by Hugh Linehan.

LIKE ITS SISTER ART, photography, film has always had a tenuous, paradoxical, productive relationship with concepts such as “facts”and “truth”. The camera lens that supposedly records reality is just as good, if not better, at conjuring up the worlds of dream and fantasy.

Yet we somehow expect factual film-making to aspire to some pure notion of truth, regardless of the high artifice involved in conceiving, planning, filming and editing any film. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the deeply unsatisfactory definitions of the documentary form, which by some reckonings encompasses everything from David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, taking in along its way swathes of reality television and investigative journalism.

So what is documentary? John Grierson’s famous formulation, that it is the “creative treatment of actuality”, doesn’t help much, as it could stretch to include Tallafornia.

Read the rest of this article from  Irish Times.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 238 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

by Thomas Gladysz.

In the history of film, Kevin Brownlow is unique. The British documentary filmmaker, preservationist and author is the first and only film historian to have won an Academy Award.

Last year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Brownlow for his lifetime achievement alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Eli Wallach and Francis Ford Coppola. That’s pretty good company for someone who works behind the scenes and is little known to the movie going public.

“Mr. Brownlow is a giant among film historians and preservationists, known and justifiably respected throughout the world for his multiple achievements,” wrote Martin Scorsese in his nomination letter. Scorsese, well aware of film history and the artists who preceded him, has just released Hugo, his own valentine to early filmmaking.

Read the rest of this article from Huffington Post.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

by Ryan A. Piccirillo.

The development of motion picture complexity has been driven by a continuing technological evolution, ignited and manipulated by human initiative and inventiveness, which has afforded filmmakers the opportunity to practice a more complex craft to tell more complex stories. In concert with societal attitudes and proximity, this evolution has driven the development of distinct styles, movements, and methods that would have been impossible without increasingly advanced apparatus.

However, while this technological progression has been linear, it has not necessarily coincided with a similar evolution of quality; the skill of a filmmaker should not be judged by the technological complexity of the production, but by the ability of the filmmaker to wield the technology of the time and of his or her choosing to effectively and clearly convey a narrative, evoke an emotion, or make an impression.

Although the linear technological evolution of filmmaking has empowered filmmakers by offering a more diverse catalogue of tools and techniques, it is the filmmaker’s ability to effectively and discerningly utilize this technology within a temporal and societal context that truly drives cinematic quality, of which there has been no clear linear progression.

Read the rest of this article from StudentPulse.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

This article was written by Bonnie Malleck.

All month Turner Classic Movies has pulled a coup in programming synergy by combining its boffo documentary series, Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, with screenings of movie classics from each era, including Casablanca, Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard, following each telecast.

Narrated by Christopher Plummer, it’s an absolutely marvelous series, running seven weeks until Dec. 13, offering a treasure trove of movie clips, commentary from renowned film historians, producers and directors who take us behind the scenes in each decade of film-making. If you love movies, this is a must-watch series.

Read the rest of this article from The Record.

—–
Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 28 pages of my 210 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”
—–

This article was written by Linda Quinlan.

“In the filmmaking business most of his career, Robert Shanebrook said he knows nothing was ever written down, and that at some point in time, people wouldn’t know what had been done.

After retiring from Eastman Kodak seven years ago, Shanebrook set out to make sure people knew the whole story.

The result is a book, “Making Kodak Film: The Illustrated Story of State-of-the-Art Photographic Film Manufacturing” by Shanebrook.

“Kodak didn’t divulge much about the business; most (employees and others) had no idea of the technology that had been built up,” Shanebrook said.

To fill in gaps, he arranged three or four tours of Kodak manufacturing facilities for Eastman House technical staff.

With an “agreement in principle” from Dr. Mary Jane Hellyar, also of Irondequoit, who was Kodak’s vice president in charge of the film business until her retirement last year, Shanebrook began documenting “how things are made.”

Read the rest of this article from Irondequoit Post.

—–
Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 28 pages of my 210 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”
—–

This article was written by Matt Barry.

