& a blog

i will off to ireland it just a few days to shoot a documentary on gaelic games. the documentary is sponsored by an at&t “new media” fellowship and was organized by the watson institute at brown. i’m thrilled to be off to ireland (it is a birthright trip in many ways) but i am almost [...]

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Terry Gilliam is the last surrealist. His latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, confirms such an assertion with its dazzling and disorienting visual effects. In “the imaginarium” Dr. Parnassus brings visitors into a world of the dreams, an inversion of those intimate possessions as they are made an entire, external world. These spaces are [...]

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If Avatar has changed anything about then movies, then it has changed everything. Let’s begin by considering what depth means to cinema. Historically, depth has only existed as a perspective, the idea taken from painting and camera optics that all viewed reality merges at a ‘vanishing point’ somewhere behind the picture plane. The whole notion [...]

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scholarship on sherlock holmes has always been preoccupied with two themes: the question of the sleuth sexuality (or, what’s all this about Watson then?) and the idea of Holmes as a rational, modern individual who is frequently made to deduce (and thus digest) what appear to be irrational, supernatural, and terrifyingly pre-modern cases. in guy [...]

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the five coolest things from last week this is rundown of the coolest things i came across last week. it includes a remix, a video game, two trailers, and an essay. i am going to try to do this more often, as it will give me a larger outlet for the fun stuff i discover [...]

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I have long believed that film students and critics need a real (or reel if you will excuse the pun) tool for critically annotating film. Now that DVD technology has advanced enough, I imagined a program or even a simple plugin that would enable movie viewers to take notes on a film. The program would [...]

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i’ve been taking an outstanding film theory class with phil rosen this semester. rosen, it tuns out, is kind of the reigning critical perspective on the authors we are reading: eisenstein, bazin, munsterberg, etc. a couple of weeks ago, in an attempt to both exorcise my creative demons and begin assessing the necessary theory for [...]

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it has been an incredibly rich semester for film at brown. in addition to providence’s beloved french film festival (run by richard manning and the amazing people over at the mcm department) there has also been an israeli film festival, and soon enough, the ivy film festival. this is not to say anything of the [...]

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