Links
Associations & Organisations
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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).
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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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The Artifice
An intelligent, broad ranging cultural criticism journal which impressively covers such diverse popular art areas as art, literature, film, TV, comics, manga, games, and anime. Pleasing jargon free writing that is informed, personal and critically astute.
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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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Filmmaker Magazine
Online organ for the magazine dedicated to independent cinema. Includes additonal material not featured in the print version.
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Blogs
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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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Cinemasparagus
Craig Keller’s eclectic musings on a broad range of intelligent (with a slant on European), auteurist cinema.
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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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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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Cinémathèque Québécoise
Montreal’s venerable cinema treasure which houses major retrospectives and selections from its own vast archive collection. Also includes an invaluable library of film books, periodicals, newspaper clippings, posters, etc., which is a mine of information for scholars and students.
By Way of Montreal
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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).
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European Films.net
Privately run website aimed at promoting European cinema. Covers films that are in-production and recently released across the world. Good source of production credit information with an extensive archive of film reviews.
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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.
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Cinemasparagus
Craig Keller’s eclectic musings on a broad range of intelligent (with a slant on European), auteurist cinema.
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Poética do cinema
New blog by Brazilian film scholar Marcelo Moreira Santos which is a voice for his research on film semiotics. Blog entries thus far include English translations of sections of his published PhD thesis, and includes helpful film links to relevant film making of and documentaries which support the entries. For example, the blog entry of May 7, 2013, “The Collaborative Authorship in Cinema,” includes brief excerpts of documentary clips from The Shining, Inception, The Dark Knight, etc.
DVD Review Sites
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Eurochannel
Eurochannel is your one-stop subscription online portal for European music, television, cinema, fashion, and art. The Eurochannel cinema features a wide variety of feature length films, shorts, and documentary, with 70 films a month, three new films every week.
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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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The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
Website for Australian government’s archival mission of preserving its audio-visual history.
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David Bordwell’s Film Blog
There are many film blogs on the web, some good, some not so good. As you might expect from one of the pre-eminent film scholars of his generation, this one from David Bordwell is good, very good.
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Poética do cinema
New blog by Brazilian film scholar Marcelo Moreira Santos which is a voice for his research on film semiotics. Blog entries thus far include English translations of sections of his published PhD thesis, and includes helpful film links to relevant film making of and documentaries which support the entries. For example, the blog entry of May 7, 2013, “The Collaborative Authorship in Cinema,” includes brief excerpts of documentary clips from The Shining, Inception, The Dark Knight, etc.
Filmmakers
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Intute
Intute is a free UK-based online resource which acts as a massive storage for the every increasing area on reputable online journals/essays in every conceivable area. Its main target are UK students, lecturers and researchers in higher academics, but obviously anyone seeking research in their particular area will benefit from Intute.
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Digitalarti
Your one-stop online source for everything digital art. Portal to events across Canada and Europe, live performances, lectures, and online journal dedicated to digital art available as a free pdf journal. Latest issue (Mag. No. 5) includes an interesting essay on the permutations of meanings on the internet. What is most important. What people read? How they read? Where the information is saved? How it is transmitted? Where are all these servers served? What is the environmental footprint of these ‘data centers’? You’ll be surprised.
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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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Film-Philosophy
Film academia meets the web. The most extensive free online archive of book reviews and theoretical essays.
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Stan Brakhage on the Web
Filmmaker red Camper’s labour of love on the late Stan Brakhage. Extensive material covering the life of America’s seminal avant-garde filmmaker.
Journalism and Criticism
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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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Vertigo
Vertigo is an international film magazine covering the best of independent and experimental film. This is the recently added online version of its hard copy magazine of the same name, which has been documenting global screen culture since 1993.
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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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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.
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Cine Outside
Well organized site that focuses on recent new release reviews but also features longer think pieces on broader cinema related issues.
View all Journalism and Criticism →
Publishers, Labels, and Retailers
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Camera & Pen
An elegantly designed website by filmmaker/writer Tim Cawkwell that features “intelligent” musings on cinema, with an emphasis on avant-garde and spiritual cinema (Bresson, Tarkovsky, Dreyer, the Holocaust, plus Cawkwell has authored a book entitled The Filmmaker’s Guide to God in 2004). The site’s title, which is a reference to Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo,’ and is appropriately subtitled “Intelligible writing about intelligent film,” also includes snippets of Cawkwell’s aborted (he stopped making films in 1987) practical creative career under the heading “own work.” A site well-worth visiting.
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Screen Directors Guild of Ireland
“Established in 2000, the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland (SDGI) is the representative body for directors involved in the Irish and international audiovisual industry. These include directors of feature films, fiction, animation documentary, television drama, short films, video art and commericals.”
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Ubuweb
A wholly independent, wonderful resource on the avant-garde, poetry (in all its forms) and, to quote Ubuweb, “outsider arts.” Includes many sounds, music, books, essays, poems, interviews, radio spots, and critical works that have been salvaged from obscurity, or at least made readily available through their website.
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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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The Criterion Collection
Home of the DVD company committed to the promotion of International cinema. The name has become synonymous with quality, and the yardstick by which other DVD transfers are measured.
View all Publishers, Labels, and Retailers →
Theory, History, and Analysis
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The Criterion Collection
Home of the DVD company committed to the promotion of International cinema. The name has become synonymous with quality, and the yardstick by which other DVD transfers are measured.
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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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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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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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Shocks to the System
Excellent blog by writer Jon Towlsen that specializes in horror films that can be considered subversive in their approach to genre norms of style, formal approach, theme or social consciousness. The blog is an extension of a book on the subject of ‘Subversive Cinema’ which is slated for publication from McFarland press in 2013. Chapter descriptions for the book are available on the blog.
