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In case you haven’t heard, on June 2, the Federal Communications Commission (the government agency charged with regulating media in the US) granted sweeping new freedoms to individual media companies–the most extensive in decades. Among the changes were the freedom to own a newspaper as well as multiple television, radio, and cable stations within the same market (city or town), and the freedom to own more television stations penetrating the national market, up from 35% to 45% of US households. In an era when media concentration offers Americans fewer broadcasting voices, the ruling was strongly supported by the major networks …

Movies compliment and critique the 20th century in such a way that one can almost trace world history through the aesthetic development of the cinema alone. One of the most pivotal movements in film, for example, was Italian neorealism, a style predicated on engaging the realities of postwar European life.

Born in antagonistic response to the polished “white telephone” films of upper class fantasy promoted by the Fascist Italian government of the ’30s and ’40s, neorealism exhibited eviscerated street locations, nonprofessional actors, natural lighting, and an intense social awareness. Its greatest successes (Open City, Shoeshine, Paisan, La Terra …

One of the pleasures of the Internet is getting access to companies and voices which one might otherwise have difficulty finding–in the electronic world, all websites are created equal. For those seeking documentary options (particularly films which address social, political, or environmental issues), Bullfrog Films offers an extensive catalogue at the click of a button. Never heard of them? Checkout their website and browse their hefty collection. Although many of their titles are sold or rented at institutional prices, they offer special discounts to nonprofit and activist groups.

Bullfrog was a major supplier of the titles I saw at the …

What will they think of next?

Giving new meaning to the phrase “an underground film festival,” Interfilm organizers in Berlin have come up with a genuinely new idea: exhibit a series of short films on monitors in Berlin subway trains and allow the passengers to be the jury.

The festival will run from January 29 to February 4, 2004. All the films will be no longer than 90 seconds and must be “free of extreme violence or obscene content.”

As exhibitors around the globe continue to think of ways of integrating artistically-minded films within the general populace, this idea sounds …

I work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and last night was the second week of our film club’s summer series. The night air cooled with a comfortable breeze and the screening was held outdoors in a small amphitheatre with a simple setup comprised of a video projector, a projection screen, and the ubiquitous popcorn machine.

The film screened was Under the Skin of the City (2001), a powerful Iranian feature by Rakhshan Bani-Eternad about a working class family and its travails in contemporary Tehran, which only recently acquired theatrical distribution in the US. Like many films of the …

After what seems like an eternity of hand-wringing and navel-gazing, Woody Allen‘s protagonist in Stardust Memories (1980), a burned-out movie director, suddenly finds himself face-to-face with a descending spacecraft. As super-intelligent extraterrestrials greet the human race for the first time, the filmmaker blurts out his abiding angst: “If nothing lasts, why am I bothering to make films, or do anything, for that matter?” “We like your films,” the aliens intone, “Particularly the early funny ones.”

As has often been noted, there is a marked difference between Allen’s pre- and post-Annie Hall (1977) career. The former delights in absurd, …