After recently seeing Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman Who… for a second time, I still found that all the words I could muster for this dense, overlapping, fractured, and impenetrable, but somehow idiosyncratically transfixing film was something of a stream of consciousness outline, jotting down passing observations with the idea that, by encapsulating them […]
A collection of transcribed essays presented during the three-day conference organized by Jim Pines, Paul Willemen, and June Givanni as part of the 40th anniversary of the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1986, Questions of Third Cinema examines the evolution, application, relevance, and continued challenges of Third Cinema in its manifestation, not only from the […]
Eleven years since the publication of Poetics of Cinema, Raúl Ruiz continues his articulate, erudite, and insightful rumination in Poetics of Cinema 2, a lithe and infectious, yet densely referential, cross-pollinated exposition on the art and nature of image-making in an age of an overexposed cinema that, in its aesthetic democratization and crass commercialization, has […]
In the book Patterns of Time: Mizoguchi and the 1930s, Donald Kirihara recounts a legendary episode at the Venice Film Festival that sets the tone for Kenji Mizoguchi’s unique and unforgettable films: When in Venice in 1963 for the festival screening of Ugetsu, he spoke of the film as a representative of Japan’s aesthetic tradition. […]
“I always tell people that I don’t make anything besides tofu and that is because I am strictly a tofu-dealer.” – Yasujiro Ozu In the book Ozu, Donald Richie examines Yasujiro Ozu’s films by following the common steps for constructing a film: the script, shooting, and editing. Of the three elements, Ozu places primary importance […]
Our Films, Their Films is a collection of perceptive, contemplative, and illuminating critical essays and personal memoirs by seminal filmmaker, composer, artist, author, intellectual, and cinephile, Satyajit Ray. Arranged into the two titular sections, Ray’s terse, candid, and often thematically overlapping expositions on Indian and international cinema reveal, not only profound engagement with, and sensitivity […]