Eire to Iran

Sunday Bloody Sunday, from IRA 1972 to IRAN 2009

Old mural in Belfast (left) & Protest in Iran (right)
Snickers sponsors the Iranian civil war!

Screens - World Cinema Stats (4)

Active cinema screens (2008) top 16 nations + EUNotes :

• Most recent data, either 2008 or 2007 for most countries.
  
• EU is there as an indicator as member states of the European Union are already present on this chart. But it shows the European countries put together become comparable to the top players (USA, China and India), which is a legit place.
• China is also split in 2 figures. One only registers what they call "modern theatres" (comparable to worldwide theatre screens). But we see that the other one, including all types of screenings (maybe in community centres in rural China, and video projectors), corresponds more to what we'd expect from a population of over 1 billion people! And it puts China above India (unlike on the Admissions chart, which was probably calculated from the "modern theatres" data)
• Curiously, despite the best scores on Production and Admissions, India is 4th, behind USA, China and EU. I wonder if the data corresponds to "modern screens" here as well. And like we noticed with the low score on the attendance per capita chart, India should build more theatres. In any case it shows that theatres in India must be packed, at every show, for every film, to sell so many admissions with so few theatres. Which is the contrary to China, where theatres are probably deserted (but reliable data is required to figure this out).
• Conversely, the USA has the largest park of screens in the world, and one of the best "attendance per capita" ratio, but doesn't sell as much as India with lower proficiency. This is explained by the difference in populations by a factor 3.8. We'll see more about that in the next post with theatre seats statistics.
  
• After the 3 major players, the other countries are roughly in the same ballpark, on a much smaller scale, from France (5426) to Russia (1890). The latter making a very low score for such a large population. Mexico, Japan and Brazil as well should be higher in the ranking given their population size.
• These inconsistencies between population size and screens capacity reveal a lack of enthusiasm for cinema by local population, or a lack of infrastructures investments in their exhibition circuit.
  

Active cinema screens (2008/2007) 48 smaller nationsMore countries at the low level, to get a more complete picture worldwide. Likewise, data are either from 2008 or 2007 when available. But as data for smaller countries are harder to find online (because they interest less statisticians and economists...) sometimes the number comes from up to 10 years ago. But it gives an idea of their ranking anyway, since a park of screen doesn't vary dramatically (except in case of a major economical phenomenon).
We may compare the respective ranks of these countries, with their ranks in the previous graphs. But we'll get a better idea with the oncoming "screens per capita" and "audience per screen" charts.
Let's note that from Lebanon downward, there are only a double digit number of screens available for local filmmakers to show their films in their original language to their domestic population. Imagine how one could fund a reasonable budget and plan a profitable career for a film, less than 100 screens at the time, in a couple of weeks! It's like a "limited release in selected cities" in the USA, except that there is no hope to expand in case of success.
It is unbelievable that stars manage to arise and prosper on the international scene in countries like Lebanon (Hadjithomas/Joreige), Serbia (Kusturica), Lithuania (Bartas), Cambodia (Panh)... Please be kind when you insinuate certain indie filmmakers don't make films to please their domestic audience, but allegedly to appeal to international festivals or foreign critics. Cinema is an expensive industry that cannot sustain itself with a handful of spectators only.

World cinema screens history (1985-2008) 10 major nations + EU
Backtracking a couple of decades to see if there are notable trends and variations. Globally there is constant growth between 1985 and 2000, almost double the park of screens everywhere. And then a certain stagnation since then.
Too few data for China and India! Anyone knows where to find a more comprehensive survey for these major cinema nations?
Note: the anomaly for Italy (1996-97) is probably due to a change of survey criteria, making 2 sets of databases that might not cover the same types of cinemas.

World cinema screens history (2005-2008) 19 smaller nations

World cinema screens history (2005-2008) 22 smallest nations


See:

• World Cinema Stats - index

Source:

• Atlas du cinéma, Cahiers du cinéma, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
• Centre National de la Cinématographie (France)
• Focus 1998-2009 : Cannes - Marché du Film (France)
• Motion Picture Aassociation of America (USA)
• Observatoire Europe de l'Audiovisuel (EU)
• My open source spreadsheet (Screens) PDF
  

Seeking World Film Bloggers Desperately

The majority of film bloggers on the English-speaking blogosphere come from the USA essentially, or the UK, and Europe more generally. This is evident on the maps of tracking counters placed on various English film blogs. Very few visitors are outside Europe and North America (which owns the most part of the worldwide internet bandwidth anyway). I suppose this is particular to the English language of course (though it should be the most popular internationally). The situation in France is even worse, French blogs are only visited by people from France (or Belgium and Switzerland).
But I would like to expand the circle of cinephiles to most places on Earth, in order to communicate with local audience, who watch the foreign films we love in their original language, or even films from our countries. Just to establish a contact worldwide beyond language barriers.

I dream of a blogosphere we could navigate to meet film lovers from any imaginable country, and be able to read their thoughts on cinema, in their own language, or translated (one way or the other). I talked about this project for a long time now (here for example), without being able to discover new blogs out there on my own, so I hope to find some help in a collective effort for everyone interested in this endeavour. All help is welcome if you share this concern to meet foreign film bloggers.

If you are a film lover, a film writer, a film critic, a film student, a film scholar, a filmmaker from non-English speaking nations or if you know someone, if you know places where to find them, if you can read these local languages, please join in on this quest to connect cinephiles around the world and gather around the same table.

The area of interest of your blog should be focused on "art-films" of course (I'm less worried about connecting the fans of Hollywood blockbusters), which means the major festival line-ups, local indie films, documentaries and experimental cinema.

To start, in a first phase -urgent priority - the main countries (either because they host the best contemporary masters or because they have a massive movie-going demographic) should be considered in priority on the radar :

• Iran [Farsi]
  
• China/Hong Kong [Chinese]
  
• Anywhere in Africa [Arabic] [Tamazigh] [Wolof] [Bambara] [French]
  
• Taiwan [Chinese]
• South Korea [Korean]
  
• The Philippines [Filipino]
  
• Thailand [Thai]
  
• Argentina [Spanish]
  
• Japan [Japanese]
  
• Mexico [Spanish]
  
• Turkey [Turkish]
  
• India [Hindi] [Tamil] [Telugu] [Kannada] [Malayalam] [Bengali] [Marathi] [Gujarati]
  
• Russia [Russian]
  

But there are many other under-represented places in the world of cinema, like Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Singapore, Israel, Palestine, Georgia, Armenia, Cuba...

