Pansori (aka P'ansori) is a genre of Korean folk music produced by travelling musicians, a singer accompanied by a lone drummer. Rooted in seventeenth century folk tales, by the 1960's, Pansori was in danger of dying out completely, when the director Im Kwon-taek made the film Sopyonje.
posted on Jul 3, 2008 - View this thread

RIP Tartan Films. The UK-based film distribution company has gone into administration, laying off it's entire staff.
posted on Jun 28, 2008 - View this thread

Lorenzo Semple, 84, has been a screenwriter for more than 50 years; his credits include "Papillion," "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor." Marcia Nasatir, 81, is a longtime agent and production executive, was the first female VP of production at United Artists, and produced films like "The Big Chill" and "Hamburger Hill." Together, they are the "Reel Geezers," offering irresistible film reviews on YouTube. To wit: Superbad, Iron Man, Sex and the City, Lars and the Real Girl, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood.
posted on Jun 11, 2008 - View this thread

Sir Norbert Smith - A Life.
posted on Jun 8, 2008 - View this thread

"In this rare documentary, Satyajit Ray talks about his films. Part 1, 2, 3. Satyajit Ray... is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Born in the city of Calcutta into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and letters, Ray studied at Presidency College and at the Visva-Bharati University. Starting his career as a commercial artist, Ray was drawn into filmmaking after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir and viewing the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves during a visit to London. He directed thirty-seven films, including feature films, documentaries and shorts. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali, won eleven international prizes, including Best Human Document at Cannes film festival"
posted on Jun 4, 2008 - View this thread

Bebe Barron, 82, Pioneer of Electronic Scores, Is Dead. Best known for the soundtrack to the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet -- the first full-length feature to use only electronic music -- she and her husband Louis Barron recorded the film's pre-synthesizer "electronic tonalities" with electronic circuits of their own invention. She never scored another feature film, but remained active in the avant-garde music scene.
posted on May 8, 2008 - View this thread

Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films (official site w/Flash) Filmmaker Arthur Dong covers the good (YT), the bad and the players (link to Flash video clips) in his latest award-winning documentary. Related MeFi post.
posted on May 4, 2008 - View this thread

Why do we spend so many precious hours of our lives watching films? What is it about cinema that it should occupy a place of such prominence in our lives? And why do we even need movies? It is as though we are trying to fill a gap in our lives - a void, an emptiness within ourselves. So to even begin on the path of our Truth Quest, we have to see the broader picture of how film correlates to life, and life to film. To find this higher perspective, it is helpful to look towards the other arts, as well as philosophy.
Cinema Seekers: Searching for truth in cinema and in life.
posted on Apr 21, 2008 - View this thread

High-Tech Noon. What makes a classic Western even more classic? Blasters and force-fields, that's what. (SLYT)
posted on Apr 21, 2008 - View this thread

The Makhmalbafs are an Iranian family of filmmakers, although Samira tends to get the most press.
posted on Apr 7, 2008 - View this thread

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation [previously] is now viewable in its entirety at YouTube. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Or at Internet Archive, if you prefer.
posted on Apr 6, 2008 - View this thread

Throwing bones in the air as 2001 turns 40. Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey turned 40 yesterday and Movie City Indie collated a good selection of links about the film and its maker to commemorate the occasion.
posted on Apr 3, 2008 - View this thread

Roger Ebert to return to writing movie reviews. Love him, hate him, disagree with him, worship him, whatever, but Pulitzer Prize winning movie critic Roger Ebert, after several operations that have left him without the power of speech, will return to writing movie reviews shortly after his 10th Annual movie festival, Ebertfest. Me, personally, I'm happy as heck about this.
posted on Apr 2, 2008 - View this thread

POSSESSED is a short documentary film that 'enters the complicated worlds of four hoarders; people whose lives are dominated by their relationship to possessions'.
posted on Mar 7, 2008 - View this thread

Hitchcock Classics as illustrated in the 2008 Hollywood Portfolio from Vanity Fair.
posted on Feb 8, 2008 - View this thread

The story behind Woody Allen's signature typeface (with screengrabs from each film). Via.
posted on Jan 30, 2008 - View this thread

American audiences remember Akira Kurosawa as the genius of the samurai epic, a past master who used the form both to revise and revive Western classics - Shakespeare with Ran and Throne of Blood, Dostoevsky with Red Beard and The Idiot, Gorky with The Lower Depths - and to give splendid and ultimately immortal life to new archetypes, as in The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo. But Kurosawa also made films of his own time. His masterpiece, in fact, was the quiet story of a gray Japanese bureaucrat dying in post-war Tokyo, and of his attempt to do something of lasting good before he leaves. The film is Ikiru ("To Live"; 1952).
posted on Jan 29, 2008 - View this thread

Trailers From Hell. Cult directors (and other industry types) introduce and comment on trailers for cult films. For instance, Allison Anders on Peeping Tom, Rick Baker on The Man Of A Thousand Faces, Joe Dante on Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman, Jack Hill on White Heat, Dan Ireland on The Haunting, Mary Lambert on The Masque Of The Red Death and Edgar Wright on Carnage. (Flash menu and intro unfortunately)
posted on Jan 28, 2008 - View this thread

Sex, drugs and sleaze! Were the bad old days really the good old days? Native New Yorkers who remember the City in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, speak up! Was the Big Apple better off then or now?
posted on Jan 23, 2008 - View this thread

