News

First things first. There's an announcement from last week to catch up with: "Aldo Tambellini's Black Films and pioneering experimental works by four other filmmakers — Ian Hugo, the international banker-turned-artist who worked with Anaïs Nin; Mike Kuchar; Gregory Markopoulos; and Jud Yalkut — will soon be saved through the 2012 Avant-Garde Masters Grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation and The Film Foundation." Martin Scorsese, who began the initiative in 2003 through seed money from The Film Foundation: "There's no other program of its kind. I'm thrilled that the work of such artists as George Kuchar, Shirley Clark, and Kenneth Anger has been preserved and — equally important — made available so audiences can actually see these extraordinary films."

On a somewhat related note, Marilyn Ferdinand has put out a call regarding For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, taking place in just a couple of weeks now: "Bloggers, we need to...

I’m not a big fan of the horror genre. I don’t care for horror films, TV shows, novels or anything like that. But I do have an understanding of the genre and the roots that it has in something I really do enjoy: German expressionist cinema.

German expressionist cinema is a type of film that highlights bizarre sets, unusual angles, dark shadows, strange people and strange places. Mental illness was often a feature of the stories in one form or another. Expressionism got its start in Germany in 1913 with The Student of Prague, but it didn’t really take off and come into its own until after World War I. Though the Expressionist movement was largely dead after 1933 (not coincidentally the year that the Nazis came to power in Germany), it nevertheless created vibe that resonates throughout film today, inspiring, in whole or in part, such genres as...