And even in Europe, outside of France and the UK, I would like to know where to find the most passionate film bloggers from the underexposed European countries (on the English blogosphere) : Romania, Ukraine, Czech Rep., Iceland, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Switzerland, Greece and to a lesser extant Spain, Italy, Germany...


In a next post (go here), I'll keep updated a list of the links found in every country, by continent. And we'll have 3 categories :

1. local/foreign blogs in English by local people (for direct international communication), or bloggers speaking English as well
   
2. local blogs in local language or non-English foreign languages (requiring proxy translation, which could be worked out eventually with the help of the community or Google Translate)
3. And if there is no personal contact to be found, a local film journal accessible online would be also precious.
   

Contact me via email (see my profile) or in the comments below. Volunteers to help coordinate, investigate, scout the web, translate are welcome. Use your own blogs, contacts, Twitter, Facebook... to relay the announcement of this research and spread the word around.

Journalists vs Academics

In response to the debate at Girish : Building large conversation (7-13-2009)

Opposition of film analysis by film critics and film scholars :

FILM CRITICS	↔ FILM SCHOLARS
• Journalists	↔ • Academics
• Work for the media (industry of communication)	↔ • Work for the university (institutions of knowledge)
• Servant of the collectivity	↔ • Research activity
• Part of the union of film critics	↔ • Part of the society of film studies
• Short articles	↔ • Long erudit essays
• Incisive phrases	↔ • Demonstrative rhetoric
• Clichés	↔ • Jargon
• Burden of proof	↔ • Evidence in methodology
• Subjectivity	↔ • Science
• Judgement	↔ • Understanding
• Taste	↔ • Knowledge

From La Critique de Cinéma, by René Prédal, 2004

::

Interpretative Institutions
Comparison with (1) Journalistic criticism, (2) Essayistic criticism and (3) Academic criticism

PUBLISHING FORMAT

1. Newspapers and popular weeklies (e.g., New York Times, Village Voice)
   Television and radio programs
   
2. Specialized or intellectual monthlies or quarterlies (e.g., Cahiers du cinéma, Artforum, Partisan Review)
   
3. Scholarly journals (e.g., Cinema Journal)
   

FORMAL INSTITUTIONS

1. Employment by periodical
   Professional associations (e.g. NYFCC)
   
2. Employment by periodical
   Galleries, museums...
   Colleges or universities
   
3. Colleges or universities
   Centers and government agencies
   Academic associations (e.g., Society for Cinema Studies)
   

INFORMAL INSTITUTIONS

1. Invisible colleges (network of acquaintances, mentors, disciples...)
2. Circles and salons around periodicals
   Invisible colleges
3. Invisible colleges
   "Schools" (group of practitioners or particular theory or method; e.g. auteur criticsm, feminist criticism)

From: David Bordwell, in Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, 1989.

::

And to the above taxonomy I would add the internet branch of article publications, for those complaining about the crisis of paper publication, since it is possible to find a readership and "peer recognition" online in case of barrage by traditional publishers.
Though these links would probably fall under one of Bordwell's predefined categories (online journals = publishing format; podcast = formal institutions; blogs/forum = informal institutions) :

FILM WRITING IN NEW MEDIA
Likewise : (1) Journalistic criticism, (2) Essayistic criticism and (3) Academic criticism :

1. Professional online press / blog (NYT, Le Monde, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jim Emerson, Serge Kaganski...)
   Corporatist online journal (Undercurrent, Criticine...)
   Independent online periodical (The Auteurs Notebook, Indian Auteur, Daily Plastic...)
   Independent blogosphere (Strictly Film School, Independencia, The Evening Class, The House Next Door...)
   Podcast (Le Masque et la Plume, Daily Plastic...)
   
   
2. Academic online revue (Offscreen, Rouge, cinemascope.it, Undercurrent, Eclipses, Senses of Cinema...)
   Institutional blogs (World Film Festivals, Moving Image Source...)
   Professional websites (The Criterion Collection...)
   Personal webpage / Blogosphere (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Girish, Dave Kehr, Serge Toubiana, FilmJourney, Elusive Lucidity...)
   Video essays (Shooting Down Pictures, Michel Reilhac, The L Magazine...)
   Podcast (Projection Privée, L'Avventura, Pinewood Dialogue...)
   Forum (Girish, Film of the Month Club...)
   
   
3. Scholar online journals (Rouge, e-Jump Cut, Image & Narrative, Journal of the Moving Image, Rhizomes, Cadrage, cinetext...)
   Personal webpage / Blogosphere (David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Spectacular Attractions, DinaView, Craig Keller, Film Studies For Free...)
   Forum (Film-Philosophy, a_film_by, Dave Kehr...)
   Audio-Video masterclass (La Cinémathèque Française, Centre Georges Pompidou, Canal-U, Les Belles Captives Cinématographiques, Berkeley, Monash University, Ciné-Philo, Forum des Images...)

Bordwell on cliché in criticism

If Critics can use the artist's statements as evidence for their interpretation, artists versed in interpretative procedures can use the critics.
A complete list of topoi* at work in film interpretation would run very long, but let me pick out a few which have given pleasure over the years.

1. A critically significant film is ambiguous, or polysemous, or dialogical.
   
2. A critically significant film is strikingly novel in subject, theme, style, or form.
   
3. A critically significant film takes up an oppositional relation to tradition (old version: ironic; new version: subversive).
4. A film should make its audience work.
5. Putting characters in the same frame unites them; cutting stresses opposition.
6. Montage is opposed to mise-en-scène, or camera movement.
7. The first viewing is different from later viewings.
8. Lumière is opposed to Méliès.
9. The image always escapes verbal paraphrase (old version: through richness; new version: through excess or plenitude).
10. The filmmaker in question is not solely a master of technique; the film also harbors profound meanings.
11. In the artist's late period, technique is thrown aside and the work becomes simpler, more schematic, and more profound.
12. The film asks a question but doesn't answer it.
13. The film is a reflection or meditation on a sophisticated philosophical or political issue.
14. The film is Shakespearian (Anglo-American version) or Racinian (French) or Faulknerian (either).
15. The film's style is so exaggerated that it must be ironic or parodic (useful for Sirk, late Vidor, Visconti, Ken Russell, and so on).
16. Previous interpretations of the film are inadequate, if not downright wrong.
    

David Bordwell, in Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, 1989.

