[Editor's Note: This is the second of two posts cross-published at The House with the kind permission of Film Comment editor Gavin Smith and writer Paul Brunick. The blog roll appends Paul's FC article "The Living and the Dead: Online versus Old School", which deals with the evolution of film criticism in the digital age. We hope this list helps direct readers to sites of note. Full disclosure that The House is included among the selections. Click here to read Part One]

Observations on Film Art
davidbordwell.net/blog

Film scholar David Bordwell is a one-man institution—not only a font of productivity (staple volumes Film Art and Film History, co-written with wife Kristin Thompson, are now in their ninth and third editions, respectively) but a kind of eager, plainspoken ambassador for the field. Moreover, this pillar of the establishment has a blog. And since its launch in September 2006, Observations on Film Art certainly stands as the most robust and active online home of any film-studies academic. Posting individual entries in roughly equal measure, Bordwell and Thompson have taken to the online world's characteristically more relaxed and informal mode of address. What makes their site an essential stop is that both are fine aesthetic observers as well as scholars, and they write the equivalent of full-fledged publishable essays, usually with plentiful and carefully placed frame enlargements. And the writing is anything but ephemeral: Bordwell's post on "new media and old storytelling'' was selected for the paperback edition of the Library of America's American Movie Critics, edited by Phillip Lopate. More recent highlights include a thoughtful appreciation of critic Gilbert Seldes and an analysis of the forgotten possibilities of "the cross" in film blocking. —Paul Fileri Continue Reading »

[Editor's Note: This is the first of two posts cross-published at The House with the kind permission of Film Comment editor Gavin Smith and writer Paul Brunick. The blog roll appends Paul's FC article "The Living and the Dead: Online versus Old School", which deals with the evolution of film criticism in the digital age. We hope this list helps direct readers to sites of note. Full disclosure that The House is included among the selections. Click here to read Part Two.]

There's one word that sums up the World Wide Web: huge. Faced with the Internet's exponentially expansive growth and sprawling heterogeneity, every other generalization comes up short. Though the all-too-familiar "death of film criticism" polemics prefer to frame the current era in terms of (degraded) quality, the truly epochal shift in digital-age criticism is a function of quantity: total media saturation and head-spinning content overload.

Mid-century cinephilia offered its transatlantic disciples something that, for the other fine arts, had reached its breaking point in the Modernist period: a canon that could be mastered in its entirety by an individual consciousness. If you subscribed to a dozen or so of the "right" periodicals and faithfully patronized the art-house premieres and repertory revivals of London, Paris, or New York (or, later, San Francisco and Los Angeles), you could quite literally see everything that was considered worth seeing and read all the critics thought to be worth reading. This culture, of course, was built on a kind of artificial scarcity: the back catalogues of film history were just starting to be excavated and archived, much of world cinema was off the Western radar, and most of the accomplished criticism published in student newspapers, mid-sized metropolitan dailies, and underground film journals went largely unnoticed. The last two decades have yielded so much to cinephilia—from digital archives and movie-review clearinghouses to TCM and Netflix—but the surfeit has taken at least one thing away: the illusion of all-encompassing critical authority. The spirit of encyclopedic completism embodied in, say, Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema seems more anachronistic by the day. There are just too many films to see and (more to the point) too many smart writers to compete with. Continue Reading »