Links
Associations & Organisations
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Electric Sheep Magazine
Subtitled a “deviant view of cinema” Electric Sheep is an intelligent source of serious reflection on all sorts of cinema, but with a concentration on the esoteric. Varied in content too, with blogs, podcasts, interviews, etc.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Blogs
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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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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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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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The Artifice
Slick, likeable, readable online journal that covers a wide range of entertainment areas, including Film, TV, animation, Games, Arts, Literature, and Art.
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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!
By Way of Montreal
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
DVD Review Sites
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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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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.
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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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Senses of Cinema
Huge, very well supported film journal that is perhaps the best of its kind. Each new issue has enough material to keep you reading for hours.
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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.
Filmmakers
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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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Film Int.
Online organ to the excellent, longstanding Swedish based film magazine, Film International (Filmint.).
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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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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.
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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.
Journalism and Criticism
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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.
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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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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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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).
View all Journalism and Criticism →
Publishers, Labels, and Retailers
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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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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.
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caboose
Montreal-based independent publishing company that specializes in cinema publications. Owned and operated by Timothy Bernard. caboose also has initiated a fascinating project called “Planetary Projection,” an ongoing meta-commentary on the history and evolution of film projections as experienced by projectionists the world over.
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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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The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
Website for Australian government’s archival mission of preserving its audio-visual history.
View all Publishers, Labels, and Retailers →
Theory, History, and Analysis
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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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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
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Octane Seating
Resources for the independent filmmaker.
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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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caboose
Montreal-based independent publishing company that specializes in cinema publications. Owned and operated by Timothy Bernard. caboose also has initiated a fascinating project called “Planetary Projection,” an ongoing meta-commentary on the history and evolution of film projections as experienced by projectionists the world over.