* Topos (plural: topoi) : literally "common place".
a traditional theme or rhetorical motif or literary convention

Indie film parody

:::

BAFICI 2009 ads : Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente

Attendance 2008 - World Cinema Stats (3)

Yearly attendance in the world, compared to domestic population (2008) top nations
Horizontally, the red dots to the right are most populous, to the left, less populous. So dots aligned vertically have national population of similar sizes.
Vertically, the red dots to the top are largest yearly movie-going demographics, to the bottom are less movie-going. So dots aligned horizontally have movie-going demographics with similar yearly frequency.
The blue line is the worldwide median, the slope corresponding to the average ratio between movie-going demographic and total population in a given country (this average is largely influenced by the weight of India and China, so it's roughly the middle ground between these 2 giants). The blue area is the side of this limit when the movie-going public is less than world average. The lighter area is the side of the heavier movie-going public are.
We can see India and USA have a demographic that is dramatically attracted to movies. While in China (with a comparable size with India) the theatrical experience has much less penetrated the total population. First I should note this data might not be exact (I suspect this attendance to correspond to only the modern cinemas, and doesn't account for all public screenings organised in rural China). Though, the Chinese are definitely not as enthused by movies as Indians are, and the population as a whole is most certainly below the average line in any case. This might be due to the lack of infrastructures (less movies produced, not enough screens, bad exhibition circuit/marketing). But the situation is obviously different in major cities, or in Hong Kong.

Attendance in the world (2008) zoom in on smaller nations
Same as graph above, in a whole different league, as we could see in the last post. It's also the same blue line (the slope only appear to differs because of the change of axis scale to fit the picture, but it's the same).
So we can see Indonesia and Brazil are the less movie-going demographics, but also Ukraine, Iran, Egypt, The Philippines. Fewer people go to the movies, and less often. It's surprising to see Japan on this side, since it is one of the largest producer of films but could be explained by the smaller park of screens available to the population (which we'll see in a next post).
On the other side, the most active cinephile communities are France, South Korea, UK, Canada, Australia, Spain...


Yearly attendance per capita
(in 2008, 2007 or earlier when data not available)

To corroborate the observation in the previous graphs, here is the ranking of countries by their yearly admissions per capita ratio. So this time we only look at the absolute proportion of movie going population within a country, regardless for the size of this country or the volume of admissions sold. And India, USA and the EU are no longer at the top. We can note that smaller countries, even tiny ones, have a population much more into cinema than the big nations usually associated with active cinephilia. Iceland, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand and Georgia have a remarkable ratio : over 4 admissions bought in a year for every single inhabitant (on average). Only the USA reaches this level, which is definitely the most movie-fan nation in the world, as a whole. France and South Korea are only around 3. And India is only at 2.61, which is remarkable however for a population of over 1 billion inhabitants! India could use a larger circuit of screens (as we'll see in the next post) to reach an even larger demographic. And China, as suspected, is clearly not doing enough to spread cinema throughout the land.

See:

• World Cinema Stats - index

Source :

• Focus Cannes - Marché du Film 1998-2009
  
• Compendium 2001-07
  
• Nation Master 2003
• My open source spreadsheet (Attendance per capita) PDF
  

Admissions - World Cinema Stats (2)

Admissions (1985-2008) 10 major nations with available data (+ EU as indicator)

Admissions (2002-2008) 10 Largest populations on Earth (more or less) ranked by movie-going volume (in brackets the percentage of World population in this nation). These 10 nations combined represent 63 % of total world population in 2008.

Admissions (2004-2008) 27 Smaller Nations (below 200,000,000 tickets sold per year)

World Admissions Shares in 2002

See:

• World Cinema Stats - index

Source:

• Atlas du cinéma, Cahiers du cinéma, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
• Centre National de la Cinématographie (France)
• Focus 1998-2009 : Cannes - Marché du Film (France)
  
• Motion Picture Aassociation of America (USA)
• Observatoire Europe de l'Audiovisuel (EU) 2004-08
  
• Screen Australia (Australia)
• Nation Master
• My open source spreadsheet (Admissions) PDF
  

Production - World Cinema Stats (1)

Last year I did an extensive analysis of the 2007 world market statistics I had in hand for 2007 and the couple previous years. There was lots of numbers in arcane lists... Today, welcome the graphic technology (thanks to Google spreadsheets)! Cahiers publishes an atlas in a special issue, every year since 2004, but since they sold out to Phaidon, this year the atlas has been split in 2 halves and folded inside 2 consecutive issues (May, June 2009) and not bilingual this year unfortunately. Anyway their survey is not consistent, so I have to fill the blanks with other sources. And they don't compile the data to compare the relative positions with other nations, or with other contextual statistics. The profiles they give for individual countries just give numbers that don't make sense if we don't know what range of numbers to expect for such or such country.

Domestic Films Produced (1995-2008) 9 Largest Industries [EDIT graph: India data completed]

Note: successive enlargements of the European Union :

•  EU 15 (since 1995) : Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, UK (EU12 + Austria + Finland + Sweden)
• EU25 (since 2004) : Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, UK (EU15 + Malta, Cyprus, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary)
• EU27 (since 2007): Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania,  Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, UK (EU25 + Bulgaria + Romania)

These are the cinema industries that produce the largest numbers of theatrical movies in the world. We can easily see the disparity between them, and we need to compare them to the size of their population, movie going audience/admissions sold, GDP, and more generally to the film industry/infrastructure/screens available to distribute so much films.
The (arbitrary) psychological threshold here is 365, corresponding to the ability of an industry to put forth 1 new film per day of the year, meaning 7 new local films in each weekly batch of the year! But of course, for these mega-industries the market is split in many non-competitive sub-markets, either in different languages (like India, Europe and China), or in various channels of distributions (multiplexes in main cities, art houses circuit, TV, direct-to-video, VOD, foreign market, black market...). In the USA for instance, they don't distribute on the commercial circuit (for mainstream audience) as many movies as they make, some of them are shelved/postponed or reserved for a limited market.
The European Union data is only indicative (to compare the USA to a market similar in size), since it compiles the numbers from other countries on this graph. And its upward curve is more due to the expansion of the members of the union (15 member-states in 1995, 25 in 2004 and 27 since 2007), than to the progression of individual industries (which are relatively stable as seen at the bottom of the graph).
Note the so called Hollywood "slump" initiated in 2005 (not that dramatic in relation to this span of more than 1 decade), which was aggravated by the Writers' strike of 2008. But they still make more movies than they can digest! [EDIT: actually in 2008, the number of films produced goes below the number of films distributed for the first time in at least a decade]
Now if we compare to India, their boom is properly scary (2 ½ more movies than Hollywood in 2008!). Especially since China should be ranked number 1 (though it's hard to find reliable extensive numbers for the Chinese market). With an average of 25 new movies per week, it's understandable why there is no room for foreign movies in India. But if we look in details, not every single Bollywood film made should be made. they just make movies in a row, on a mindless assembly line, because the Bollywood economy allows it, and that the extremely movie-going audience is supporting them. But this extravagant raise should stop after the exhibitors strike in Bollywood at the beginning of 2009. Until now, Bollywood doesn't seem to hurt as much as Hollywood (!) from the piracy competition and the online offers.
Japan is still the leader of the non-mega-sized countries in the world, and seems to have reached a plateau around 400 films/year since 2006.
The European countries at the bottom show a relatively stable evolution, except for Germany that enjoys a recent notable surge.


