A new documentary by a Swedish-based Italian filmmaker examines how media mogul turned two-time president Silvio Berlusconi's 30-year grip on Italian television has shaped the country, its politics, its culture and society. Erik Gandini's Videocracy, which screens at the Venice Film Festival, starts 30 years ago, when Berlusconi introduced a quiz show whose female contestants stripped for the camera, and charts 30 years of showgirls, celebrities, reality TV shows and Berlusconi's rise to political power, and interviews characters of the system, including a talentless but fame-hungry TV contestant, a fascist-sympathising media fixer, and a paparazzo/extortionist turned celebrity. More details here and (with a trailer) here. [more inside]
posted by acb on Sep 5, 2009 - 14 comments

" There were lots of small children in the audience. I thought about asking one little girl if she had voted for the paddle, the rod or the cattle prod." In 1995, a company called Interfilm revolutionized the movie industry. Oh, no, wait, it didn't. Audiences at Mr. Payback, "the first interactive movie," pressed buttons on a joystick attached to their seat to vote on the actions of the characters on-screen -- for instance, what kind of physical abuse a captured thug should undergo. Despite the pedigree of director Bob Gale (writer/producer of Back to the Future) and co-star Christopher Lloyd, critics were not impressed. The company folded a week after releasing its third interfilm, "I'm Your Man," scored by Joe Jackson, which did, a few years Interfilm was the brainchild of "conceptualist" and guy-with-gigantic-glasses Bob Bejan (Dateline NBC interview), who now works at a next-generation, data-driven marketing agency that delivers strategic, multi-channeled communication solutions designed to cultivate and sustain relationships between brands and their audiences. Watch: Clips from "Mr. Payback." The making of "I'm Your Man." (warning: A. Whitney Brown.) Read: the New York Times on the 1998 DVD release of "I'm Your Man." Booklet copy from the "I'm Your Man" DVD.
posted by escabeche on Aug 31, 2009 - 43 comments

The SF Signal Mind Meld feature poses science fiction related questions to a number of SF luminaries and the scientist, science writer or blogger. Subjects have included the best women writers in SF, taboo topics in SF, underated authors and the most controversial SF novels of the past and present. The also cover lighter topics, such the role of media tie-ins, how Battlestar Galactica could have ended better (bonus Geoff Ryman) and the realistic (or otherwise) use of science on TV SF shows.
posted by Artw on May 6, 2009 - 17 comments

"What you're looking for as a retoucher is a broom, something that covers your tracks, some way of obscuring where you've been. The first thing [most] people take out is bloodshot eyes. That's the last thing I take out—the last thing I'd, like, just wipe, because that just makes it look retouched." -- from Jesse Epstein's video op-ed for the NY Times, based on her film Wet Dreams and False Images ("I know that's not airbrushed. I could put a million dollars that's not airbrushed."), one of three related short documentaries on physical perfection. "Each head has to be identical to the other head, so we don't want anybody putting sandpaper to the head." -- from 34 x 25 x 36. Via the latest installment of Shakesville's Impossibly Beautiful series. (Previous posts on retouching.)
posted by maudlin on Apr 3, 2009 - 51 comments

Moving Image Source is devoted to the history of film, television, and digital media. It features original articles by leading critics, authors, and scholars; a calendar that highlights major retrospectives, festivals, and gallery exhibitions at venues around the world; and a regularly updated guide to online research resources. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Dec 30, 2008 - 1 comment

In defense of suburbs: "Revolutionary Road," based on Richard Yates's 1961 novel of the same name, is the latest entry in a long stream of art that portrays the American suburbs as the physical correlative to spiritual and mental death.
posted by kliuless on Dec 29, 2008 - 172 comments

Director Peter Watkins' web site describes the filming, distribution and critical reaction to each of his controversial films, including Punishment Park, the rock star satire Privilege, The War Game, La Commune and more. He also offers a 10-part critique of "the media crisis" that marginalizes non-mainstream ideas via the Hollywood monoform and the Universal Clock, a style he claims structures almost all of the messages delivered to the public, but which sharply limits the range of relationships possible between media producers and audiences. [more inside]
posted by mediareport on Nov 3, 2008 - 7 comments

2009: A True Story. "My name is Sara Ford and I am 18 years old. I moved to California at the end of last year. Before the first attacks... before everything changed." [Via] [more inside]
posted by homunculus on Aug 3, 2008 - 74 comments

Gravityland. Interactive Web TV series. Watch weekly episodes, respond, contribute. Read blog. Add moves to music video. Play Where in the world is Gravityland? Read comic book. Build FAQ. Somehow, it's all related, and all possibility. [more inside]
posted by Miko on Mar 5, 2008 - 8 comments

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 by Ambrosia Voyeur on Aug 28, 2007 - 12 comments

Free Movies, Documentaries, Cartoons, TV-Shows, Music & Comedy - 100% handpicked content chosen to inform, educate, shock and entertain you. Most of the old films and cartoons are in public domain: "when a work's copyright or patent restrictions expire, it enters the public domain and may be used by anyone for any purpose." The newer media is probably not in public domain, they are just freely available for some unknown reason. Tomorrow they could be gone.
posted by crunchland on Sep 18, 2006 - 19 comments

The Image Culture - a discussion of the history, manipulation, desensitization and supplanting of language skills by the ubiquity of images. And no, there are no pretty pictures.
posted by peacay on Nov 19, 2005 - 38 comments

Channel 4's 100 Greatest War Films as voted for by their (generally more clued-up than average) viewership has plenty for you to disagree with, but much to recommend. Filmsite.org has a history of war films (as does Berkeley) for the completists among you. There are more war films from and about Vietnam and Indochina than you can shake a bayonet at (see also the 1999 NYT article, Apocalypse Then: Vietnam Marketing War Films to learn a little about the Vietnamese government's 1960s and 70s archive of war film). The [British] national archives have archived film from pre-WWI to the Cold War.
posted by nthdegx on May 17, 2005 - 74 comments

“The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically.”
In "Tout Va Bien", just released on Criterion DVD, four years after May '68 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin examine the wreckage: fading workers' empowerment (page with sound), media fatuity, capitalist sprawl, global imperialist mayhem, interpersonal disconnections. "Tout Va Bien" is the story of a strike at a factory as witnessed by an American reporter (Jane Fonda) and her has-been New Wave film director husband (Yves Montand). Included on the DVD is also Letter to Jane (1972), a short film in which Godard and Gorin spend an hour examining the semiotics of a single, hypnotizing photograph of Fonda as she shares feelings with a Vietnamese villager. More inside.
posted by matteo on Mar 8, 2005 - 18 comments

"Movies: They're worth it!" In a move to educate those darn thieving kids and their evil P2P file-sharing networks which are used to trade ripped movies, the MPAA has launched a public service campaign to explain, in layman's terms, why violating their copyrights is wrong. …Yes, these are the same people who have just brought us an entire summer of bloated sequels, shameless celebrity vehicles and uninspired hack-work. Respect!
posted by Down10 on Aug 3, 2003 - 81 comments

The Appalshop, nestled in the hills of coal-stained eastern Kentucky, was founded in 1969 as a War on Poverty project designed to train young people in Appalachia for jobs in film and television. Today, it flourishes as one of the premier cultural outposts of a proud and struggling swath of America. Its projects include documentary films, a record label, and one of the best public radio stations in the country.
posted by PrinceValium on May 8, 2003 - 5 comments