Karel Zeman was a Czech animator probably best known for his movies Journey to the Beginning of Time and The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. He used stop-motion animation, cartoons, puppetry, colorization, and live action to create surreal and otherworldly films of amazing beauty. Sadly (for some), there's not a lot on the internet in English about the man.
posted on Jul 6, 2008 - View this thread

Koyaanisqatsi
posted on May 10, 2008 - View this thread

Dressing a dog up as a person is I think not a very good thing. But when I do it, it's fine. William Wegman's Early Videos. Short Films. Trio/Metropolis/Guitar. Clips from his feature, The Hardly Boys.

David Hart's David Hockney meets William Wegman
posted on Mar 24, 2008 - View this thread

His career started with the memorable poster he created for Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, but encompassed so many more iconic movie posters of our time. ET? His work. Blade Runner? His too. The Lion King? Also his. You may not recognize the name, but the body of work speaks for itself. Although I didn't know his name back then, his art (especially this) made me want to design movie posters as a kid. He died last week at age 59. RIP John Alvin.
posted on Feb 13, 2008 - View this thread

Scans from a storybook adaptation of John Sutherland's 1959 animated film Rhapsody of Steel.
posted on Jan 15, 2008 - View this thread

The Star Wars illustrations and posters of Noriyoshi Ohrai.
posted on Jan 12, 2008 - View this thread

The short films of Floris Kaayk and Sil van der Woerd blend live-action footage and computer animation. Metalosis Maligna. Swim. Duet. Order Electrum.
posted on Dec 22, 2007 - View this thread

High speed camera.
posted on Nov 4, 2007 - View this thread

Billions and Billions astrophotography CCD gallery / film gallery / equipment / tutorials
posted on Sep 14, 2007 - View this thread

The Color of Top Grossing Movies. A movie’s theatrical poster is only a very small part of the larger marketing and hype machine that turns movies into spectacular blockbusters, but as part of a whole, they are fairly representative of the “image” of any given movie. So, as an exercise in color trends, and to see if any significant pattern emerged, I decided to break down the colors of 25 posters — the top 5 of each MPAA category.
posted on Sep 12, 2007 - View this thread

The author of this site takes screen-shots from long-pan scenes of classic animation and puts them together to re-create the original larger background images. Much cooler than it sounds, honest. [via MeFi's own kokogiak, sort of]
posted on Aug 10, 2007 - View this thread

How to make a film like Hitchcock would have. Also, a sociological perspective on guilt and innocence in Hitchcock's work - rituals of liminality (pdf). (via)
posted on Jun 20, 2007 - View this thread

Cloned Disney cels: page 1 [Russian, bad English], page 2 [Russian, bad English]
posted on Apr 10, 2007 - View this thread

From extra sheep and mountains in Brokeback Mountain, to flipping around shops and removing a leg in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Buzz Image provides an extensive portfolio of their CG and FX work. And plenty of beavers.
posted on Dec 20, 2006 - View this thread

UbuWeb has converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats. via WFMU.
posted on Nov 28, 2006 - View this thread

Starting January 1st, the so-called 'Godfather' of avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas will podcast one short film per day, for a full year. If you can't wait till January here are 2 of Mekas's films to tide you over: Zefiro Torna and Hare Krishna. Or see the 40 short films being shown at a gallery in New York. [Via this NPR report, which, if you're already familiar with Mekas and his work, is likely the most interesting link here.]
posted on Nov 6, 2006 - View this thread

Blemph-O! Gymnasium - tHE oFFICIAL pAUL nw pROCH wEBSITE?! More on pAUL pROCH, here, here and here. Warning: this site is so not web 2.0...
posted on Aug 25, 2006 - View this thread

Ernest and Bertram --short film, formerly one of the best films you can't see after debuting at Sundance in 2002, with Sesame's lawyers then cracking down and forcing it to be pulled--now on youtube.
posted on Aug 15, 2006 - View this thread

