Thumbnails 6/9/2013

"Film is of course used in many areas, from production to exhibition to archiving. But its position has received particular attention in exhibition, where more than 75 percent of the world’s cinema screens (and 85 percent in North America) are now digital, greatly reducing the demand for film prints. At CinemaCon in April 2012, National Association of Theatre Owners president John Fithian predicted that the domestic distribution of movies on celluloid could cease before the end of 2013. In fact, during that address Fithian reported that Fox had already notified exhibitors of its intent to end film distribution in the U.S. within two years." 

"The more you look at this entire, almost three-minute scene, the better and more intricate it gets. We can notice, for example, that Hank does his patting gesture, in fact, a grand total of four times: on the detective, on Walter Jr, and twice on Skyler! This is contrasted with the warmer mother-son embrace, viewed from the master-shot’s distance, that sneaks into the final frames of the scene."

3. "The Unique Joy of Film Festivals." By Nashen Moodley for The Guardian. About how seeing a particular film at a festival -- in this case, Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine -- can create an insatiable hunger in a viewer to see "more and more." To read Roger Ebert's review of Sonatine, click here. 

"Thirteen of France’s most celebrated actors—including Mathieu Amalric, Pierre Arditi, Anne Consigny, Anny Duperey, Michel Piccoli, Lambert Wilson, and Sabine Azéma (who is also the director’s wife)—play themselves in a scenario where they are summoned by phone to the funeral of a friend, the (fictitious) playwright Antoine d’Anthac, which is being held at his villa in the mountainside village of Peillon. There, the majordomo (Andrzej Seweryn) seats the guests together in the playwright’s grand salon to satisfy his last request: that they watch a video, hosted by the playwright himself (played by the splendid comic actor Denis Podalydès), in which a young theatre company performs one of his celebrated plays, 'Eurydice,' in which all of the assembled actors had, over the years, performed onstage. But as the performance unfolds on the video (featuring the real-life Compagnie de la Colombe and directed not by Resnais but by the filmmaker Bruno Podalydès), the actors who are watching begin to speak the lines along with the recording. Soon, the villa’s spaces are transformed—by means of Resnais’s digital prestidigitation—into a stage in which the play is spontaneously reprised by its primordial interpreters, who revive their own lives’ memories and passions as they act."