Domestic Films Produced (2004-2008) Selected Smaller Industries
I've split these countries in 2 separate graphs for readability of the bottom part, too dense in the top graph. Here the (arbitrary) psychological threshold is 52, corresponding to the ability of an industry to put forth 1 new domestic film every week of the year, on average. Below this threshold, it is impossible to propose to the audience at least 1 local movie amongst the weekly batch of titles distributed every week, in case the local culture matters.
It's difficult to find comprehensive statistics for lesser known countries. This selection only represent the ones which had data from 2004 to 2008, all countries below France. Though notable missing countries with a large production (ranging 90-40) : Bangladesh, Canada, The Philippines, Switzerland, Sweden, Egypt, Austria, Netherlands, Taiwan, Belgium.
The UK seems to be the only European country closely tied to the Hollywood "slump". The others are rather on the raise, especially Germany and Italy which show a remarkable boom.
The Cannes Palme d'Or for Romania in 2007 didn't affect the local artists and producers yet... Though 3 more Romanian films were present in Cannes this year.
The numbers for Iran are quite inconsistent. I wonder if it reflects the instability of the industry (or of the censorship board) or if the survey is just random and unreliable...
We'll look at these countries individually, when compared to their respective population size and ticket sales, in my next posts.


Why looking at the health of foreign markets matter to cinephiles? Because if the movie industry depends on local conjunctures, the production of new films in every corners of the world are important to global film culture as a whole. It's only a competition from the producers' perspective! But viewers don't look at it as a territorial battle where we should should only support our local production. Real cinephiles love foreign movies as much because cinema is a universal language, the language of art, the language of emotions. Local stars, local plot lines, local issues, local language are only marginally significant when what we love is the expression of cinema. So it is meaningful to learn about how other countries fare and how they cope with the recession and survive, the countries that host our favourite auteurs.

See:

• World Cinema Stats -index

Sources:

• Atlas du cinéma, Cahiers du cinéma, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
• Centre National de la Cinématographie (France)
• Focus 1998-2009 : Cannes - Marché du Film (France)
• Motion Picture Association of America (USA)
• Nation Master
• My open source spreadsheet (Domestic Production) PDF
  

CNN hologram in English

"You've never seen anything like this on television" CNN's election night hologram
By HarryTuttle (April 2009) at Rouge (issue 13) May 2009
translated from the French version (Nov 2008)

Forgery, misinterpretation and hidden flaws: televisual media stumble in the era of hyper-information. Let us examine the nature of images used on television, their vulgarisation in public discourse and their onscreen perversion.

It's more about TV (not my preferred domain I must confess) than cinema unfortunately... but now it's out there. I touch on a couple of issues I'm interested in, like the perception of images and the misappropriation of visual constructs, which would require further investigations around the new types of daily life images, on TV and online.
My first full length article published in English language, in no less than the best online journal for Cinema studies : Rouge! Adrian Martin was kind enough to give it a chance and asked me to publish it. Many thanks. That's quite an achievement for a no-name French dude like me. I'm very proud. I could retire happy and satisfied.

French pronunciation

In relation to the article on Truffaut's La Politique des Auteurs (you can read it at the Indian Auteur website : part 1 & 2), I've recorded a MP3 for the pronunciation of these terms. Enjoy :

1. François Truffaut
2. Une Certaine tendance du cinéma français [A certain tendency of French cinema]
3. La Politique des Auteurs [The Policy of Auteurs]
4. auteur
5. Cahiers du cinéma
6. André Bazin
7. Henri Langlois
8. Les Jeunes Turcs [The Young Turks]
9. La Tradition de Qualité [The Tradition of Quality]
10. Réalisme Poétique [Poetic Realism]
11. Réalisme Psychologique [Psychological Realism]
12. La Nouvelle Vague [The New Wave]
13. mise en scène
14. œuvre [work of art/complete filmography]
15. plan séquence [single-shot scene]
16. montage [editing]
17. découpage [cutting]
18. ciné-club
19. cinéaste [filmmaker; and not "cinéphile"!]
20. cinéphile
21. cinéphilie [cinephilia]

Seeds for wider diversity in American culture?

World Cinema Foundation (launched during the 2007 Cannes festival) press conference in Cannes 2009 (15 May 2009)

Kent Jones (General Delegate for the WCF) : "One thing that has a tendency to happen at times in film culture is that things can get insular. These initiatives are all organised to combat that. To get the word out. To make the films known, to get them seen, to get people talking about them. To create an online community that begins with The Auteurs*, that will come to our website.
As we know there are many films available for free, it's easy to see films... The idea of [showing restored prints] for free is to create awareness."

Martin Scorsese (Chairman of WCF) : "I just want to make a point, maybe it's more idealistic. Ultimately, the more the audience has seen these films, they more they want to see other films like them. And then what happens is the audience changes. Which means that movies that are being made around the world could change, cause there is an audience for special movies, for new movies, for a different way to look at the world. Not just blockbusters."

The Green Cine Daily interview with Scorsese and Jones (16 May 2009)
Martin Scorsese : "It's important for these film also to be seen. As an American, to see influences from other countries, other cultures, because it only enriches our culture."