Mona Lisa and other classics in clay animation. Joan C. Gratz is the talented artist behind this and other projects. This particular short film won an academy award for best animated short film in 1992. I am surprised to have never viewed it before today. Wikipedia has next to nothing on Gratz or her works.
posted on Aug 14, 2006 - View this thread

The 1 Second Film. 12 giant frames. One giant movie. 90 minutes of credits. All profits to the Global Fund for Women. It's all part of a plan.
posted on Jul 21, 2006 - View this thread

CON-CAN Movie Festival is an online international short film festival connecting creators and viewers all around the world. (Win/Mac compatible)." Thirty international short films available in the screening room.
posted on Jul 12, 2006 - View this thread

Son of Rambo (not to be confused with Rambo IV: Holy War/End of Peace) is a Hammer and Tongs film about two kids in the 80s making a home video sequel to First Blood. No teaser or trailer available as of post time, but there is a showcase of illustrations by hand-picked and contributing artists that claim to cover the era, themes and content of the film.
posted on Jun 20, 2006 - View this thread

Len Lye: New Zealander Len Lye was a restless maverick - a pioneer of films without cameras (drawing directly onto the celluloid) and kinetic art (CD available through Atoll, sound samples here and here), and he was also quite handy with poems and inks. More about his Windwand and recently installed Waterwhirler on Flickr. Coralised open directory of short Waterwhirler movies here.
posted on May 30, 2006 - View this thread

Drama is impossible today. I don't know of any. Drama used to be the belief in guilt, and in a higher order. This absolutely cruel didactic is impossible, unacceptable for us moderns. But melodrama has kept it. You are caged. In melodrama you have human, earthly prisons rather than godly creations. Every Greek tragedy ends with the chorus — "those are strange happenings. Those are the ways of the gods". And so it always is in melodrama.
His career as a film director lasted more than 40 years, but Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) is remembered for the melodramas he made for Universal in Hollywood between 1954 and 1959, his "divine wallow": Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1958, William Faulkner considered it the best screen adaptation of one of his novels), Imitation of Life (1959) -- all considered for decades little more than a camp oddity. Now audiences are beginning to look deeper at the films of Douglas Sirk, at how, in megafan Todd Haynes' words, they are "almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths". Now, lucky Chicagoans can enjoy "Douglas Sirk at Universal", matinees at the Music Box. More inside.
posted on Apr 29, 2006 - View this thread

The Polaroid Photography Collective has a number of links to some great galleries. The multi-shot panoramas are especially nice. {some images may be nsfw}
posted on Apr 6, 2006 - View this thread

Piero Scaruffi is a normal person. Like so many others, he ponders knowledge, language, and art from time to time. When he travels, he takes pictures. Just like everyone else. Sure, he has his thoughts about politics and world affairs, who doesn't? And when he's done with all of this he just wants to rock. Exactly like you. See?
posted on Feb 23, 2006 - View this thread

"He was someone who acted out our psyches ... He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them on-screen... the history of Lon Chaney is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that's grotesque, that the world will turn away from."
A Valentine for Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces. (BugMeNot for the first link; more inside)
posted on Feb 18, 2006 - View this thread

The always great (and frequently linked) RetroCrush currently has an exhibit on Polish movie posters for western films; seemingly devoid of the original branding & identity art, it's fun to try and guess what movie the images could even be trying to promote. Some are beautiful, some are amateurish, all are intriguing.
posted on Feb 12, 2006 - View this thread

The Man With The Magnétoscope.
"How marvelous to be able to look at what you cannot see... cinema, like Christianity, is not founded on historical truth. It supplies us with a story and says: Believe — believe come what may."
Jean Luc Godard's 'Histoire(s) du Cinéma' at UCLA.
posted on Feb 7, 2006 - View this thread

