I wouldn’t know what I miss, if anything. What sort of things do you notice in movies that other people don’t? What sort of things do you miss that others tend to notice more? Eastern European movies are very “film school”, while films from “emerging” countries have a directness bordering on audacity, which has nothing to do with lack of sophistication and perhaps something to do with oral traditions. My personal rules of thumb have been to watch anything silent and anything Japanese (so Japanese silents must be the apotheosis!), and I pretty much think anything from Eastern Europe is worth watching, and most items from Iran and Africa. Maybe it’s not all foreign movies, but more than fifty percent, and now it’s spread to American cinema. I have facetiously complained that all foreign movies have a scene where somebody urinates this goes all the way back to Bicycle Thief. I’ve just watched Fassbinder’s German sci-fi TV movie World on a Wire, which we can safely say has a mirror in every scene! Yes, and the mirror scene is often the very first or last scene. Are there any other secrets or rules of thumbs to cinema which you’d like to share? You once mentioned to me that every film inevitably has a mirror scene, something which I’ve noticed ever since you pointed out. The articles are all there, but Popmatters changed all the URLs, so I’m in the process of updating them - by going to to find the title and then googling that). January 2022 Update: About 1/2 the hyperlinks in the article are broken. The interview took place in February 2012. The URL is here: (I add the latest recommendations every year to that URL). Finally, even though this hyperlink is not active, I’ve been reproducing MB’s private end-of-the-year book & movie recommendations which he circulates to friends. In one of his more notable essays, You are Living in the Golden Age of Cinema, Barrett asserts that he doesn’t believe in the myth of declining quality of cinema (when compared to “golden ages” like the 1970s.) “The new problem is getting … noticed amid all this overwhelming superfluity of access, but I submit that this is a much happier problem than not finding a distributor-of which there are a surprising number during this so-called decline, and an increasing number of festivals and labels and channels hungry for product.” (A brief annotated list of his cinema essays is at the end-Also, every text link included in this interview takes you to the relevant Barrett essays). Barrett’s forte is writing longer analytical essays about obscure cinematic genres under the guide of DVD reviews. I’ve known Mike since college where we collaborated on a literary magazine and I ran the film projectors for an international films series Barrett headed. In addition to currently writing articles and reviews for the San Antonio Express-News, Video Watchdog magazine, and PopMatters, he keeps busy selling old books on Amazon. His screenplay for an animation feature is currently going through “development heck.” Other projects include writing children’s fiction actually intended for adults and appearing in a still-unreleased comic video about the life of John Ruskin. Michael Barrett is a San Antonio writer and critic who has been publishing essays about cinema and TV for more than 20 years. Promotional Tips for Smashwords Authors u0026#038 Publishers.Robert’s Roundup u002du002d Ebook Deals.Incredible Musicians you can download for free (Best of Jamendo).Introducing Booby Naked Stories (Personal Memoirs).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |