Associations & Organisations

• Ingmar Bergman Face to Face

  English version of the award winning Swedish website on Ingmar Bergman, launched on May 22, 2006. An excellent reference site for works by and about Bergman.

• Filmmaker Magazine

  Online organ for the magazine dedicated to independent cinema. Includes additonal material not featured in the print version.

• The Artifice

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

• Cine Outside

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

• Canuxploitation

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

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Blogs

• Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema

  Excellent website dedicated to pre-cinema and early cinema. The site is based on a book entitled Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema edited by Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, which can be purchased through the website.

• 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.

• Images: a journal of film and popular culture

  Intelligent analysis of popular genres. Includes an excellent “In Focus” section on Italian Gothic Horror film.

• 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.

• Masters of Cinema

  Serious, erudite in the best sense possible. Covers art house DVD releases across all DVD regions. Great for making your mouth water over DVD’s you don’t have but would die for.

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By Way of Montreal

• Ingmar Bergman Face to Face

  English version of the award winning Swedish website on Ingmar Bergman, launched on May 22, 2006. An excellent reference site for works by and about Bergman.

• 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.

• The Island of Sokurov

  Offical website for the Russian director.

• FIAF

  Site for the Journal of Film Preservation. Amazingly, the site includes full text (pdf file) access to the excellent association journal.

  

• 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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DVD Review Sites

• 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.

• Paracinema

  Edited by Christine Makepeace, Paracinema is the online organ of the magazine that is made for, to paraphrase its tagline, “People who love genre movies.” Although many of the back issues (since 2007) are unfortunately sold out, the online presence fills in the space in-between new issues with exclusive editorials, links, festival reports, etc. Taking its name from the term coined by media theorist Jeffrey Sconce (which itself owes a debt to Michael J. Weldon’s ‘psychotronic cinema’), Paracinema prides itself in its writing, which is the right blend of serious, scholarly (without the leaden jargon), well-written, personal, and fun

• 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.

• Incite! Journal of Experimental Media & Radical Aesthetics

  “INCITE! is a new journal dedicated to the discourse, culture, and community of experimental film, video, and new media. Merging handmade and online platforms, this hybrid publication addresses the lack of critical attention afforded film and media artists working today. In addition to scholarly articles, INCITE! publishes aesthetic statements, manifestos, artist projects, multiples, archival documents, interviews, reviews, and hastily drawn plans. Stationing ourselves at the cross-flow of research, scholarship, and creation, we encourage personal writing, critical poetics, and radical approaches to film and media (editor, Brett Kashmere).

• The Island of Sokurov

  Offical website for the Russian director.

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Filmmakers

• 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.

• Women Make Movies

  A non-profit organization which promotes and distributes films from all over the world made by and about women. Their catalogue contains over 400 titles in all genres, with an emphasis on documentary and experimental.

• Cineroute

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

• 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!

• 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.

  

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Journalism and Criticism

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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Publishers, Labels, and Retailers

• Masters of Cinema

  Serious, erudite in the best sense possible. Covers art house DVD releases across all DVD regions. Great for making your mouth water over DVD’s you don’t have but would die for.

• Korean Film

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

• Canuxploitation

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

• Images: a journal of film and popular culture

  Intelligent analysis of popular genres. Includes an excellent “In Focus” section on Italian Gothic Horror film.

• 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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Theory, History, and Analysis

• Oddity Cinema

  As the title suggests, Oddity Cinema is a webzine which tackles the weird and the wonderful in bite-sized morsels of critical commentary, capsule reviews, interviews, trailers, plugs for upcoming releases, etc. What sets it apart from most online review sites is its interactivity, with readers able to add their own comments to reviews. The design is colorful and attractive, yet remains functional and easy to navigate.

• DVD Beaver

  A website specializing in DVD quality control. The place to go if deliberating between competing DVD issues of a film. You’‘ll get the technical comparison, complete with bit rate compression, film stills, and commentary.

• 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.

• Ingmar Bergman Face to Face

  English version of the award winning Swedish website on Ingmar Bergman, launched on May 22, 2006. An excellent reference site for works by and about Bergman.

• 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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