A Handful of Reads

-- Cinematheque Ontario is doing a series, curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin, on essay films. Also: Andrew Tracy on essay films at Moving Image Source.

-- Glenn Kenny on Cinemascope at the Auteurs Notebook; David Bordwell is among those who weigh in after the post.

-- Bordwell: on the sexual use of bedposts in movies; on Shaw Brothers widescreen cinema; and on four little-known but interesting Hollywood films from 1933.

-- Dave Kehr in the NYT: two horror film articles (one and two); on new Sirk and Buñuel DVDs; and on Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. (Also: Dan North on the Zemeckis.)

-- From the Viennale, Gabe Klinger reflects on film festivals. Also: Gabe on the AFI Fest.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum: on "recycled cinema" (Rivette's Divertimento and Stone's Natural Born Killers); a dialogue between Jonathan and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa on Kiarostami's Shirin; on Resnais and Marker's Statues Don't Die; and on his favorite Ford film, The Sun Shines Bright (1953), which I've never seen but just found online in a used VHS copy.

-- An autodidact's joy: "250 Free Courses from Top Universities," all online.

-- Catherine Grant: links to some introductions to film studies; a collection of studies of the close-up; and writings in phenomenological film and media studies.

-- Chris Cagle evaluates several currently used film history textbooks.

-- Michael Guillen assembles a large post of Robert Beavers' comments to audiences during the filmmaker's recent 2-week residency in San Francisco.

-- Ben Sachs relates Michael Mann to 19th century painting at The Auteurs Notebook.

-- Michael Anderson at Tativille offers an essay on the "taxonomy of the 360-degree panorama."

-- Michael Byrne at The Nation on the films of Dusan Makavejev.

-- Pedro Costa discusses his Jeanne Balibar documentary, Ne Change Rien, with Scott Foundas: “When the Lumière brothers did a shot, the movement inside the shot is almost impossible to re-create today [...] I am always very afraid when I see a little dog crossing the street in a Lumière brothers film, afraid it’s going to be crushed by a Model T. It’s something very concrete, this menace. Then Chaplin did the same thing consciously, and Stroheim took it further. We could see so many things in those films that, today, you only see in some Filipino or Chinese films, or sometimes on TV, in some documentaries. Everything beautiful and everything dangerous and everything that has to do with society disappeared a little bit from films. I’m becoming very reactionary, but Straub would say you have to go back to the past to push things forward.”

-- Newly discovered blog: Matthew Holtmeier's Cinema Without Organs.

pic: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), in Jean-Pierre Gorin and Cinematheque Ontario's essay film series.