Kristin here: David s passing was well over two years ago, and not surprisingly various tributes continue to appear. Film series, collections of essays by his colleagues and friends, many of whom he never met but whose lives were touched by him, and even the naming of institutions for him and me. (One such event will [ ]
Many of you may know that an anthology of writings about various aspects of David s career has been in the works partly because many of you contributed to it. Twenty-five to be precise, plus, as the cover above states, a foreword by me and a preface by Damien Chazelle. It has been edited by Charlie Keil [ ]
Kristin here Last year at the Le Giornate del Cinema Muto film festival in Pordenone, Italy, attendees had the first opportunity to purchase Lea Jacobs fresh-off-the-presses book, John Ford at Work: Production Histories from 1927 to 1939. It was also given away as one of the perks for higher-level donors. The title says Production Histories, [ ]
Back in 2024, I was contacted by two Romanian film professors, Andrei Rus and Doru Nitescu of the Universitatea Nationala de Arta Teatrala si Cinematografica I.L.Caragiale. They had translated David s and my textbook, Film History: an Introduction, the first of our books to appear in Romanian. As part of the activities around its release, they [ ]
Kristin here Last autumn I was contacted by Nick, aka The Voice of Nick, asking for my consent to his creating an audio-book of The Frodo Franchise. This was quite a surprise—a pleasant one of course. Naturally I gave him the go-ahead. I wrote The Frodo Franchise for two main reasons. First, after The Fellowship [ ]
The Youth of Maxim (Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg) Kristin here: As usual, this end-of-the-year entry has come out early in the next year. I was out of the country for six weeks recently, returning on December 27. It takes awhile to choose ten films, track down copies, watch them, and format the illustrations. For my [ ]
Kristin here Loyal readers of this blog checking back at intervals in the hope of finding a new entry will not have found one for quite some time now. Indeed, the last entry was posted in March, and just over half a of silence. This lack of new entries does not reflect a decision to [ ]
Kristin here: Students and faculty in the film-studies division of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are known for aesthetic analysis of films and historical study of the film industry. One aspect of the latter has been the study of franchises. Long ago Henry Jenkins coined the term acafan, defined as [ ]
I dimly remember hearing in late 2020 that the sequel to Moana (2016) was going to be Moana: The Series, streaming on Disney+ rather than a theatrical feature. David and I liked Moana very much, but in those of Covid and non-theater-going, it seemed a minor thing. A series wasn t appealing, and we could just [ ]
Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu) Kristin here: This surprisingly popular series started with what we assumed to be a one-off entry. In 2007 David and I saluted the birth of the Classical Hollywood Cinema in 1917 as a full-fledged new set of norms that would last until the present day and influence filmmakers around [ ]