Associations & Organisations

• 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.

• Fab Press

  UK publishing house run and operated by the indefatigable Harvey Fenton. Genre material done with passion, style, and intelligence.

• Cinema du Parc

  An important Montreal venue for alternative and independent cinemas. Not afraid to mix the popular with the esoteric.

• British Film Institute

  Excellent and in-depth site from the venerable British Film Institute. Highlights include the series “BFI Archive Interactive” which includes excellent interactive studies on British cinema. A recent one was Paul Merton on Early British Comedy.

  

• 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.

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Blogs

• Film-Philosophy

  Film academia meets the web. The most extensive free online archive of book reviews and theoretical essays.

• Reverse Shot

  Independent, quarterly film journal with intelligent and eclectic writing. Highlights include selected ‘director symposiums’ where the editorial board features who they feel are expressive voices in the contemporary cinematic landscape. Past symposiums include Jim Jarmusch, Tsai Ming-liang and Olivier Assayas.

• 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.

• Rouge

  Rouge, edited by Adrian Martin, is a simple, user-friendly online film journal which is all about the writing, and mantains one of the highest standards of writing of any online film journal.

• 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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By Way of Montreal

• British Film Institute

  Excellent and in-depth site from the venerable British Film Institute. Highlights include the series “BFI Archive Interactive” which includes excellent interactive studies on British cinema. A recent one was Paul Merton on Early British Comedy.

  

• The School of Sound

  The School of Sound is an organisation that has staged an annual and now, biennial international symposium on the creative use of sound in the arts and media. The next SOS takes place in London in April 27-30, 2011. You can learn more about their related activities, including their journal, “The Soundtrack,” at their website.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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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DVD Review Sites

• 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.

• Panorama-cinema

  A Quebec based French language webzine with impeccable taste and an astute critical sense. Their individual film reviews may not be exceptionally long but treat each word as a precious commodity in distilling the necessary elements of the film. The zine has spread out to include interviews, podcasts, and has recently emerged as a publisher, thus far with two books under its wing: their first L’Humanisme D’Après-Guerre Japonaise (Humanism in Post-War Japan) and the second Vies & Morts du Giallo (Lives and Deaths of the Giallo). I have looked at the latter and am impressed with its scope and scholarship. It is an important contribution to the critical literature on the giallo.

• The Artifice

  Slick, likeable, readable online journal that covers a wide range of entertainment areas, including Film, TV, animation, Games, Arts, Literature, and Art.

• Fab Press

  UK publishing house run and operated by the indefatigable Harvey Fenton. Genre material done with passion, style, and intelligence.

• Bright Lights Film Journal

  Once a print magazine, now an intelligent journal of film criticism. Equally compelling with popular film and the more esoteric. Manages to nicely blend a scholarly yet readable approach to a variety of subjects ranging in equal measure from the horror genre to experimental cinema.

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Filmmakers

• Korean Film

  Excellent site on Korean cinema. Includes book/film reviews, purchasing links, festival updates, industry analysis, etc.

• Panorama-cinema

  A Quebec based French language webzine with impeccable taste and an astute critical sense. Their individual film reviews may not be exceptionally long but treat each word as a precious commodity in distilling the necessary elements of the film. The zine has spread out to include interviews, podcasts, and has recently emerged as a publisher, thus far with two books under its wing: their first L’Humanisme D’Après-Guerre Japonaise (Humanism in Post-War Japan) and the second Vies & Morts du Giallo (Lives and Deaths of the Giallo). I have looked at the latter and am impressed with its scope and scholarship. It is an important contribution to the critical literature on the giallo.

• Filmsound.org

  The internet’s foremost resource on matters of film sound theory and practice.

  

• 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.

• 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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Journalism and Criticism

• 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.

• 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.

• Film-Philosophy

  Film academia meets the web. The most extensive free online archive of book reviews and theoretical essays.

• 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.

• 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.

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Publishers, Labels, and Retailers

• 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.”

• Cine Outside

  Well organized site that focuses on recent new release reviews but also features longer think pieces on broader cinema related issues.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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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Theory, History, and Analysis

• Cineroute

  A gateway into the National Film Board of Canada’s vast film collection.

• The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

  Website for Australian government’s archival mission of preserving its audio-visual history.

• Cinema du Parc

  An important Montreal venue for alternative and independent cinemas. Not afraid to mix the popular with the esoteric.

• 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.

• Canuxploitation

  All you need to know about Canadian exploitation cinema (and there’s more than you’d expect!).

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