And suddenly, in my memory, everything turns real: the summer breeze of Izu, the lazy sun of an early afternoon, the stale smell of water standing in the rice fields. For a moment it is that day in 1956, 37 years ago, and I am standing there, 33 years old myself. See—just to the left of the camera, just out of range. Here comes Mifune running, and there stands my younger ghost, right of that pillar, just off screen... And the summer sun beats down and the fresh breeze of Izu bathes my face, and then the story continues and the film ends and the lights go up and the students open their notebooks and I stand up and began talking about the influence of the Noh.
Donald Richie (previous post), the worldwide authority on Japanese film, shares his movie memories.
posted on Feb 1, 2006 - View this thread

Cellfilms. Ithica College in New York is hosting the Cellflix Film Festival, and has asked students between 13 and 20 to submit 30-second movies shot entirely with their cell phones. They have narrowed down the nearly 200 entries they received to 10 finalists that can be found here. (My votes to the shadow puppets and the progression of life.)
posted on Jan 27, 2006 - View this thread

"One could go on, and one will -- praising (...) the National Center for Jewish Film for releasing all four of Edgar Ulmer's Yiddish films in restored editions. But the DVD player is beckoning, and I think it is time for me to get back to the couch".
The National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF) is a unique nonprofit motion picture archive, distributor and resource center housing the largest, most comprehensive collection of Jewish-theme film and video in the world. In their archives you can discover the works of Leo Fuchs, the "Yiddish Fred Astaire", restored gems (scroll down) like "Motl the Operator" and re-releases like "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg". (More on Greenberg, the Jewish kid who challenged Babe Ruth’s homerun record here, more on the NCJF inside).
posted on Jan 9, 2006 - View this thread

Using fine-art images to promote movies: "But it was Mr. Kessell's "Florilegium" (or "collection of floral images") daguerrotypes that caught Mr. Palen's eye: each image is close-up of a surgical instrument, so poetically rendered that it seems almost organic. Some of the macabre implements resemble exotic flowers. One, from a distance, could be mistaken for the horns of a gazelle. "We were sort of blocked, and all the pieces fell into place once I saw that image," Mr. Palen explained. A deal was made to use that daguerreotype [to promote the upcoming Tarantino-produced film "Hostel"], which actually shows a surgical clamp. [The poster] now appears in theaters and on widespread promotions. [Side: direct WMV link of Tarantino spazing out while introducing "Hostel's" director Eli Roth at a festival.]
posted on Jan 4, 2006 - View this thread

King Kong's Post Production Diary - videos of weekly progress, on all aspects of filmmaking, starting from the first day of post-production, upto the premiere.
posted on Dec 19, 2005 - View this thread

"... we are sweeping everything under the carpet, but the oddness is cropping up all over the place. And then, the carpet starts to move…".
Michael Haneke, "le manipulateur" who introduced his latest film, Caché, at Cannes with a half-amused “I wish you a disturbing evening”, is the proponent of a "cinema of disturbance". A cinema of loving self-mutilation, where time is non-linear and everything happens in long take shots; in Haneke's world, guilt destroys lives decades after the original sin. All his male characters are "Georges" and his female characters are either "Evas" or "Annas", "because I lack fantasy". Unsurprisingly, he is a Bresson and Tarkovsky fan. He'll direct "Don Giovanni" at the Paris Opera in early 2006: "In 20 years of working in the theater, I only staged one comedy, and that was my single failure".
posted on Nov 18, 2005 - View this thread

Parasitic Subway Projector: High concept German art students cram a Mac mini and a projector into a suitcase and mount it to the side of a subway car with suction cups. The resulting images, projected onto the tunnel walls, make for a fascinating work of public art. [QuickTime] Link via: The Unofficial Mac Weblog
posted on Nov 5, 2005 - View this thread

The Emperor's Bunker. "The Japanese, with sadness and irony, stressed that Hirohito couldn't even speak properly. This was partly to do with the fact that he didn't have to speak - people spoke in his name and he was isolated from real life". "The Sun", the third part in Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's 'Men of Power' tetralogy after the gloom of Moloch (1999), about Hitler and Eva Braun, and the despairing tones of "Taurus" (2001), focused on the wheelchair-bound Lenin in his death throes, "The Sun" seems almost upbeat. This, after all, is a film about reconciliation. More inside.
posted on Sep 13, 2005 - View this thread

