Associations & Organisations

• Film Studies For Free

  Run by Catherine Grant, this is an invaluable resource which does exactly what its title would suggest: it brings together in one place links to scholarly and intelligent articles and essays on a wide range of subjects that are available for free. The site is dangerous. Why? Well because when you visit this site you will always spend more time perusing the many interesting links and connected tangents than you can afford!

• Electronics Arts Intermix (EAI)

  Non-profit resource for film, video and interactive media art. Includes substantial video streaming samples of many of their artists, including Chris Marker, George Kuchar, Ken Jacobs, Carolee Schneemann, Michael Snow, and Douglas Gordon.

• Film Studies Association of Canada

  Organ for Canada’s long running Association that brings together film scholars, students, researchers, and teachers from all over the country.

  

• FIPRESCI: The International Federation of Film Critics

  Website for the important film critics organization, FIPRESCI. Includes a link-up to their relatively new online film journal, “Undercurrents,” an interesting section where film critics write about film books that influenced their intellectual history, and much more.

  

• Movieplayer.it

  Italian language one stop site for all news/info on what is playing and forthcoming across Italy. Although the texts are written in Italian, and consumer geared, there is a huge database of trailers, many in their original languages, which are not easily found elsewhere. Not only are there tons of trailers, but links to biographies of film personalities, event descriptions (like currently a notice of the restored screening of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour playing at the Cinema Ritrovato a Bologna), etc. Where else can you find, as in the ‘Oggi al cinema’ section, what is playing where across all of Italy? I find it particularly useful for discovering recent Italian films, rather than the North American films filling many screens there as elsewhere. The site is very well organized and essential for Italians seeking cinema news, and any one travelling to Italy who doesn’t want to miss out on their film fix.

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Blogs

• Octane Seating

  Resources for the independent filmmaker.

• Filmsound.org

  The internet’s foremost resource on matters of film sound theory and practice.

  

• Ingmar Bergman Face to Face

  English version of the award winning Swedish website on Ingmar Bergman, launched on May 22, 2006. An excellent reference site for works by and about Bergman.

• Rouge

  Rouge, edited by Adrian Martin, is a simple, user-friendly online film journal which is all about the writing, and mantains one of the highest standards of writing of any online film journal.

• Masters of Cinema

  Serious, erudite in the best sense possible. Covers art house DVD releases across all DVD regions. Great for making your mouth water over DVD’s you don’t have but would die for.

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By Way of Montreal

• Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism

  What a wonderful surprise it was to learn of this new (2010) rekindling of the excellent British film magazine Movie, that ran from 1962 to 2000 and published some of the most engaged, constructive and intelligent film criticism of its time. The online version of Movie provides a nice lineage with the original by including a tribute to one of its founding fathers Ian Cameron (who died in January 2010) by V.F. Perkins, another important figurehead of the original magazine, as well as reprinted the essay by Cameron “Films, Directors, and Critics” from Movie #2. The online version (which is refereed and bi-annual) also emulates the style and layout of the original magazine, and includes some excellent frame grabs. Welcome back.

• David Bordwell’s Film Blog

  There are many film blogs on the web, some good, some not so good. As you might expect from one of the pre-eminent film scholars of his generation, this one from David Bordwell is good, very good.

• The Italian Page

  A one-stop destination for all things Italy related, spanning culture, art, film, education, travel, health, sports, architecture, and history.

• Film-Philosophy

  Film academia meets the web. The most extensive free online archive of book reviews and theoretical essays.

• Film Studies For Free

  Great blog that is more than a blog: a wealth of resources for online scholarly writing on film that is ‘open access’ (free). There is a lot of really good stuff written on the web of value and this site does a great service in promoting this.

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DVD Review Sites

• Truth-in-Cinema

  Quirky but intense website dedicated to the cinematic spiritual heavyweights (Tarkovsky, Bergman, Ozu, Sokurv, etc.).

• Film Int.

  Online organ to the excellent, longstanding Swedish based film magazine, Film International (Filmint.).

• Girish

  Blog written by Film and Cultural critic Girish Shambu which is simple and straightforward: perceptive thoughts on all things relating to cinema, with each blog entry capped off by a useful series of “recent readings” which links you to other film writing which has caught the bloggers mind for one reason or another.

• Senses of Cinema

  Huge, very well supported film journal that is perhaps the best of its kind. Each new issue has enough material to keep you reading for hours.

• Masters of Cinema

  Serious, erudite in the best sense possible. Covers art house DVD releases across all DVD regions. Great for making your mouth water over DVD’s you don’t have but would die for.

