Well I’ve just had one whirlwind of a trip. First, five nights in Atlantida, a very sleepy seaside town just along the coast from Montevideo (which I didn’t get to visit) on the La Plata estuary, for a small but … Continue reading
Over on ‘Open Spaces‘, Patty Zimmerman recently wrote about the vitality of cinema studies south the Rio Grande. She talks about attending a conference in Mexico and how she ‘heard brilliant analyses of films I didn’t know about. I listened … Continue reading
Here’s the third film from the Curtocircuito workshop, Materia by Pablo Fontenla and Marce Magán. This one hardly needs subtitles. The text at the end says ‘Everything exists or doesn’t exist. Something can be at the same time itself and something … Continue reading
The task was not so easy. The participants in the workshop had to make a three-minute documentary in four days. The subject was Santiago de Compostela, where the workshop was held as part of Curtocircuito—ShortCircuit in Gallego—one of a number … Continue reading
I’ve recently caught up with Charles O’Brien’s splendid, paradigm-shifting book, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound, subtitled Technology and Film Style in France and the US. Briefly, O’Brien combines thorough research into primary sources and empirical methods of analysing film style to critique … Continue reading
Let’s have no illusions. It was probably inevitable. The government has announced plans for a merger of the BFI and the Film Council [UKFC]. As The Guardian has it, ‘The British film landscape could be facing its biggest upheaval in … Continue reading
The Times reports today that the withdrawal of his appeal by the supposed Lockerbie bomber, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, and his expected repatriation on compassionate grounds (he is terminally ill), looks like part of a deal, indeed a cover-up, designed … Continue reading
Here comes another film on Che Guevara. This time it’s a documentary with the somewhat naff title of Chevolution, directed by Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez, opening at the ICA in London on 18th September. In fact there’s been a … Continue reading
Back in February, actors starring in Michael Winterbottom’s politically-charged The Road To Guantanamo were held by British police under anti-terrorism legislation on their return from Berlin where the film premiered. One of the actors, Rizwan Ahmed, said he was verbally abused, … Continue reading