Truman Capote's Blood Work Two soon-to-be released films on Truman Capote's life, Capote and Have You Heard? begin as the novelist drops into rural Kansas to begin work on what became "In Cold Blood". More inside.
posted on Aug 18, 2005 - View this thread

A huge, comprehensive collection of Italian soundtrack covers. With print runs as small as 300, some of these soundtracks are impossible to find nowadays. Some of the cover art is really fantastic. There's a pretty extensive collection of French, German, American, English and Japanese soundtracks too.
posted on Aug 8, 2005 - View this thread

Get 1 Minute. "When I wake up in the morning I go out and film a one minute observation of the day."

Every day Johanna Marxer films for one minute and posts it. While you are there check out the chaotic future.
posted on Jun 23, 2005 - View this thread

Nifty Super 8 box covers.
posted on May 31, 2005 - View this thread

The Khronos Projector interactive art installation allows users to send parts of a filmed projection forwards or backwards in time. Neat temporal waving follows.
posted on May 6, 2005 - View this thread

The photographs of Gregory Crewdson are variably described as disturbing (nsfw,) otherworldly, filmic and sometimes just technically stunning. He readily acknowledges the influence of David Lynch and Steven Spielberg, so it's no surprise that some of Hollywood's finest are queuing up to appear in his big budget images of skewed suburbia.
posted on Apr 24, 2005 - View this thread

Better known for their modernist take on contemporary furniture design, Minneapolis furniture studio Blu Dot has just introduced a series of film shorts entitled Blu Dot Shorts. Their first short film, Seven Twenty (embedded Quicktime warning), was directed by Christopher Arcella (Flash warning). While is is not earth shattering conceptually, it is a jaunty and fun little piece of cinema.
posted on Apr 6, 2005 - View this thread

The Cheerful Transgressive Ever since 1971, when Larry Clark published Tulsa, an austere series chronicling his meth-shooting pals in sixties Oklahoma, Clark has made it his mission to document teenagers at their most deviant, their most vulnerable, their most sexually unhinged (possibly NSFW). And now “Larry Clark” the first American retrospective of Clark’s work, currently on display at the International Center of Photography, demonstrates the richness with which he’s mined this single subject (NSFW). More inside.
posted on Mar 31, 2005 - View this thread

Freedom on the Fence: The Polish Poster. While we're at it: The history and culture of the Polish poster and an analysis of American Films in Polish Posters. Or, if you'd prefer, The Classic Polish Film Poster database (where the Disney/Children's film posters are quite lovely). Also, The Wallace Library at the Rochester Institute of Technology has a fantastic searchable and browse-able database, with many hi-res images. Finally, some other Polish Poster Galleries. (What's that? You want more? You want artist-specific galleries? Okay. Here's work by Mieczyslaw Gorowski, Piotr Kunce, Wieslaw Walkuski, and Jan Sawka. Oh, you wanted Communist-era Polish propaganda posters? Fine. Here ya go.) [previous MeFi discussion on Polish film posters; also, some of the images from these links may be NSFW, depending on how S your W environment is.]
posted on Mar 13, 2005 - View this thread

The End Of Sexual Taboos: Erotic and Pornographic Cinema. Not safe for work.
posted on Feb 26, 2005 - View this thread

"You can fool everybody, but landie dearie me, you can't fool a cat. They seem to know who's not right". The psychoanalyst calmly explains to his patient that her idea that she is turning into a member of the cat family is a fantasy; she silences him with fang and talon.
Val Lewton made his name as a producer with the horror film Cat People, produced for RKO on a minuscule budget and directed by Jacques Tourneur. The star? French actress Simone Simon, who died today in Paris aged 93. More inside.
posted on Feb 23, 2005 - View this thread

Straight outta Belgium, it's "The Matrix: The Beginning". This is a see-it-to-believe-it occasion. [20m WMV; Trailer for those with a lower tolerance for this sort of nonsense; Main site]
posted on Feb 20, 2005 - View this thread

