film history

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• SOURCE: Deadline
  7/31/2021
  

  Elephant Statues Commemorating D.W. Griffith Removed from Hollywood and Highland Plaza

  The statues were an homage to Griffith's film "Intolerance," widely seen as a rebuke of the NAACP and other critics who denounced the racism of his prior pro-KKK film "Birth of a Nation." 

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• SOURCE: Medium
  12/9/2020
  

  The Other ‘Mank’: Joe Mankiewicz and the Wildest Night in Hollywood History

  by Greg Mitchell

  The Netflix film "Mank" provides an opportunity to remember the civil liberties stand taken by Frank Mankiewicz's brother Joe, who opposed the imposition of loyalty oaths on the Directors' Guild at the height of the postwar red scare. 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  9/25/2020
  

  James E. Hinton’s Unseen Films Reframe the Black Power Movement

  Hinton’s work as a cinematographer and filmmaker achieved a similar balance between taking in the grander sweep of history and considering the nature, appearance, manner, and presence of the individual people making it.

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  8/24/2020
  

  How Wagner Shaped Hollywood

  Music historian Daniel Ira Goldmark counts more than a hundred Warner Bros. cartoons with Wagner on their soundtracks.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  8/11/2020
  

  What to Stream: A Blazing Interview with Orson Welles By Richard Brody

  Welles is careful to distinguish actors from stars: “The real star is an animal absolutely separate from actors. He may be, or she may be, the greatest actor in the world, but he is not like actors. The vocation of being a star is separate from the vocation of being an actor. It is very close to wanting to be President of the United States.”

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• 2/9/20
  

  The Dramatic Relationship Between Black America and the Academy Awards

  by Elwood Watson

  From Hattie McDaniel to #OscarsSoWhite. 

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• 1/12/20
  

  Cinema Paradiso: The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Will Be The Home of Movies, Past and Present

  by Andrew Fletcher

  When it opens in 2020, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will be an interesting landmark for historians and movie buffs alike.

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Education
  4/24/19
  

  Taking Down ‘Birth of a Nation’

  Chapman University removes posters from prominent places in its film school after students object to centrality of a work full of racism.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  11-17-13
  

  A Daring Film, Silenced No More

  "Different From the Others," a 1919 film on homosexuality.

• 
• SOURCE: USA Today
  9-21-2013
  

  Lost Part of Film History Found in a Barn

  A contractor finds four significant films thought to be lost, including Their First Misunderstanding featuring Mary Pickford.

• SOURCE: CriterionCast
  2-19-13
  

  Iconic Japanese Film Historian Donald Richie Passes Away

  While the film world may in many ways still be reeling from the loss of legendary film critic Andrew Sarris this past summer, another iconic film critic and historian has left us. Author/critic Donald Richie, arguably one of the most influential voices in expanding the reach of Japanese culture (particularly cinema) has passed away. He was 88.Best known for books like The Japan Journals, the writer’s imprint on the overall culture has been his aiding in growing the breadth with which Japanese culture reaches. He had been influential in discussing the works of such directors as Ozu and Kurosawa, and has since become an absolute legend in a movement that has lasted ever since....

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• The 10 Best Lincoln Moments in Film History

  by Thomas Doherty

  "Lincoln does not have the phallus; he is the phallus," proclaimed the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1970, in a group-written polemic on the ideological superstructure of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), John Ford's moody paean to the salad days of the Great Emancipator. The piece is a doozy of a performance, a high-wire act exemplifying the airy delights of the high renaissance of French-accented film theory. Alternately enlightening and maddening, the essay ends on a declaration that few Americans could ever abide: that in Ford's film, Lincoln emerges finally as a figure of “monstrous dimensions.” A monster? Not Abe, never Abe -- he is our guardian angel, secular saint, and -- virtually since the birth of American cinema -- celluloid hero.