Departments

;

film history

  • 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.

  • 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.”

  • 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: 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....

  • 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.