Month: February 2016

A salute to Jacques Rivette, craftsman of the French New Wave

Last week, we quietly lost Jacques Rivette, one of the original filmmakers of the original French New Wave movement. As a filmmaker and a critic, Rivette advocated for a more natural, improvised cinema that the New Wave aspired to. Godard and Truffaut captured the spotlight, but Rivette’s films are often considered some of the most … Continue reading “A salute to Jacques Rivette, craftsman of the French New Wave”

Last week, we quietly lost Jacques Rivette, one of the original filmmakers of the original French New Wave movement. As a filmmaker and a critic, Rivette advocated for a more natural, improvised cinema that the New Wave aspired to. Godard and Truffaut captured the spotlight, but Rivette’s films are often considered some of the most involved and accomplished. His films are often only critical assessed long and complicated, but they offer more than that.

We’ll leave the eulogizing to Glenn Kenny at Flavorwire, who wrote an excellent tribute to a man who never labeled himself a director and preferred a credit for mise en scène. Give it a read.

Rivette’s films are often unusually difficult to find in the United States, but luckily, we have a few available to watch in the library.

Short film on Lumière et compagnie – HU DVD 283
Who Knows? – DVD 314
Gang of Four – HU DVD 318
Secret Defense – HU DVD 530
The Beautiful Troublemaker – HU DVD 10599
The Nun – DVD 11306

How copyright law makes Star Wars homage, not theft

The fever over Star Wars: The Force Awakens has faded now (we haven’t posted about it in over a month!), but there’s still plenty to dissect about it. One of the greatest criticisms of the movie was its tendency to retread themes, imagery, and structure from the original film – ignoring that the first movies … Continue reading “How copyright law makes Star Wars homage, not theft”

The fever over Star Wars: The Force Awakens has faded now (we haven’t posted about it in over a month!), but there’s still plenty to dissect about it. One of the greatest criticisms of the movie was its tendency to retread themes, imagery, and structure from the original film – ignoring that the first movies explicitly, famously stole from classic action serials and samurai movies.

Rather than turn this into a creativity blame game, the Re:Create Coalition, an intellectual copyright law advocacy group, used this as an opportunity to explain the limits of copyright and the difference between infringement and expression. For one specific example, author Jonathan Band cites the early Tatooine scenes from A New Hope by comparing them to sequences and imagery from John Ford’s classic Western The Searchers. This isn’t theft since it’s building on the ideas of an existing work and expressing it in a new way.

That’s a tricky distinction in copyright law for any filmmaker, and Star Wars is a great example of how that can be navigated creatively. Band’s article is mostly a list of examples connecting Star Wars to previous films, but they make a strong point: ideas are meant to be adapted, not restricted.

Bill Clinton watched Groundhog Day while in office – and lots of comedies, oddly

Today is America’s favorite non-holiday that we’re all still obligated to talk about: Groundhog Day! The classic Bill Murray movie with that name came out 23 years ago this month and almost immediately had its fans – including, apparently, Bill Clinton. That’s a clumsy topical segue into a new list from Gizmodo’s Matt Novak of … Continue reading “Bill Clinton watched Groundhog Day while in office – and lots of comedies, oddly”

Today is America’s favorite non-holiday that we’re all still obligated to talk about: Groundhog Day! The classic Bill Murray movie with that name came out 23 years ago this month and almost immediately had its fans – including, apparently, Bill Clinton.

That’s a clumsy topical segue into a new list from Gizmodo’s Matt Novak of every film Clinton watched while he was president. Novak previously rifled through public records for a list of everything Jimmy Carter watched, and Clinton’s history is even more fascinating for its variety.

Groundhog Day was one of the first films Clinton watched after his inauguration in 1993, which set the tone for the hundreds of movies that followed. Where Carter’s movie selections were defined by New Hollywood classics like The Godfather, Clinton watched far more new-release action movies and comedies. It just makes a lot of sense to read that he watched Demolition Man, Deep Impact, The Big Lebowski, Fight Club, and the third Naked Gun movie.

Novak argues that this surprisinglye exciting list might reflect that Clinton used the White House theater for entertaining visitors rather than his tastes. We chose to believe Bill Clinton was a Bill Murray fan.

Atlas Obscura thinks Fritz Lang may have invented rocket countdowns

Life imitates art, but rarely does art have the chance to define the hallmark of a totally unrelated field. For an example of when a film managed to capture the public imagination that strongly, read Cara Giaimo’s article for Atlas Obscura about how German director Fritz Lang essentially popularized the basic ideas of space travel. … Continue reading “Atlas Obscura thinks Fritz Lang may have invented rocket countdowns”

Life imitates art, but rarely does art have the chance to define the hallmark of a totally unrelated field. For an example of when a film managed to capture the public imagination that strongly, read Cara Giaimo’s article for Atlas Obscura about how German director Fritz Lang essentially popularized the basic ideas of space travel.

Giaimo ties Lang’s 1929 silent film Woman in the Moon to the booming popularity of rocketry in post-World War II Germany. Lang worked with a rocket scientist through the film’s production to depict space travel as realistically as possible, often making up concepts as needed. A number of their hypothetical inventions, like a multi-stage engine, have become standard in space travel.

But their biggest artistic license was the use of a countdown before a rocket launch. That was entirely a filmmaking technique to build tension in the absence of sound, but it was so effective that it immediately became part of the popular imagination. The next time you watch any sort of space launch, remember that we have Fritz Lang to thank, accidentally, for that countdown from ten.

Woman in the Moon so accurately predicted the future of rocketry that Hitler reportedly banned the film during Germany’s development of the V-2 rocket. We have no idea if that’s true, but you can certainly watch it now. Borrow our DVD copy at the Media Services desk (HU DVD 1285).