Comprehensive profile, in the NY Times magazine, of the new crop of talented Romanian filmmakers. Be sure to check out the interactive component of the story, with clips and commentary on several recent films.
posted on Jan 21, 2008 - View this thread

"But, it's a post on film noir!" I told her. She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me. I knew that caving into my desires meant I might lose her. But I didn't care. I went out to the kitchen to make coffee -- yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. I knew she'd be back.
posted on Jan 11, 2008 - View this thread

The finished work of a favorite author annoys, resonants a certain word. Puissant at first, it puissantly overpowers sentences and paragraphs amazingly. Anyways.
posted on Jan 10, 2008 - View this thread

The return of BIG acting. Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood
posted on Jan 5, 2008 - View this thread

Hammer films are back! ... The classic British horror film company has returned from the dead with the first new film in 20 years to be first broadcast in instalments via MySpace. This has allowed some news programs to camp it up just a little... See the trailer here. Behind the scenes.
posted on Dec 18, 2007 - View this thread

Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Alfred Hitchcock reflects on his career in movies, discussing among other things, the origin of the term "MacGuffin", his creative process and what his earliest fear was.
posted on Dec 17, 2007 - View this thread

Fonts at the movies.
posted on Dec 14, 2007 - View this thread

The Unsung Joe: Where bit-part actors go when they die. Biographies of the most obscure micro-stars of 1940s and '50s cinema, all remarkably well-researched and richly illustrated.
posted on Dec 11, 2007 - View this thread

Though best known for his role as hunky Lance Rocke in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the actor/author was also distinguished by a career as a beefcake pin-up boy. Sadly, he has passed away at the age of 67.
posted on Dec 6, 2007 - View this thread

Freaky Flicks is a p2p community with a radical mascot that collects arthouse and cult cinema.

Browse the selection on The Pirate Bay or look at their list of Red Letter Directors.

The FF Forum is pretty good for recommendations and links to non-p2p and legal online video.
posted on Dec 4, 2007 - View this thread

Enjoy some silent film this week: Battleship Potemkin. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The General. The Immigrant. Haxan. Intolerance (1, 2, 3). Nosferatu.
posted on Dec 2, 2007 - View this thread

Though not as commonly known, Alfred Hitchcock's late British period is nonetheless an intriguing look at what delights were to come from his later work.

Secret Agent (1936 | Wikipedia | Download)
Young and Innocent (1937 | Wikipedia | Download)
Jamaica Inn (1939 | Wikipedia | Download)

posted on Nov 25, 2007 - View this thread

Norman Bates and that oh, so famous shower scene...
posted on Nov 24, 2007 - View this thread

von Trier/Van Halen
posted on Nov 8, 2007 - View this thread

Top 10 Most Disturbing Movies of All Time.
posted on Nov 7, 2007 - View this thread

Jazz on the Screen "This searchable filmography documents the work of some 1,000 major jazz and blues figures in over 14,000 cinema, television and video productions."
posted on Oct 26, 2007 - View this thread

Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema - David Bordwell
posted on Oct 16, 2007 - View this thread

72 scenes from various episodes of The Simpsons, each one beside the movie scene to which they refer (By The Accordion Guy)
posted on Sep 22, 2007 - View this thread

Cinematic particles is an online applet that draws watercolor-like visualizations of movie dialogs, from Apocalypse Now to Zabriskie Point. See also: Spinal Rhythms, L-Garden, SpyCamp and other online toys by Austrian artist Eva Schindling.
posted on Sep 15, 2007 - View this thread

In 1974, Martin Scorsese interviewed his parents on film, prompting them to discuss their life together as well as their Sicilian ancestry. The resultant documentary was entitled Italianamerican. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. [Inspired by...]
posted on Sep 4, 2007 - View this thread

80 years of Found Footage Filmmaking...
1927-1967:
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, 1927.
Rose Hobart, 1936.
Night and Fog 2 3 4 5 6 7, 1956.
1968-2007 inside...
posted on Aug 28, 2007 - View this thread

The 50 Greatest movie sex scenes of all time (with clips)
posted on Aug 23, 2007 - View this thread

Women In Film, similar to the previously posted Women In Art
posted on Aug 14, 2007 - View this thread

Fred Astaire was a pimp.
posted on Aug 8, 2007 - View this thread

21-87 is a short film from Arthur Lipsett that has been discussed before.
posted on Aug 2, 2007 - View this thread

A mainstay of the old-timey cinema era, the Photoplayer was a pump organ designed for player piano rolls, sound effects and a human composer. [Courtesy of Huell Howser]
posted on Aug 1, 2007 - View this thread

Plotbot is a web-based collaborative screenwriting application where you can write a screenplay with as many or as few people as you like. Adopting the wiki approach to screenwriting, each element is editable by any member of a project. You can also comment on, delete or restore any element. For all of the "filmic storytellers" on MeFi.
posted on Jul 30, 2007 - View this thread

Before Caligula, Cat People & Star Trek: Generations, even before he played Alex de Large in Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell was dashingly rebellious in Lindsay Anderson's If. (Some background of that cafe scene)
posted on Jul 22, 2007 - View this thread

Apocalypse Oz
posted on Jul 20, 2007 - View this thread

Kerwin Mathews, 1926-2007. The genre actor may be best remembered as the title character in one of my favorite movies, the classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
posted on Jul 18, 2007 - View this thread

NoMediaKings.org will tell you how to hand-bind books in a variety of ways. Then you can make the movie of the book. As a bonus: Time Management for Anarchists.
posted on Jul 8, 2007 - View this thread