“The comedy short occupies an odd position in the history of film. Beloved by audiences, especially during the silent era, but also throughout the 30s and 40s, the comedy short was a hugely important part of any film program.

The geniuses of film comedy for the first part of the twentieth century almost all had a background in short films. Certainly the major artists of the silent era-Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd-had extensive background in short films. Even after the major comedians had moved into feature films by the early 1920s, there were new crops of short comedy stars-Billy Bevan, Ben Turpin, Charley Chase, Max Davidson, and of course, Laurel and Hardy.”

Read the rest of this article from Forces of Geek.

—–
Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 28 pages of my 210 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”
—–

This article was written by Woody Lindsey.

“French New Wave is basically, postwar French cinema consisted chiefly of adaptations of literary classics – all very static, cosy and unambitious.Although the New Wave were certainly no less intellectual in their approach to film-making, they were a generation raised on the drama and excitement of Hollywood movies.

A loose group of young film critics and directors, based around France’s film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, struck out to make films with their own voice, influenced heavily by Hollywood – particularly directors such as Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, who they had previously identified as ‘auteurs’, directors who were the dominant creative force behind their films with their own voice. They rebelled against the traditional French cinema which they felt had become staid and false; dependent on a contrived world of studio sets and screenplays adapted from novels. Instead, they concentrated on bringing a sense of realism to cinema.”

Read the rest of this article from Film Directors.

—–
Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 28 pages of my 210 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”
—–

This article was written for Studio Canal Collection.

“As screenwriter William Goldman famously said of film-making, “nobody knows anything”. The art of cinema is, by definition, a cocktail of disciplines: writing, acting, shooting, scoring. But on top of that, there is that indefinable, intangible something that makes a movie special. It’s not about budget, or James Cameron’s Avatar would be everyone’s favourite.

It’s about much more than that: a classic movie is quite simply a phenomenon, a lightning bolt trapped in a bottle, a colossus to be aped but never equalled, no matter how hard its rivals try. So how can we define a classic? We’ve chosen the key elements we believe a memorable movie needs …”

Read the rest of this article from Studio Canal Collection.

This article was written by George Russell.

“In many ways, too much time has passed for films from the ‘30s to be of much interest to most people living today. The black and white images, the grainy sound, the entirely different method of acting and the relatively straightforward plots all require time and an open mind to get used to—two scarce commodities in our era.

However, the rewards of watching films from Hollywood’s Golden Age are many, perhaps the most important being that they connect us to a heritage of American cinematic art that was at one time the envy of the world. Only tiny echoes of this distant past can be seen and heard in a relatively small number of films today. For better or worse, modern cinema has become something else entirely.”

Read the rest of this article from Pop Matters.

This article was written by Eoin O’Faolain.

Concluding our look back on the last decade, Screenhead examines the major movie events of the year 2009, and ponders on what the future holds for cinema.

“The global crisis that is concluding this decade may have been predicted by experts in 2006, but it was beginning to be noticed by the public in 2008, and by the turn of this decade’s last year, worldwide recession, debt, and cutbacks were in every home, on every media in every country. We were officially in comedown, with banks and banking institutes collapsing like houses of cards.

Hollywood braced itself. It started to make redundancies based on fears that abundant pay cuts would mean less disposable income to spend on things like cinema tickets and DVDs. But oh how wrong they were. By the end of the year, 2009 will have earned far more box office moolah than any other year, despite all the gloom and doom, beating the record set in 2007.

Why? Because people still need entertainment. They may even need it more now than ever. And film offers a 2-3 hour break from the anxiety of reality, an escape into another world. And despite what many say about the death of cinema in an age of LCD screens and HD formats, going to the movie theatre is a social aspect, a way of getting out of the confines of the home (which may indeed represent financial anxiety) and connecting with other people. It’s this shared experience that home video can never replace.”

Read this article from Screenhead.

The Ten Commandments of Filmmaking
How to Work (and Survive) in the
Film and Television Industry
by Peter D. Marshall