Links
Associations & Organisations
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Filmmaker Magazine
Online organ for the magazine dedicated to independent cinema. Includes additonal material not featured in the print version.
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Cinema du Parc
An important Montreal venue for alternative and independent cinemas. Not afraid to mix the popular with the esoteric.
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Film Studies For Free
Run by Catherine Grant, this is an invaluable resource which does exactly what its title would suggest: it brings together in one place links to scholarly and intelligent articles and essays on a wide range of subjects that are available for free. The site is dangerous. Why? Well because when you visit this site you will always spend more time perusing the many interesting links and connected tangents than you can afford!
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FIAF
Site for the Journal of Film Preservation. Amazingly, the site includes full text (pdf file) access to the excellent association journal.
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Giallo Fever
Keith Brown’s excellent analysis of the Italian giallo. Entries are normally on a singular film, but reference previous entries and are part of a broader aesthetic and stylistic understanding of the giallo (Brown is a PhD student and I imagine his thesis is on the giallo).
View all Associations & Organisations →
Blogs
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Truth-in-Cinema
Quirky but intense website dedicated to the cinematic spiritual heavyweights (Tarkovsky, Bergman, Ozu, Sokurv, etc.).
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Images: a journal of film and popular culture
Intelligent analysis of popular genres. Includes an excellent “In Focus” section on Italian Gothic Horror film.
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Cineaste
Online link-up for the longstanding film magazine, which now includes web only material that supplements the monthly paper editions. Cineaste continues to publish excellent, well-informed criticism informed by all aspects of film art: the social, political and aesthetic.
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Montreal Serai
A politically engaged cultural magazine that has a growing online presence (over 2000 subscribers). Montreal Serai rightly prides itself on the ethnic and cultural diversity of its writers and subjects. The webzine covers all the arts, both big and small (from cinema to poetry) with equal dedication.
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Short Ends
A small Montreal-based socially committed film collective that encourages personal writing on films that are off the mainstream path.
By Way of Montreal
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Culture.ca
This website is an initiative of the Department of Canadian Heritage, and functions as a one-stop gateway to all aspects of the Canadian cultural scene, including history, politics, sports, and art. Contains an impressive range of up-to-date links and cultural information, including streamed segments from the CBC Television Archives.
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Tim Cawkwell’s Cinema
A sounding board for former filmmaker Tim Cawkwell, on the more esoteric and contemplative aspects of film thought (religion, theology, the imagination, etc.). Cawkwell writes with the general reader in mind, not necessarily the arcane academic. As his logo states, “Intelligible writing about intelligent film.”
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The Island of Sokurov
Offical website for the Russian director.
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Cult Epics
Independent DVD label which specializes in esoteric arthouse, erotica, and horror cinema. Their releases are always a labor of love with care, commitment, and excellent supplementary material.
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Film Festival World
Excellent, valuable online resource for everything connected to the world of the film festival. By far the most complete, organised, and up-to-date resource on film festivals from all over the world. Resources include a listing of International film academies and awards bodies and links to film journals and e-zines.
DVD Review Sites
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The Island of Sokurov
Offical website for the Russian director.
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Fab Press
UK publishing house run and operated by the indefatigable Harvey Fenton. Genre material done with passion, style, and intelligence.
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Montreal Serai
A politically engaged cultural magazine that has a growing online presence (over 2000 subscribers). Montreal Serai rightly prides itself on the ethnic and cultural diversity of its writers and subjects. The webzine covers all the arts, both big and small (from cinema to poetry) with equal dedication.
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Cinephilia and Beyond
Cinephilia is plain and simple a great and unique film website that oozes love of cinema, its meaning, human value and entertainment value. Unique because you never know what you will find, snippets, interviews, video essays, short films, documentaries, essays, old and new stuff, anything that has or can touch someone about cinema. Or should it be called sinema?
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Korean Film
Excellent site on Korean cinema. Includes book/film reviews, purchasing links, festival updates, industry analysis, etc.
Filmmakers
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Culture.ca
This website is an initiative of the Department of Canadian Heritage, and functions as a one-stop gateway to all aspects of the Canadian cultural scene, including history, politics, sports, and art. Contains an impressive range of up-to-date links and cultural information, including streamed segments from the CBC Television Archives.
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Cineaste
One of the most venerable American paper film magazine has slowly been upping their online presence, and now has added exclusive online content, a smattering of ‘free’ published material and a valuable always-up-to-date cumulative index.