* 4 films previously restored by the WCF and projected in the Cannes Classics program are now available for free online at The Auteurs (original language, subtitled in English), from anywhere in the world (which is quite an achievement in these days of DVD regions and Internet territorial restrictions for viewing!) :

• Hanyo / The Housemaid (1960/Kim Ki-young/South Korea) restored for Cannes Classics 2008
  
• Susuz Yaz / Dry Summer (1964/Metin Erksan/Turkey) restored for Cannes Classics 2008
  
• Touki Bouki (1973/Djibril Diop Mambéty/Senegal) restored for Cannes Classics 2008
  
• Transes (1981/Ahamed El Maanouni/Morocco) restored for Cannes Classics 2007

See introduction to this films written by godfather-filmmakers at the WCF website.

Critical Fallacy 10 : Insularity

Insularity is the tendency of critics to look outside their windows, without making the effort to look behind the corner if the weather is changing, let alone checking out beyond the horizon, on the planet cinema as a whole, to properly contextualize whatever aesthetic trends they come up with to qualify domestic "sensations", and speculate on cinema without any global perspective on the full production of this medium. One can always believe the world is gold when this world is limited to a predefined familiar self-indulgent turf, while ignoring everything outside that could challenge it, especially if it'd pale in comparison to better films, better filmmakers, better cinema

Jonathan Rosenbaum (The House Next Door, 2006) : "To some limited extent, film can be a road into other cultures and other parts of the world, especially considering how isolated America is and how disastrous some of the consequences of those isolations are. You can see that in the newspaper every day. I feel that I am ignorant about the rest of the world, but an obvious way one can at least start to learn is through seeing films from other countries. I think that is an attitude shared by many people that I know. There is always talk about how there is no interest in foreign films, but I don’t think anybody knows what the audience wants. [..]
One thing that has been important to me is in some way to experiment with form in writing, including film criticism. Getting involved with collaborations and exchanges with other writers has also been very fruitful. I have done several books in collaboration with others. Movie Mutations, co-edited by the Australian film critic Adrian Martin, was written by several people from around the world. It’s made up of various exchanges, letters, and so on. Most people’s concept of writing is that it is a very solitary activity, but this was a very social, communal way of working."

Jonathan Rosenbaum (2009) : "[..] this criticism is often found today in different places (i.e., on the Internet and much less often in libraries), that there’s considerably more of it (including academic stuff, omitted from Peary’s survey), that whether or not it’s American is of little consequence (though whether or not it’s in English is vital), and that it’s about many more films than anyone could have possibly had access to between 1968 and 1980."

It's time to realise that since Cinema is one quasi-united phenomenon (as seen at international festivals) therefore Film Criticism is also a one single discourse. Every critic talks about the same films. And English language criticism is hardly limited to the North-American media.

Adrian Martin (Undercurrent, 2006) : "On the general question of reviewing Australian films, I certainly think, for all the reasons that we've been saying, that a film reviewer's contract is with their reader. The contract is not with the film industry, it's not with filmmakers, it's not with the film funding bodies, it's not with the film industry in any way, shape, or form. In other words, the reader has to believe that I am telling the truth about what I felt about that film."

Julie Rigg (Undercurrent, 2006) : "We shouldn't run a sheltered workshop for filmmakers just because they're local."

Lorena Cancela (Undercurrent, 2006) : "There are few occasions on which we Argentinean film critics are asked to discuss our own practice or what we have said or written about this or that. In general, the main topic is New Argentine Cinema (but now if it is dead or alive). Sometimes we tend to ignore what our colleagues are doing, or we pretend that we don't care: 'everybody knows what the colleagues are doing, but nobody talks about it.' "

Personally I believe that the only accountability of critics is toward Cinema, the art itself, the abstract entity. If readers and audience are dumb and demand entertainment, flourish style, star ratings and thumbs up/down... I say critics don't owe them anything! It's the habits of readers that participated to the newspaper crisis, so if we'd listen to them the self-promotional studio publicists would have won, and Film Culture would be left to the pundits...

The problem of insularity is not limited to national borders and domestic production. Sometimes it gets even more refined, breaking up national cinema in smaller territorial niches, defended by their guardians, who justify their own existence by calling the adverse camp "contrarians".

The contrarian fallacy : Armond White vs. the Hipsters (Lost In Negative Space, 2006)

Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader, 2000) : "No less typical was the refusal of the New Yorker to give even capsule reviews to either Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man or Andre Techine’s Thieves, two of the most important U.S. releases of 1996 and the two movies I wanted to discuss on Chicago Tonight. Neither feature was deemed important enough by its film reviewers, yet Dead Man was distributed by Miramax and Thieves by Sony Classics. I don’t think Sony Classics could be blamed for the New Yorker ignoring Thieves; that neglect undoubtedly has much more to do with an overall neglect of foreign-language movies spearheaded by Pauline Kael during her last years as critic there, something that’s become commonplace in virtually all mainstream magazines since."

• see illustration here

Peary on American-centric criticism

In the latest issue of Undercurrent #5 (sporadic publication!) Chris Fujiwara Interviews Gerald Peary, who made a documentary on American Film Criticism (on the poster are ugly caricatures, including Harry Knowles of all reviewers...!)

See comments on this film by David Bordwell and Jonathan Rosenbaum

PEARY : Film criticism = "a profession under siege"

Sieged by who exactly? Readers don't care to read articles... that's not a war, it's free market baby. You might want to rephrase that in order to appropriately address the core of the crisis.

PEARY : "Mine is the first documentary ever to attempt a filmic history of film criticism of one country. May critics in other countries be inspired to make movies detailing their histories.."

If this 1h10 long documentary is the full history of American Film Criticism... then Le Fantôme d'Henri Langlois (2004/Richard/France) is as little comprehensive an overview of French Film Criticism in 3h30, from WW2 till very recently, interviewing most major figures alive.

FUJIWARA : "The question of what qualifies a film critic is a nagging one throughout the film. The rationale that seems to emerge most powerfully is that of John Powers ("getting paid") and Harlan Jacobson ("I got the job"). Such a response of course answers the question, "By what right do you call yourself a film critic?" But it doesn't answer the more important questions, which are, "What is a good film critic? What should a film critic be?"

"getting paid" and "i got the job" qualify any job you can think of! and it's not a pertinent answer to the question "By what right do you call yourself a film critic?" either!
If we're playing Jeopardy, the correct question was "What makes you an employee of film review pages?"
If you think getting paid to write on movies makes you a (rightful) film critic, you took the problem from the wrong end, the bureaucratic end. If we are talking about "right", a moral credential, a peer recognition, an achievement test, an intellectual authority in the domain of cinema... salary and employers have nothing to do with that. And the point of this "crisis" was precisely that employers replaced all critics and editors by unqualified reviewers!

