Shorts, 5/22.

"On the one hand, there is cinephilia as a conceptual mode of pleasure, and on the other, is thinking of cinephilia as a particular historical moment and/or cultural movement (think only most recently, Rosenbaum and Martin's Movie Mutations, and - I would add - the blogosphere)." Jason Sperb's been reading Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory and posts a few thoughts at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope.

DK Holm begins a series on recent books on Orson Welles at ScreenGrab, beginning with Rosenbaum's Discovering Orson Welles, a work "almost as complex as Welles's career." DK's review, though, is not - excellent stuff.

Rosenbaum was one of three writers who visited the set of Jacques Rivette's multi-feature project Les Filles du Feu; the resulting essay appeared in Sight & Sound in 1974, and Order of the Exile has revived it. Also new at the invaluable Rivette site is Noel Burch, asking in 1959, "Qu'est-ce que la Nouvelle Vague?" - and Rivette himself with several takes on works by Jean Renoir.

"May 68 awaited its definitive film portrait until the arrival of Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers in 2005," writes Michael Atkinson. "The movie is in fact more of an impressionistic personal meditation on the place and time than an outright historical film. But the feeling of the era, the cataclysmic, romantic, liberating and finally tragically disillusioned emotional thrust of resistance, coupled with the electric sense of being 19, sexually alive, responsibility free and ready to dope up and drop out — all of it seeps out of this neglected three-hour epic like fragrance from a valley of lilacs." Also, briefly, the "must-have, must-see film culture classic," Sansho the Bailiff.

Also at IFC News: "Sometimes you're popular, sometimes you're not. It's not going to change the nature of the work I do. Those [earlier] movies seem to mean a lot to people of a certain age at that time. And yeah, they don't want you to change." Aaron Hillis talks with Hal Hartley about Fay Grim.

For Reverse Shot, Jeannette Catsoulis talks with John Carney, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová about Once. Carney: "The point is to defy expectations, but if you do that too much then the audience becomes frustrated.... For me, making a film is like writing a song that leaves the audience happily surprised."

ST VanAirsdale hears Werner Herzog relate yet another episode of the filmmaker's adventures at getting at the "ecstatic truth," this time for his upcoming Antarctica documentary.

"Venezuela is to give the American actor Danny Glover almost $18m (£9m) to make a film about a slave uprising in Haiti, with President Hugo Chávez hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world," reports Rory Carroll for the Guardian. "It will also give seed money for a film version of The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel García Márquez's novel about the last days of Simón Bolívar, who liberated much of South America from Spanish colonialism." He's got a three-minute audio Q&A with Glover, too.

A slew of Gary Cooper DVDs is coming out and Dave Kehr watches them for the New York Times: "Cooper seemed to carry the West with him, the living embodiment (on screen, at least) of all the virtues that best-selling authors like Harold Bell Wright and Zane Grey had built into their western heroes: a taciturn independence, a distrust of city folk and their fast-talking ways, an unshakable sense of right and wrong and enough skill in violence to back up his convictions."

"The contemporary label defining Harold Lloyd as "The Third Genius" is both demeaning and incorrect," argues David Jeffers at the Siffblog.

"Lee Byeong-il's The Wedding Day was a breakthrough for Korean cinema." Even so, Duncan Mitchel, writing for Koreanfilm.org is neither over- nor underwhelmed.

Matt Riviera on Scott Walker: 30 Century Man and the myth behind the musician: "In [Stephen] Kijak's insightful and substantial documentary, it has found a worthy vessel with which to continue its course through rock history."

"When Good Directors Go Bad." Paul Clark at ScreenGrab on Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg.

Ted Pigeon writes an open letter: "Your stature as a published and respected critic, Mr Schickel, does not entitle you to make broad claims about us 'busy bloggers' that lack any validity or reasoning. However, since you have done precisely that, you have shown yourself to be among the very imposters of film criticism you label bloggers to be."

Online viewing tip #1. David Poland lunches with Sarah Polley. Related: Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic on Away From Her.

Online viewing tip #2. At the Guardian's film blog, Ben Marshall points to clip from Nick Broomfield's upcoming Iraq drama, Battle for Haditha.

Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2007 2:43 PM