen – ‘The River’: from when this song was new – just because…
• Innerspace: Eric Hynes at the Museum of the Moving Image Reverse Shot blog writes very well about Miami Vice (1984-89, above) and Miami Vice (2006); for those nostalgic about the original series, take a look at the Top 10 Miami Vice music moments compiled by schnuffel661:
Sometimes there are connections between them, oftentimes there not.
• A new Whitney: Michael Kimmelman reviews Manhattan’s latest museum, with great use of embedded video and graphics (above) in a spectacular online essay from The New York Times.
• The Louvre scene from Bande à part (1964, director Jean-Luc Godard): this has recently been appropriated by an ad for a mobile phone, but the original says more about heritage, museums, cinema and being young than pretty much any other 40 seconds of film.
• The Smithsons on Housing: writer and filmmaker B. S. Johnson’s eccentric and compelling BBC documentary made in 1970 about architects Alison and Peter Smithson; I came to this via John Grindrod’s terrific blog Dirty Rotten Scoundrel, which has an informative entry here (and lots more links to fascinating films).
• Los Angeles Plays Itself: Thom Andersen’s great 2003 essay film (above) about Hollywood’s representation of the city of angeles is finally available on DVD (albeit as a Region 1 impost); here’s the trailer…
• Survival tactics: German filmmakers in Hollywood, 1940-1960: a long, detailed and dense essay by Joe McElhaney for Lola about Michael Curtiz, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder and others – fascinating if you’re prepared to devote the time it needs.
• How I feel for the films of Robert Siodmak: Geoff Andrew for the BFI on the noir director who has a retrospective at BFI Southbank this month and next; here’s the trailer for the re-release of Siodmak’s Cry of the City (1948):