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Filmmakers

• Filmsound.org

  The internet’s foremost resource on matters of film sound theory and practice.

  

• Paracinema

  Edited by Christine Makepeace, Paracinema is the online organ of the magazine that is made for, to paraphrase its tagline, “People who love genre movies.” Although many of the back issues (since 2007) are unfortunately sold out, the online presence fills in the space in-between new issues with exclusive editorials, links, festival reports, etc. Taking its name from the term coined by media theorist Jeffrey Sconce (which itself owes a debt to Michael J. Weldon’s ‘psychotronic cinema’), Paracinema prides itself in its writing, which is the right blend of serious, scholarly (without the leaden jargon), well-written, personal, and fun

• Intute

  Intute is a free UK-based online resource which acts as a massive storage for the every increasing area on reputable online journals/essays in every conceivable area. Its main target are UK students, lecturers and researchers in higher academics, but obviously anyone seeking research in their particular area will benefit from Intute.

• Ubuweb

  A wholly independent, wonderful resource on the avant-garde, poetry (in all its forms) and, to quote Ubuweb, “outsider arts.” Includes many sounds, music, books, essays, poems, interviews, radio spots, and critical works that have been salvaged from obscurity, or at least made readily available through their website.

• The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

  Website for Australian government’s archival mission of preserving its audio-visual history.

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Journalism and Criticism

• Truth-in-Cinema

  Quirky but intense website dedicated to the cinematic spiritual heavyweights (Tarkovsky, Bergman, Ozu, Sokurv, etc.).

• Giallo Fever

  Keith Brown’s excellent analysis of the Italian giallo. Entries are normally on a singular film, but reference previous entries and are part of a broader aesthetic and stylistic understanding of the giallo (Brown is a PhD student and I imagine his thesis is on the giallo).

• FIAF

  Site for the Journal of Film Preservation. Amazingly, the site includes full text (pdf file) access to the excellent association journal.

  

• Korean Film

  Excellent site on Korean cinema. Includes book/film reviews, purchasing links, festival updates, industry analysis, etc.

• The Artifice

  An intelligent, broad ranging cultural criticism journal which impressively covers such diverse popular art areas as art, literature, film, TV, comics, manga, games, and anime. Pleasing jargon free writing that is informed, personal and critically astute.

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Publishers, Labels, and Retailers

• caboose

  Montreal-based independent publishing company that specializes in cinema publications. Owned and operated by Timothy Bernard. caboose also has initiated a fascinating project called “Planetary Projection,” an ongoing meta-commentary on the history and evolution of film projections as experienced by projectionists the world over.

• Filmmaker Magazine

  Online organ for the magazine dedicated to independent cinema. Includes additonal material not featured in the print version.

• Giallo Fever

  Keith Brown’s excellent analysis of the Italian giallo. Entries are normally on a singular film, but reference previous entries and are part of a broader aesthetic and stylistic understanding of the giallo (Brown is a PhD student and I imagine his thesis is on the giallo).

• Montreal Serai

  A politically engaged cultural magazine that has a growing online presence (over 2000 subscribers). Montreal Serai rightly prides itself on the ethnic and cultural diversity of its writers and subjects. The webzine covers all the arts, both big and small (from cinema to poetry) with equal dedication.

• The Criterion Collection

  Home of the DVD company committed to the promotion of International cinema. The name has become synonymous with quality, and the yardstick by which other DVD transfers are measured.

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Theory, History, and Analysis

• Cinémathèque Québécoise

  Montreal’s venerable cinema treasure which houses major retrospectives and selections from its own vast archive collection. Also includes an invaluable library of film books, periodicals, newspaper clippings, posters, etc., which is a mine of information for scholars and students.

• Tim Cawkwell’s Cinema

  A sounding board for former filmmaker Tim Cawkwell, on the more esoteric and contemplative aspects of film thought (religion, theology, the imagination, etc.). Cawkwell writes with the general reader in mind, not necessarily the arcane academic. As his logo states, “Intelligible writing about intelligent film.”

• Bright Lights Film Journal

  Once a print magazine, now an intelligent journal of film criticism. Equally compelling with popular film and the more esoteric. Manages to nicely blend a scholarly yet readable approach to a variety of subjects ranging in equal measure from the horror genre to experimental cinema.

• DVD Beaver

  A website specializing in DVD quality control. The place to go if deliberating between competing DVD issues of a film. You’‘ll get the technical comparison, complete with bit rate compression, film stills, and commentary.

• Canuxploitation

  All you need to know about Canadian exploitation cinema (and there’s more than you’d expect!).

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