Monthly Archive for July, 2010

Film Critic and Professor, Emanuel Levy, speaking in LA on The Image

Published on July 30, 2010 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

emanuel_headshot

As a film author, professor and critic, Levy will speak in a plenary session at The Image Conference, 2-3 December 2010 at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA.

Emanuel Levy belongs to a small group of scholars who have juggled two full-time careers, as film professor and as film critic. He has taught at Columbia University, New School for Social Research, Wellesley College, ASU, where he was chair between 1990 and 1992, and now at UCLA Film School.

He is a voting member of five groups: Hollywood Foreign Press (HFPA), Los Angeles Film Critics (LAFCA), Broadcast Film Critics (BFCA), National Society of Film Critics (NSFC), and the International Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci). He has served on the grand juries of 45 international film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Montreal, Locarno, Taormina, San Francisco, Hawaii. More…

In Praise of Polaroid

Published on July 25, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

samaras_lucas_2006_4_1_detail1

From Fans in a Flashbulb…

Due to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of Minnesota’s ruling against Polaroid in 2009, the company had to sell part of its extensive photography collection to meet its creditors’ monetary demands. The sale took place in New York in June at Sotheby’s, and it seems an appropriate time to remember the amazing contributions that Polaroid has made to the art of photography.

In the 1960s Polaroid established its Artists Support Program in which it traded cameras and film to artists in exchange for their Polaroid prints. In this way, the company amassed a collection that includes works by Ansel Adams, Chuck Close, Lucas Samaras, Andy Warhol, and William Wegman. These artists, and many others, were drawn by the portability, immediacy, and simplicity (except for the 20 by 24 inch and 40 by 80 inch cameras) of Polaroid’s products.

The images above from ICP’s Collection both use Polaroid technology. Samaras used a SX-70 camera and manipulated the print during processing. Warhol used Polacolor Type 108 film. More…

Mini-series–In an austere climate for publishing, one innovation is booming: brief studies of single films or TV shows.

Published on July 24, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

doctor-who

From Diane Negra at The Times Higher Education…

In an era of fiscal and intellectual uncertainty in academic publishing, where both the traditional monograph and the anthology are under stress, publishers of media studies books are seemingly in agreement about the attractions of one particular form: the short single-film/TV series study.

Running at about half the length of the conventional monograph and organised to attract both scholarly readers and bookshop browsers, titles of this kind represent a relatively robust area of publication in the discipline. Where once the British Film Institute Classics/Modern Classics stood alone in the category, other series devoted to such books have proliferated in recent years. One can now point to examples such as American Indies from Edinburgh University Press, Spin-Offs from Duke University Press, TV Milestones from Wayne State University Press, Studies in Film and Television from Wiley-Blackwell and Cultographies from Wallflower Press, among others.

The rise of this sort of book as an intellectual/commercial phenomenon has occurred (not coincidentally) in tandem with the popularisation of the DVD box set and the expansion of “serious” internet commentary about media, some of it by academics writing for forums such as FlowTV, In Medias Res and Antenna. It also accompanies the much-lamented (if arguable) death of popular film criticism in print. More…

(Image: TV Milestones Series)