By Tony Williams. 50 years ago I watched the one and only BBC TV transmission of The Power of the Daleks (November to December, 1966) one of the now missing serials of the early Dr. Who series (premiering in 1963). The opening episode introduced Patrick Troughton (1920-1987) as the replacement for […]
The New Southern Gothic: Loving, Jeff Nichols, and the Southern Artist in the 21st Century
By Will Tomford. As I watched Loving come to an end, I thought to myself, please don’t have an epilogue text. An artistic director like Jeff Nichols wouldn’t need to end a film with anyting but an ambiguous shot. But to my dissapointment, there it was: the what-happened-next. Maybe this […]
Film Scratches: Channeling Visions Through Machinery – Robot Pavlov Sputnik (2014)
January 17, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Robot Pavlov Sputnik is a complex and gorgeous eight-minute animation by Oliver Hockenhull. The video derives inspiration (and a main layer […]
Film Scratches: Never-ending Metamorphosis – A Cherenkov Radiation Jewelry Box Meltdown (2015)
January 17, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. A Cherenkov Radiation Jewelry Box Meltdown is a three-minute computer-animated short of radical beauty by Oliver Hockenhull. It can be classified […]
DVD as Reference Library: His Girl Friday on Criterion
By Tony Williams. Since companies have decided to issue features accompanying DVD reissues of films available on VHS and Laserdisc in the past, the value of these additions vary with each product. For some distributors, they are extras of little value except to add padding to sell product that many […]
Writing Our Future: The Inauguration, Alternate Inauguration Ball, and Protests
January 14, 2017
January 19th to the 21st will bring Trump’s inauguration, a Peace Ball (with Angela Davis and Solange), and street protests, including the Inauguration Day Freedom Protest on Freedom Plaza, DC, the Bridge Together in Golden Gate Park, and the 200,000 Women’s March. How can we quickly document and analyze these […]
Cat People: Horror, Necessity, and Creative Collaboration
January 13, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. Who gets the credit for Cat People (1942)? Is it first-time producer Val Lewton, who though generally overlooked in his day has since received considerable reappraisal for his innovative, low-budget ingenuity? Or is it director Jacques Tourneur, the French emigre who would bring a shadowy visual flair […]
It’s Complicated: Joss Whedon and Race by Mary Ellen Iatropoulos and Lowery A. Woodall III
January 11, 2017
A Book Review by Jessica Baxter. Let’s face it. White liberals are having a “woke” moment that is shamefully long overdue. Growing up in the 1980s and early 90s as a white middle class kid from a moderately open-minded family (albeit residing in the conservative American south east), I was […]
Equality with a Discursive, Televisual Face: TV Socialism by Aniko Imre
A Book Review by Tony Williams. In Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) the enigmatic voice of Dr. Soberin delivers one of his voice-of-God traditional thespian pronouncements over the prone, semi-crucified body of savior/destroyer Mike Hammer, whose actor (Ralph Meeker) belongs to a very different performance acting style. “How civilized […]
Jackie: Alone in Oblivion
By Christopher Sharrett. The title to Pablo Larrain’s film Jackie might be more sensibly called The Last Days of Kennedy; the title is misleading if one is prepared to see a Jacqueline Kennedy biography. I say this especially because the film’s unremitting gloom seems to flow from its chronicle of […]