PEARY : "Sarris was an overt auteurist, Kael a covert one, but between them they changed cinema into what is now widely regarded as a director's art."

Sure, and you call the French chauvinist? I know it's a documentary on AMERICAN film criticism... but when Cahiers made American critics rediscover their own American directors, it's ungrateful to so boldly overlook the role of Bazin, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, etc. in establishing the status of the auteur, and American auteurs in particular!

PEARY : "the most appropriately valued American critics around the globe are people like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jim Hoberman, who themselves have global perspectives about cinema."

Amen.

FUJIWARA : "Knowles's remark might suggest that there is some underground of young rebel film critics who are occupying a similar position now to that which Sarris occupied in the 1960s, defending contemporary films that were despised by traditionalist critics because they were commercial films, genre films."

In principle, maybe. But that doesn't mean that any blogosphere pundit like Harry Knowles should be taken seriously just because their taste is somewhat subversive or anti-establishment... There is a lot of stuff outside the enshrined pantheon of acclaimed cinema... and most of it is deservedly rubbish. The underdog Truffaut challenged was a genius. There aren't many Hitchcocks in today's overlooked mainstream directors!

NYT with mini-balls

It's too rare not to mention. The venerable institution that is the New York Times finally shows some balls and takes a quick break from sucking up to Hollywood ! Are there actual critics in charge in this newspaper? As in critics whose job is to defend the liberty/diversity of cinema, not the other kind of "critics" with stars in their eyes when they talk about the industrial production. I had lost all hopes... This is a big day for American Film Criticism! Please keep at it, EVERY WEEK, until something changes in Hollywood! Thank you.

Memos to Hollywood (NYT, 5-3-2009) :

Manohla Dargis : "Foreign-film distribution in the United States is in a state of acute crisis: New Yorker Films, which released masterworks from the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Ousmane Sembene, was recently forced out of business, and other companies are on the brink. If you don’t support off-Hollywood cinema now, it will disappear from theaters and sooner than you think."

* * *

AO Scott : "Did you notice the last election? People paid a lot of attention, took sides, argued back and forth. As they had, come to think of it, for much of the previous eight years. And yet so many of your “serious” movies tiptoe around areas of real public concern, trying to be vaguely topical while strenuously working to avoid offending anybody. As a result, nobody bothers to go see them. So why not risk troubling the waters a little bit? A lot of the audience likes to argue about movies and also about politics. Why not feed that appetite instead of suppressing it?"

* * *

Manohla Dargis : "The tripod is your friend. Few filmmakers can pull off florid handheld camerawork because most aren’t saying all that much through their visuals, handheld or not. (Also: Shaking the camera does not create realism.) Though it’s a cliché of contemporary cinema, fiction and nonfiction both, handheld camerawork that calls aggressive attention to itself tends to make empty images seem even emptier."

Well, I can't be totally happy, of course, because I'm a whiner.
I notice a pattern. The bulk of their complaints is scenario, scenario, scenario and cinematography. Apparently that's what critics find wrong with Hollywood. That's what they think cinema is.
They want polished genre, certain characters and not others, less violence, more censorship tolerance, less homophobia, more women, less of that actress, more of that actor, less plot twist, more of... of je ne sais quoi. Are they at the supermarket, or at the fast food of "make-your-own-movie-by-the-menu"? They relay the typical complaints that the average audience has been making for years. But is that really the concern of actual film critics???
Reading this, we'd think that all there is in a good film is a recipe approved by the audience, with the right ingredients in the mix...


Are there people out there who still care about the art in this commercial industry? Who talks about cinema with care for inspiration, intentions, message, worldview, understanding of humanity, aesthetics, mastery of the medium, production of an original visual language regardless for textbooks and conventions?


Well Hollywood wouldn't read these memos otherwise, and the NYT would cut the movie pages if it didn't promote weekly distribution...

Film Theory Branding

When did the last major movement arose in world cinema? Maybe we go through an epoch of individualism, maybe the time of ensemble momentum is over... Always more of the same, with slight variations in synopsis, star names and special FX budget. Even the names of all new pseudo-trends lack personality !

There are film critics who think they are writers, you know, wordsmith artists, poets ! (AO Scott is one of them, see also my previous post).
Well, I don't. In my humble opinion. I've said it many times before, literature is a minor aspect of criticism... What kind of theory branding would we get if these guys were bad at writing...? Our critics need to bribe their muse if they want to claim the divine inspiration of literary artists. It just proves that theoreticians are either unimaginative or that the trends in question are not original enough to deserved a complete name change. New movements always have to be compared to something that existed before, as if it was just a diluted/mutated continuation of the same old. Historians are conservative, always falling back on something known and afraid to call the future by its name.

When you look back at history, you need every period to stand out for itself, to be clearly identifiable, to have iconic names easily distinguishable among the endless list of artists throughout evolution of Art. We don't need distinct arts to share a similar name, soundalike, or even ambiguous.
There are various common blunders in theory branding : empty, generic, self-referencial, obsolete, ambiguous, relative or tautological terms. New-something or Post-something or Adjective-cinema... let's take a moment to free bash a bit the branding of film movements.


NEO NEO REALISM

What is the name AO Scott branded the new emerging American trend? "Neo-Neo Realism" ! When a label is that unoriginal, it doesn't need a name of its own. At least "Mumblecore" shows an ounce of creativity (even if its descriptor is derogatory instead of appreciative; an aesthetic defined by its detractors?).
I know it was just the title of an article, not an official taxonomy, with as much authority as is expected from the "institutional weight" of the New York Time. Not only the direct reference to Italian Neorealism was far-fetched, but stacking neo's in front of existing labels is just laziness.
What is "new-new"? Is it better than "new"? What is a new version of an old trend that wasn't new anymore? Is it Realism 3.0 ? (Realism = 1.0; Neo Realism = 2.0) are we really at a place in History when we can affirm we've reached the 3rd era of whatever is "realism"? The new and improved reality... while everyone else around speaks of virtual reality. Forget about all your old overrated realism... only now do we get the real deal, the latest upgrade brought to you by the NYT.