Dream Job. "It's Linklater's faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, which is being brought to full paranoid life via Bob Sabiston's gloriously surreal software abilities, which, as in the team's previous Waking Life, utilizes hi-def filmmaking overlayed with a rich, rotoscope-inspired animation. Thirty-plus animators, and, here's the catch, so pay attention: They need more." [via]
posted on Jan 26, 2005 - View this thread

Into the realm of Henry Darger When Henry Darger died in Chicago on April 13, 1973, he was a destitute man whose final days were spent at a home for the elderly. Now, 30 years later, Darger ranks among the greatest outsider artists America has ever seen. Found in the astounding clutter of Darger's one-room apartment was a 15,000-page fantasy epic, bound by hand in 15 volumes, titled "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." Along with this were three separate volumes filled with 300 drawings, including 87 multi-sheet horizontal panels, some 12 feet long with drawings on both sides. The discovery of Darger's NSFW work spawned numerous books, a play, a British rock band (the Vivian Girls), and an excellent y2karl MetaFilter post. And now there's also Jessica Yu's documentary "In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger," a portrait of the reclusive artist that has been shortlisted for the upcoming Academy Award nominations. Again, Darger's art can be disturbing and must be considered not safe for work (more inside)
posted on Jan 14, 2005 - View this thread

Charles Eames (1907-78) and Ray Eames (1912-88) gave shape to America's twentieth century. Their lives and work represented the nation's defining social movements: the West Coast's coming-of-age, the economy's shift from making goods to the producing information, and the global expansion of American culture. This Library of Congress exhibit outlines major themes of the Eames' life and voluminous works, including architecture, furniture, and the film Powers of Ten. It is wonderfully illustrated with artifacts, photos of their life and work, and examples from the Eames' collection of 350,000 slides.
posted on Jan 12, 2005 - View this thread

Check that random selection of classic screenplays. I'd like to thank that other girl.
posted on Aug 7, 2004 - View this thread

Gen Art.
posted on Jul 2, 2004 - View this thread

Digital Snapshot .. "What does a moment look like? Can snapshots freeze a moment in time? In Digital Snapshot, motion fragments were captured and rearranged in a new visual context via unconventional digital manipulations. A long take camera movement cycle generates a unique 'digital painting.' In this case Digital Snapshot enables the viewer to experience a virtual walk through a beautiful park during summertime."
posted on Jun 27, 2004 - View this thread

BadAssMovieImages.com features rare stills and artwork for viewing, with a healthy (but not exclusive) emphasis on cult cinema, and only occasional reviews and comments to compete with the goodness and/or bad-assedness. A movie fan shares his wealth with the world.
posted on May 3, 2004 - View this thread

Images is a webzine devoted to pop culture new and old, particularly dealing with film and television. Along with their reviews of current releases is a growing archive of essays on varying topics such as blaxploitation films from the seventies, or film from throughout the world. Dare I post their list of The 30 Best Westerns?
posted on Apr 27, 2004 - View this thread

Guernica. Take a stroll through some famous works of art (larger version here.) More Pocket Movies. [Via The Cartoonist.]
posted on Mar 29, 2004 - View this thread

These people make for some "Interesting Motherfuckers."
posted on Nov 28, 2003 - View this thread

Three Rivers Film Festival - fine film comes to the Iron City.
posted on Oct 31, 2003 - View this thread

Like many of us, I enjoy the bad women, from your garden variety betrayed women to the problem girls, the untamed youth running wild. An all too brief gallery of documentary films about this fascinating subculture is up over at retrocrush.
posted on Jul 24, 2003 - View this thread

The Dance of Death. Die Totentanz: A German-language site spotlighting, for example, the dance of death in literature, graphic art, music and film. For those, like me, whose German is not so good, this page offers an English-language history of the phenomenon, and the Catholic Encyclopedia has an article too. See also Holbein's Dance-of-Death; Lübeck's Dance-of-Death; and umm, this.
posted on Jul 3, 2003 - View this thread

