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Her design for living
Kristin in Rome, 1997, in front of a “recent” hand from a colossal statue of Constantine. The Amarna statuary fragments she studies are twice as old. DB here: Kristin is in the spotlight today, and...
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METROPOLIS unbound
Fritz Lang has created a lot of pretty pictures and has discovered the astonishing talent of Brigitte Helm. I cannot blame him for not being able to cut the quantity of ideas in individual scenes...
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A hundred years, plus a few thousand more, in a day
Charlie Keil, Yuri Tsivian, Henry Jenkins, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger. Photo by Joel Ninmann. Last Saturday we held the symposium “Movies, Media, and Methods” in honor of Kristin’s arrival at...
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Glancing backward, mostly at critics
The Mortal Storm (1940). DB bere: As Freud’s mom says in Huston’s film, “Memory plays queer tricks, Siggy.” Herewith, some journeys into the past, launched on a lazy June afternoon. Ten-best lists are...
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Now you see it, now you can’t
DB here: We usually respond to films spontaneously, but afterward we can think about our responses and figure out why we reacted as we did. When we’re fooled by a mystery, for instance, we can...
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The buddy system
Sweet Smell of Success. DB here: Many of our friends write books, and what are friends for if not occasionally to promote each other’s books? Here’s an armload of titles, most of them recently...
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Rebooked
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, CinemaScope). DB here: Are blog readers book readers, let alone book buyers? I asked once before, but in a different tone of voice. Books are still...
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Molly wanted more
The Crime of M. Lange. DB here: I was watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs some years ago with a friend’s three-year-old daughter. Molly hadn’t seen the movie before, and she watched it in a...
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Scriptography
Hollywood screenwriters at work, according to Boy Meets Girl (1938). It’s not every conference that opens a morning session by asking the men in the audience to take off their underwear. But I...
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Bringing to book
Artists and Models. Blushing from Bryce Renninger’s generous article about us and the new edition of Film Art can’t keep us from offering another of our occasional entries devoted to new books we...
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All play and no work? ROOM 237
Room 237 (2012). DB here: Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 gathers the thoughts of five people concerning the deeper, or wider, or just awesomer meanings evoked by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Those...
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The book stops here: Theory, practice, and in between
Tinpis Run (Pengau Nengo, 1991). DB here: Apart from things I’m reading for research (academic monographs, 1940s Hollywood novels, star bios and autobios), the film books I like best are blends. They...
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Pulverizing plots: Into the woods with Sondheim, Shklovsky, and David O. Russell
American Hustle (2013). The different writers, who live in different times, come across the same pattern, the same chain of circumstances, which reveal themselves in different ways in each time. This...
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You and me and every frog we know
Frog TV (2014, N. Joe Myers). DB here: Be patient, the frogs are coming. But first, a bit of film theory. Movies in code Once many film scholars were captivated by the idea that our responses to a...
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Friendly books, books by friends
Moses and Aaron (1974). DB here: When the stack of books by friends threatens to topple off my filing cabinet, I know it’s time to flag them for you. I can’t claim to have read every word in them, but...
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André Bazin, man of the cinema
DB here: André Bazin was born in 1918 and died on 11 November 1958. In his short life he became, without aiming at it, one of the greatest theorists and critics of cinema. A central figure in the...
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Kindest, E.: A memoir of Edward Branigan
Equinox Flower (1958). DB here (but writing for Kristin too): Edward Branigan died on Saturday, 29 June, in Bellingham, Washington. He had fought for a year against Acute Myeloid Leukemia. He was 74....
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Brains, bodies, and movies: Ways of thinking about the psychology of cinema
Summer at Grandpa’s (Hou, 1984). DB here: This is another phantom entry I posted as Private for the seminar I’ve been teaching this term. I’ve opened it up for a wider audience because some readers...
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Can the science of mirror neurons explain the power of camera movement? A...
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). DB here: Over the years we’ve brought you several guest posts from friends whose research we admire. The list includes Matthew Bernstein, Kelley Conway, Leslie Midkiff...
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Learning to watch a film, while watching a film
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992). DB here: “Every film trains its spectator,” I wrote a long time ago. In other words: A movie teaches us how to watch it. But how can we give that idea some heft?...
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