Category: Texts

Over the holidays, I spent some time indulging in a periodic hobby of mine–science fiction literature. After poking around, I discovered that Orion Books in the UK has been printing a series entitled SF Masterworks for a number of years (with decreasing frequency), putting out major works by authors from Bester to Stapledon to Wells that have been long out-of-print in the UK (and in many cases the US). What grabbed my attention was one of their last additions, Roadside Picnic, the 1972 novel by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky that inspired Stalker (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunting …

The last few weeks, I spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices, which wasn’t good for my blogging but was good for my reading, and fortunately my love for the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer. For cinephiles familiar with the lack of resources on Dreyer, the last few months have offered a bonanza:

• The Masters of Cinema label I helped form and Criterion have released Martin Koerber’s beautifully restored Vampyr (1932) on DVD with a lot of shared supplementary materials. MoC includes a commentary by Guillermo del Toro; Criterion includes Dreyer’s original script. I managed to see the …

“Back to that balcony at the place de la RÈpublique where all huge demonstrations have always started or ended. I manage to frame again the top portion of my old photograph. In between I have been in Japan, Korea, Bolivia, Chile. I have filmed students in Guinea-Bissau, medics in Kosovo, Bosnian refugees, Brazilian activists, animals everywhere. I covered the first free elections in East Germany after the fall of the Wall, and I sniffed the first moments of perestroika in Moscow, when people weren’t afraid to talk to each other anymore. I traded film for video and video for computer. …

Before heading off to the Palm Springs film festival, I thought I’d post a collection of links I’ve amassed inspired by a book I recently received: Animation Unlimited: Innovative Short Films Since 1940. It’s a large, glossy paperback published in the UK in 2003 that features short write-ups on 50 animators, over 500 color stills, and–best of all–a two-hour, region 2 DVD sampler containing 29 of the works (in part or in whole) that the authors cite.

I’m still exploring it, and so far I’ve been favoring non-digital work over digital entries (co-writer Liz Farber is a managing partner …