I’ve been trying to follow the emergence of James Cameron’s Avatar as a transmedia property for a few years now. I posted about the narrative importance of DisneyWorld’s Valley of Mo’ara attraction in 2017. It was the first sequel we had to the 2009 film in any entertainment medium. The events we experience in the…
Category: Brief Note
The Making of Robert Lapoujade’s LE SOCRATE (1968): A Few Notes and Documents
“Lapoujade’s greatest strengths are his refusal to produce digestible cinema and his passionate effort to create a dialogue with the audience.” This is from the introduction to an 18 October 1968 episode of the TV show Cinéma critique (fig.1-2) devoted to the production of Le socrate (1968), avant-garde filmmaker Robert Lapoujade’s first feature. That episode…
“The Invention of Robert Bresson” and Its Sequels: Free E-book and Links
A quick update: To celebrate the fifth anniversary of its publication, I have elected to make The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market (2017) available as a free e-book here (click on “Download PDF” to open). Since its release, the book, I am happy to say, has been well received, with reviews…
Bresson in Granada: A Tale of (Partially) Dashed Cinephilia
In May 2002, a few months shy of starting my master’s degree at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema (Concordia University, Montreal), I traveled with two friends to Spain. For a month we drove around the country, avoiding the predetermined paths laid down by railway travel and improvising our way through better and lesser known…
(Un)Natural Forms: The Parametric Style in Recent Documentary Series
Briefly checking in with an observation about recent documentary series, some available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and DisneyPlus. I’ve long been a fanatic of nature shows, and the last decade or so (perhaps more) has seen an uptick in “quality” documentary series, probably as a result of the influence of David Attenborough’s award-winning Planet Earth…
Experimental Animation in France: Painter-Animator Robert Lapoujade (1921-1993) and the RTF’s Latin American Links
Briefly checking in with a recent discovery: an experimental animated short currently available on the website of France’s INA (Institut national de l’audiovisuel). The film, entitled Vélodrame (1963), which you can view here, is by a painter-animator I wrote about last year, Robert Lapoujade. Lapoujade completed 17 films between 1959 and 1978, including the extraordinary…
Cut the Tension: A Modern Pop-Storytelling Mantra?
I’m currently watching AEW’s most recent wrestling event, Fight for the Fallen. (AEW is a fledgling organization which many hope will compete with WWE, still the industry leader.) And halfway through the card it occurred to me that in many mediums and forms, storytellers today lean–sometimes consciously, sometimes not, but either way far too regularly…
Celebrating 20 Years of FMS at WashU: A Gallery of Photos from “Beyond the Film”
Yesterday, Washington University in St. Louis presented “Beyond the Film: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Movie Audiences and their Environments,” a symposium celebrating 20 years of the Film and Media Studies Program. My wonderful colleague Diane Lewis and I organized the event. And what a success! Special thanks are in order to Jeff Smith (UW-Madison), Cara Caddoo (Indiana…
In Lieu of a “Best of”–A Registry of Film/Media I Enjoyed in 2018
In what follows, I offer a registry–a hodge-podgey catalogue–of fifty-odd new, and in one or two cases revisited, items I saw and enjoyed in 2018. Items are listed in no particular order under three categories (contemporary feature films, past feature films, and short format items). As an added bonus, I’ve included my 2016 registry as…
Style and Process: A Note on Bresson and Surrealism
There’s a movement toward movements in Bresson commentary. Increasingly, critics and scholars like to position Robert Bresson’s cinema as part of several conscious trends in 20th century thought and fine arts, Surrealism in particular. I’ve contributed in my own small way to this project. In a recent blog, filmmaker/scholar Laura Ivins takes up Bresson’s Surrealist…
Moving Patterns 