In December 2010, The Museum of the City of New York made available over 100,000 digitized images, many of which had never been seen publicly before. …more

In those days, the only way to see David Lynch’s early, short films was to start or join a film club, pool resources, and rent them from some place like Facets in Chicago. …more

Earlier this year, I made a case for Paranormal Activity 2 as an avant-garde film, …more

Perhaps the most enduring movies are those that tempt us into deep interpretation even as they resist all efforts to impose meaning on them. …more

This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine Marnie, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1964): …more

The trailer for Sleeping Beauty (directed by Julia Leigh, 2011) clocking in at just over one minute and 30 seconds, …more

On the evening of July 27 I interviewed Megan Boyle over gchat. Rather than prepare questions or focus on a specific topic, we used Wikipedia’s “random article” link to go to pages to generate content for our conversation. …more

Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series. Here are parts 1 and 2. …more

There is a moment in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) that cuts from Lula’s (Laura Dern’s) feet stomping in excitement on a bed to those same feet stomping in dance mode in a bar to the sound of the song “Slaughterhouse” by Powermad. …more

In the winter of 1989 I had finished my first semester of graduate studies in English at Penn State University and received, in my campus mailbox, the comments from my professors for the “Introduction to Graduate Studies” class. …more

On July 12, 1849, a man appeared at the offices, in Philadelphia, of the Quaker City, a newspaper. He was despondent and wearing only one shoe, and was seeking the editor and writer George Lippard. When he found him he said. “You are my last hope. If you fail me, I can do nothing but die.” …more

One of the enduring mysteries of American literature is a series of three letters drafted by Emily Dickinson to someone she called “Master.” …more

Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, 2011) has the feel of a slow march through a black swamp. There is a majesty and a tar-pit trap power in the wordless matching of moving images and music.

I am obliged to wonder what are the “penalties—very heavy penalties” mentioned in this trailer for Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh, 2011).

Here was the headline at the New York Times online the morning of May 3: …more

This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine I Shot Andy Warhol, directed by Mary Harron (1996): …more

This coming Wednesday, March 30, a new 10/40/70 experimental film column will be published here at The Rumpus.

In the spirit of the absurd beauty of spring, if you can identify the film I’ll be writing about from this single frame, e-mail me at nrombes AT hotmail.com with your address and I’ll mail you a frame from a mysterious 16mm film I discovered recently in an archive, as well as a short note typed on interesting letterhead.

Larger version after the jump: …more

Not usually a fan of these mash-ups, but this one—the great museum sequence from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) set to Brian Eno’s song “Third Uncle”—works just fine. Oh Angie! (The music kicks in at around 40 seconds.): …more

This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine if…. directed by Lindsay Anderson (1968): …more

This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine Alien, directed by Ridley Scott (1979): …more

In at least two of his novels, Thomas Pynchon mentions a Porky Pig cartoon from the 1930s.

Here is the reference from The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), as Oedipa Maas listens to an old man named Thoth, whose grandfather was an Indian killer: “Did you ever see the one about Porky Pig and the anarchist?” he asks her. “The anarchist is dressed in all black. In the dark you can only see his eyes. It dates from the 1930s. Porky Pig is a little boy.” …more

Before the fiasco of the “rock musical” Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Julie Taymor worked in smaller savageries, especially Titus (1999), her adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

The movie was a bit of an easy target. It was released after Richard III (1995) with Ian McKellan, and Romeo + Juliet (1996) directed by Baz Luhrmann, both of which scrambled time and place and tone in ways that seemed to reflect the shallow, ahistorical excesses of postmodernism. But Titus, beneath its flamboyance, was something else altogether: a deeply felt meditation on the wages of violence, as seen through the eyes of a young boy. …more

Speaking of Egypt. The Yacobean Building (2006), directed by Marwan Hamed. The film shifts stunningly and beautifully between hard-core melodrama, sadness, and comedy. There are, eerily, some scenes that seem to predict the uprising against Mubarek. …more

This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine Gun Crazy, directed by Joseph K. Lewis (1949): …more

Another clip from Polish director Andrzej Zulawski’s masterpiece Possession (1981), starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill.

The movie piles on one outrageous, tornado-like scene after another, but it is often the quiet, in-between moments that are more deeply eerie. In this scene such a moment occurs at around 1:50, just after the cars fall off the truck. Suddenly, Adjanji’s face changes; something is different, but we’re not sure what. Watching Possession is like surviving a torrent of chair throwing: …more

A few years ago, when I was finishing up the final edits on Cinema in the Digital Age, a colleague and I got into a heated debate about a section of the book where I argued that some of the images and sequences in The Ring (Gore Verbinksi, 2002) were as visually radical and avant-garde as, well, so-called avant-garde films. …more

This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine eXistenZ, directed by David Cronenberg (1999): …more

Japanese experimental filmmaker Takashi Ito’s short film Ghost remains as fresh and startling now as it did in 1984.

“The entire work was shot frame-by-frame with long exposures,” Ito has said. “I filmed this in the company dorm I was living in the middle of the night after I had come home from work, and thought I might die from what had become my daily pattern of sleeping for two hours in the morning then going off to work.” …more

The 2010 Sundance Film Festival Shorts came through town for a one-night only showing, which I caught earlier this week at the grand old Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor.

The jury prize winner in international filmmaking, The Six Dollar Fifty Man (New Zealand, 15 minutes) was supposed to be poignant and funny and a little scary, and it was all of those, but not in a good way. …more

This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine Moon, directed by Duncan Jones (2009): …more

This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine Machine Gun McCain, directed by Giuliano Montaldo (1969): …more

I’ve had the book for about a year. Margaret Drabble’s Thank You All Very Much, originally published in 1965 as The Millstone.

My copy, a Signet edition from 1969, was given a new title, I think, to coincide with a 1969 film adaptation of the book called A Touch of Love, which was re-titled Thank You All Very Much. Of the three titles, I like Thank You All Very Much the best; it captures the ironic voice of Rosamund, the narrator.

So I read the book, and while it was very good, what caught my attention were the underlinings and brief marginal notes of a previous reader. …more