NEW

Whether it's Neo/Nouveau/Nuevo/Novo/New... it says it's new, that's all. Nothing more.
This is a relative adjective. The effect of novelty is destined to wear off and get outdated. A couple years/decades down the line, after its extinction, the movement is not longer "new" and this word loses entirely its significance. So it's generally a bad idea to use "new" in a title for posterity, a self-centred, short term perspective consideration.
It is also a tautological adjective, meaning that it's only new because it says it's new. If you'd invent a new label, you wouldn't need to add "new" to make sure everyone understands it's unlike what we had before.
Examples : Neorealism, New Cinema, New Hollywood, New American Cinema, New Indian Cinema, New German Cinema, Nuevo Cine, Nuevo Cine, Cinema Novo, Novo Cinema, Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity, Neo-Noir...

NB : Avant-Garde
This is a military term (one sufficient reason not to use it in Art history!), the vanguard, the troops moving at the head of an army. Again it's a relative term. It refers to artists ahead of their time, preceding the aesthetic changes of the conservative, mainstream establishment. But one is only ahead for so long, before getting caught up by the crowd, appropriated, digested and standardised. Besides it's an historical category defining a zone of production outside of the norm, and varies along with the progress of history. But it's not defined by its production, or by artists themselves. You're no longer part of the AG when you're not anymore innovator. The AG of today is not the same content/concern/conceptual reflection/modus operandi than what the AG used to be in the 20ies... obviously. Contrary to popular belief, it's not a group of people, or a cohesive movement. You can't say I want to be in the AG, like you could say you want to make a film Noir or a Soviet Montage film, which are clearly defined stylistically. You're part of the AG if your work deserves it, in regard to the artistic production (mainstream and marginal) in the world. There is absolutely no inner (stylistic, formal, content-driven) coherence among AG filmmakers.


REALISM

What is Realism ? Or conversely, what isn't "realism" in cinema ? The concept of realism in the realm of staged production is absurd in the first place. Would anything else than documentaries tend to some form of realism ? Even most documentaries keep editing their way away from actual realism, allegedly for narrative improvement.
I know what is fiction. But to establish a scale of realism among rather-realist films is very subjective and tricky.
Why appropriate this word of the common language to redefine it with a narrow interpretation, highly connoted with specific stylistic traits that have little to do with off-camera reality? Why make everyone else refer to this appropriation ever after ? This is generally a bad idea to use a common word to brand a singular style.
Examples : Poetic Realism, Psychological Realism, Socialist Realism, Surrealism, Neorealism, Neo-Neo Realism...


MODERNISM

What is Modernism? The problem is this word has already been overused in other disciplines, referring to eras that don't match. For historians, the Modern Era is between the XVth and XIXth century in France (and ending later for English historians in 1920); for Painting art it's between 1907 and 1960, for Musical art it's also the first half of the XXth century; Modernity in Literature is essentially the XIXth century and ends at the beginning of the XXth century. It's usually an opposition to the preceding establishment of Classicism.
In cinema, Modernity appeared in the mid-60ies and found its prime in the 70ies. Even French theory of La Modernité and American theory of Modernism don't quite agree on the scope and time frame of this aesthetic movement. To Jacques Aumont ["MODERNE ? Comment le cinéma est devenu le plus singulier des arts", 2007], cinema has never been "modern" yet. To Adrian Martin ["Que es el cinema moderno ?", 2008], modernist films are still being made today.
The adjective "modern" is a relative temporality, literally it means "contemporary". Since every period we live is "modern", the term loses any meaning as an identifiable time marker. It's confusing and it's NOT specific.
What is Post-Modernism? the post-present! building up on an already dubious term. Very informative indeed. Thanks nomenclaturists.


WAVES

Everything and anything nowadays is called a "New Wave"... La Nouvelle Vague was one major movement indeed, but not to the extent of a normalised namesake franchise for every new generation, on and on, ad infinitum. It's a non-specific descriptor. It's a vague paraphrase for "new movement", thus completely interchangeable. It's a wave, OK, it's new, OK... but it could be anything, as long as it's a new trend of something, good or bad, short-lived or long-lasting. So when you call something a "new wave" it doesn't say anything about it. A name without purpose, without intention, without intrinsic self-explanatory definition.
Repeating "new wave" for every new generation in every country makes no sense. Please stop it with the "new waves"! Get to work guys, come up with your own unique name, so we can get a rich and colorful overview of cinema history.
Examples: Nouvelle Vague/French New Wave, Japanese New Wave/Nuberu Bagu, Argentinian New Wave, Romanian New Wave, Australian New Wave, German New Wave, Taiwan New Wave, Thai New Wave, Persian/Iranian New Wave, Czech New Wave, Brazilian New Wave, Hong Kong New Wave, British New Wave...


ADJECTIVE CINEMA and -ISM

There are a lot of movements only defined by an adjective too. Obviously it's less empty than the above categories of brands. The adjective is there to qualify this movement, and eventually set it apart from the rest, if the word is specific enough. Again, a generic adjective, too often used in other types of films, will make this exclusive appropriation of a common term seem overreaching and confusing.
Examples : Free Cinema, Direct Cinema, Jeune Cinema; Impressionism, Expressionism, Realism, Situationism, Divism...


Related:

• Sabouraud a minima (3) 

Neo-Neo

I like it when critics break out of their ivory tower and engage with each others writings. I don't care who is right, who is wrong, or whether anyone is pertinent (that's a matter of interpretation and partisanship I guess)... What's important is that it proves film criticism is being read by people who try to chew it before swallowing it whole, that it's thought-provoking, that it invites debate, that it feeds a thriving organic Film Discourse. And Film Discourse is not the gospel of whoever has the privilege of being published and get media circulation.


In fact, I agree with most of Brody's rebuttal as well as the entire counter-rebuttal of AO Scott. However I'm not following his "Neo-Neo Realism" catch, which was the main article (NYT, March 17, 2009) at the origin of this mini-polemic.

George Washington (2000/Gordon Green)
Our Song (2000/McKay)
Man Push Cart (2005/Bahrani) Iran
Half Neslon (2006/Fleck)
In Between Days (2006/Kim So Young) Korea
Chop Shop (2007/Bahrani) Iran
Old Joy (2007/Reichardt)
Sugar (2008/Fleck)
Goodbye Solo (2008/Bahrani) Iran
Treeless Mountain (2008/Kim So Young) Korea
Ballast (2008/Hammer)
Wendy and Lucy (2008/Reichardt)

It's tempting indeed to figure out what the cinema of the XXIst century Recession looks like, but all the films AO Scott cites were conceived, written and produced before the stock market crash (Oct 2008) and the official recession (Dec 2008). I also disagree, like Brody, that this "social-realism" trend is so sudden (coinciding with the DVD release of Burnett's film?).
I would also like to point out that some of his examples aren't even American filmmakers... so them making films in the USA doesn't really make them part of a trend that would be typically American.