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Cinema of Malayalam
Website dedicated to the cinema of Kerala, the southernmost costal state of India. This website contains an extensive database of national and international award winning films and directors of Malayalam (the language spoken in Kerala) cinema.
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Caracult and Fuorivista
Two interesting linked Italian websites, one, Caracult, exploring the broader cultural sphere with a slant toward the esoteric and the anthropological, and the other, Fuorivista, a cinema journal featuring varied approaches to marginalized cinemas and an inclusive understanding of cinema (the journal is interested in all aspects of cinema, aesthetic, industrial, spectatorial, etc.).
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Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism
What a wonderful surprise it was to learn of this new (2010) rekindling of the excellent British film magazine Movie, that ran from 1962 to 2000 and published some of the most engaged, constructive and intelligent film criticism of its time. The online version of Movie provides a nice lineage with the original by including a tribute to one of its founding fathers Ian Cameron (who died in January 2010) by V.F. Perkins, another important figurehead of the original magazine, as well as reprinted the essay by Cameron “Films, Directors, and Critics” from Movie #2. The online version (which is refereed and bi-annual) also emulates the style and layout of the original magazine, and includes some excellent frame grabs. Welcome back.
Journalism and Criticism
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Fangoria
Website that both promotes and adds material to the long running horror magazine.
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Learning Adobe Premiere
If you are a young filmmaker or critic wanting to learn how to make audio-visual essays, this is a good primer.
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FIPRESCI: The International Federation of Film Critics
Website for the important film critics organization, FIPRESCI. Includes a link-up to their relatively new online film journal, “Undercurrents,” an interesting section where film critics write about film books that influenced their intellectual history, and much more.
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Cineaste
Online link-up for the longstanding film magazine, which now includes web only material that supplements the monthly paper editions. Cineaste continues to publish excellent, well-informed criticism informed by all aspects of film art: the social, political and aesthetic.
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Film Studies For Free
Great blog that is more than a blog: a wealth of resources for online scholarly writing on film that is ‘open access’ (free). There is a lot of really good stuff written on the web of value and this site does a great service in promoting this.
View all Journalism and Criticism →
Publishers, Labels, and Retailers
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Filmmaker Magazine
Online organ for the magazine dedicated to independent cinema. Includes additonal material not featured in the print version.
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Index DVD
Independent video distribution label which strongly promotes Austrian (mainly) and East European political and avant-garde artists. Their DVDs are beautiful works of art in themselves, with stylish see-through covers, copious (bilingual) liner notes and artist bios.
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Movieplayer.it
Italian language one stop site for all news/info on what is playing and forthcoming across Italy. Although the texts are written in Italian, and consumer geared, there is a huge database of trailers, many in their original languages, which are not easily found elsewhere. Not only are there tons of trailers, but links to biographies of film personalities, event descriptions (like currently a notice of the restored screening of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour playing at the Cinema Ritrovato a Bologna), etc. Where else can you find, as in the ‘Oggi al cinema’ section, what is playing where across all of Italy? I find it particularly useful for discovering recent Italian films, rather than the North American films filling many screens there as elsewhere. The site is very well organized and essential for Italians seeking cinema news, and any one travelling to Italy who doesn’t want to miss out on their film fix.
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Cinema Scope
Cinema Scope is one of, if not the, best Canadian film magazines on the market, featuring intelligent criticism, festival coverage, and interviews. Their website offers content information on current and back issues, subscription information, and some web only content.
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Images: a journal of film and popular culture
Intelligent analysis of popular genres. Includes an excellent “In Focus” section on Italian Gothic Horror film.
View all Publishers, Labels, and Retailers →
Theory, History, and Analysis
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Electronics Arts Intermix (EAI)
Non-profit resource for film, video and interactive media art. Includes substantial video streaming samples of many of their artists, including Chris Marker, George Kuchar, Ken Jacobs, Carolee Schneemann, Michael Snow, and Douglas Gordon.
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Filmmaker Magazine
Online organ for the magazine dedicated to independent cinema. Includes additonal material not featured in the print version.
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Film Studies Association of Canada
Organ for Canada’s long running Association that brings together film scholars, students, researchers, and teachers from all over the country.
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Girish
Blog written by Film and Cultural critic Girish Shambu which is simple and straightforward: perceptive thoughts on all things relating to cinema, with each blog entry capped off by a useful series of “recent readings” which links you to other film writing which has caught the bloggers mind for one reason or another.
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Cinema du Parc
An important Montreal venue for alternative and independent cinemas. Not afraid to mix the popular with the esoteric.