Tarkovsky's Stalker coming as video game in 2003. I always wondered how long it would take for a more artistically-informed bunch to come to the $18B/year video game market (bigger than Hollywood). Will our generation have its video-game counterparts to Faulkner and Fitzgerald? A David Foster Wallace or Don Delillo authored game? Are there other video games that can stand up as "Art?"
posted on Dec 3, 2002 - View this thread

Polish movie posters. The Polish Poster Gallery has a fascinating collection of artist renditions of american movie posters. The collection compares favorably with the 50 Greatest Movie Posters, as listed by Premiere magazine.
(via fark)
posted on May 16, 2002 - View this thread

I think he liked the new Spider Man movie. Not only includes many arguments for why the movie is great, but goes so far as to say that Art is "culturally irrelevant," has been replaced by movies as the most successful reflection of our times, and that this movie will stand not merely as the best film of 2002, but might well be studied in the future as the creative work most symbolic of America in these troubled modern times. Wow. Now THAT's a good flick!
posted on May 7, 2002 - View this thread

DVD covers that stink! [Via Kottke]
posted on Apr 30, 2002 - View this thread

In reviewing ‘A beautiful mind’ NYT reviewer said of Nash "Before he married Alicia …he fathered another child…. and abandoned both mother and child to poverty. He formed a number of intense, apparently sexual bonds with other men, and he lost his security clearance ….. after he was arrested for soliciting sex in a men's room. When his illness became intractable and his behavior intolerable, Alicia divorced him. …. None of this has made it to the screen." It went on to say that "The story ….egregiously simplifies the tangled, suspicious world of cold war academia." Most other reviewers appears to have judged that movie on its merits as a work of art and seemed to like it. Recently, the plans to build a statue to honor the FDNY firefighters were dropped after a controvery broke out over plans to alter the original image of three firefighters hoisting the American flag. In an article that tried to put the later controvery in a context, NYT said that that "Sculptors, and artists in general, always take liberties". Conservative columnist Jonah Golderg in a different column defended the sanctity of ‘factual accuracy' in art. I rarely agree with Goldberg. But I think if one is depicting an event or a likeness of an event one has an obligation to stay close to the truth. Where do you draw the line between creative freedom and factual accuracy?
posted on Jan 20, 2002 - View this thread

Real Cinephiles Prefer Reading "Cahiers du Cinema" to Going to the Movies: I stopped reading Cahiers du Cinema - the famously dogmatic French film journal where Godard, Truffaut, Resnais and Rohmer cut their teeth - a few years ago, when it got too arty-farty for its own good. Well, it's slowly becoming essential again. Their website is trés chic, intelectually challenging and a welcome antidote to the usual online movie-reviewing clowns. Or is it still a load of pretentious rubbish? (In French, but with a lovely intro, lots of cool stills and a Quicktime interview, in English, with underrated director Paul Verhoeven)
posted on Dec 5, 2001 - View this thread

Will a changing world change film? Will the Sept. 11th tragedy instill a new social or political significance to contempoary art? Does this mark the end of irony? How do you think these recent events are going to shape film, art and comedy?
posted on Oct 4, 2001 - View this thread

polish posters not only does poland have the best cinematographers, but their movie posters are really awesome, too. inflammatory, erotic, surreal, and cute... well, not cute :) truly art as advertisement and good for decoration!
posted on Sep 27, 2001 - View this thread

A very pretty digital film Actually made waaaay back in the year 1996, though it's still quite nice. The fine people over at Paperveins have quite a bit of neat interactive art, although their servers seem to be a little slow... Please be gentle!
posted on Jun 1, 2001 - View this thread

The man behind Woman in the Dunes has passed away. Filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara died on Saturday with nary a press announcement. I haven't been this pissed off about a media blackout since Sam Fuller passed on (or, to some extent, the recent death of Joey Ramone). Is the only way for an obscure artist to gain that long-neglected recognition for their works to kick the bucket? It would seem that, even then, there are no guarantees.
posted on Apr 18, 2001 - View this thread