Brody goes all the way back to Film Noir and the 50ies... which are slightly more genre-coded and stylized than what we would expect in a neorealist manner. It would be a stretch to write in the NYT that nothing happened in America around the realm of realism. (I would hope Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, would be more precise on this subject than both of them)
Burnett for one, the New York scene with Cassavetes and some of the Underground, or the New Hollywood and the outsider hippy dramas, early Jarmusch, some Altman.
But more recently, we already saw several indie films fitting Scott's description even before 9/11.

I'm thinking of :
Smoke (1995/Wang), Sue (1997/Kollek), Sunday (1997/Nossiter), Buffalo '66 (1998/Gallo), The Straight Story (1999/Lynch), Judy Berlin (1999/Mendelsohn), Bobby G Can't Swim (2000/Montias), Apartment #5C (2002/Nadjari), The Station Agent (2003/McCarthy), Land of Plenty (2004/Wenders), Keane (2004/Kerrigan), Bubble (2005/Soderbergh), Day Night Day Night (2006/Loktev), Quinceañera (2006/Glatzer/Westmoreland), The Princess of Nebraska (2007/Wang), A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2007/Wang) ... just to name a few.
I'm not saying these films are the American Neorealism, but they are as close/far from Italian Neorealism than the ones AO Scott cites, therefore should be incorporated to this reflection on the subject, and its timeline extended.

There I disagree with Brody that it's lame cinema. Most of them are much more interesting than an Eastwood flick. So in a way I agree with AO Scott's general appreciation of this type of realism, but not with the way he simplifies it.

As for the silly name itself "neo-neorealism"... I'll keep that for another post (read here).

And if like me you wonder how long will they keep trumpeting around that the "institutional weight" (sic AO Scott) of the NYT paper press is more reliable than the internets... here is a couple of fact-checking nit picks at what an editor green lights for mass distribution :

AO Scott : "“Chop Shop,” released last winter, is, if anything, even more deeply Iranian in mood and method, in part because its protagonist is a child — something of a hallmark of Kiarostami’s mid-’90s work in particular — and also because it seems at once utterly naturalistic and meticulously composed."

I think he meant to say Kiarostami's 1970-89 work (from The Bread and the Alley, to Where is The Friend's Home? and Homeworks), not mid-90s (Taste of Cherry...) much more adult since Close Up in 1990 (with the exception of one single film : Through the Olive Trees in 1994).

AO Scott : "That film [Taste of Cherry], which shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997, explores the uneasy bond between a driver and passenger, one of whom turns out to want the other’s help in committing suicide."

This is the problem with expeditive encapsulation of a synopsis in a one liner... Why on Earth would you want people who didn't see the film to think it's about a pro-euthanasia hitch-hiker who assists someone's suicide? The guy he's looking for is to bury him, an undertaker, not to help him die. This technical detail might be too subtle, but I do think it will alienate readers (for the wrong reason). The film is a fascinating existential reflection around a metaphysical taboo. It explores the spiritual journey toward suicide, and the various reactions of society to this project; not suicide itself which is relegated to a postscript. People who saw the film know it's not a "suicidal movie".

AO Scott : "AN INTEREST IN MOVIES from other countries is too often, even among people who should know better, taken as a sign of snobbery, an overrefined devotion to the esoteric and the difficult. There may be some commercial benefit as well as creative satisfaction in aspiring to be the next Tarantino or Scorsese — or even the next Spike Lee, Kevin Smith or Wes Anderson. But to set out to be the next Dardenne Brothers, the next Kore-eda or the next Kiarostami is to court stares of incomprehension from your peers and polite demurrals from financial backers."

So the fact that Scorsese borrowed from Italian cinema, Tarantino from Hong Kong and Anderson from Truffaut doesn't make them snob because they became big powerhouse stars? How is the situation any different with the new generation of filmmakers borrowing from Kore-eda, Dardenne bros or Kiarostami ??? What I can see is that the reception of the American public and critics alike to any type of artfilm (i.e. non-Hollywood or non-mainstream) is irrationally anti-intellectual, defensively jingoist, culturally limitative... always draging down cinema to the lowest common denominator to avoid exposing the average crowd to anything culturally challenging. As if it was a demeaning challenge to think outisde the box, to discover the world stage, to expand the scope of individual taste...

New Indian Auteur website

Nitesh (Winds From the East) and his friends has just opened a new website and a community of cinephiles in India which goal is to promote artfilms and Auteurist Indian cinema in the land of the Bollywood hegemony. The manifesto statement can be read here. There are also a lot of cine club events throughout regions of India as well as participation to retrospectives on foreign cinema. And I wrote for them an article on Truffaut's article "Une certaine Tendance du cinéma français"; the first part is up now.
Cheers to an exciting adventure developing now.

FINALLY…persistence paid. Days of dilemmas, confusion, indecision, uncertainty, and countless embarrassed postponements later, the group managed to strike the first death knell finally, as it launched (the beta version) of its own website, www. indianauteur.com, in the wee hours of the morning, on 12th Feb 2009.

The inaugural issue features reviews, the much-read Delhi Manifesto, details of upcoming events by the group, and the various extensive, and exhaustive features on various topics related to the state of Indian cinema. The issue also touches upon an unique topic of Film Education to inform and help Indian readers get acquainted with different styles, forms of cinema and film criticism. HarryTuttle, French cinephile author of Screenville talks about Truffaut and his manifesto in the first issue.

The group held a little party to commemorate a sort of an official announcement of the launch, on the morning of 12th Feb, at Café Turtle, situated in Khan Market. The launch had as its chief guest, Dr. Ziaei, Director, Iran Culture House; along with a few members of the group.

"Congratulations to them. Best wishes, and hope they grow as great writers and filmmakers in an international film event", said Dr. Ziaei.

CNN Hologram at Obama's election

Francophile only :

Quand CNN convie un spectre de Star Wars (Novembre 2008)

J'avais écrit ce texte après les élections américaines de Novembre 2008 pour la revue "Spectres du cinéma", et comme le numéro suivant ne sort toujours pas, je le publie ici pour qu'il aie un semblant d'actualité avec l'inauguration de la prise de pouvoir du président Obama. Mais c'est déjà de l'histoire ancienne. Enfin, je trouvais ça amusant à l'époque.
Ma participation à cette revue incertaine s'achève ici.