News

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named Samantha N. Sheppard and J.E. Smyth as the 2021 Academy Film Scholars on Monday.

The annual grant is given to established scholars whose projects are focused on some aspect of filmmaking and the film industry. The Academy’s Educational Grants Committee will award Sheppard and Smyth each $25,000 on the basis of their proposals.

Sheppard is an associate professor at Cornell University. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a B.A. in Film and Television Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Dartmouth College. Her book project, “A Black W/hole: Phantom Cinemas and the Reimagining of Black Women’s Media Histories,” will address the voids in cinema and media scholarship relating to Black women’s creative practices, histories, traditions, and discourses. Through a series of case studies,...

The Academy has chosen its film scholars this year and is not letting the coronavirus pandemic get in the way of one of AMPAS’ most important programs, at least in terms of serious studies relating to the film industry. Fittingly, considering Oscar’s drive toward greater diversity, both projects involve issues revolving around movies and their depictions of the Black community.

Racquel Gates and Rebecca Prime have been chosen as 2020 Academy Film Scholars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Their respective book projects, Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness and Uptight!: Race, Revolution, and the Struggle to Make the Most Dangerous Film of 1968, explore in depth the topic of race in Hollywood. The Academy’s Educational Grants Committee will award Gates and Prime $25,000 each on the basis of their proposals.

Established in 1999, the Academy Film Scholars program is designed to support significant new works of film scholarship.

Gremlins (1984)Towards the end of his latest book, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, film critic J. Hoberman highlights Charles Musser’s Politicking and Emergent Media: Us Presidential Elections of the 1890s, a historical study that demonstrated how “the candidate most adroit in deploying new communications technology almost always prevailed.” Extrapolating from this, Hoberman points out Roosevelt’s “successful use of radio,” Eisenhower’s “pioneering TV commercials,” and Kennedy’s victory over Nixon which was secured over televised debate—after which he moves on to Ronald Reagan, the book’s prime player. The final entry in the author’s “Found Illusions” trilogy, Make My Day completes the long-gestating historical project Hoberman started in 2003 with The Dream Life and extended with 2011’s An Army of Phantoms. Thus, it's both a culmination of the author’s considered, career-long engagement with American film culture, and a kind of corollary to Musser’s study,...

Allyson Nadia Field and Mindy Johnson have been named 2019 Academy Film Scholars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Their respective book projects explore the impact of minstrelsy on early American film and the accomplishments of women in the formation of early animation.

The Academy’s Educational Grants Committee will award Field and Johnson $25,000 each on the basis of their proposals.

“Field and Johnson’s research will shed new light on the history of the film industry through two distinct lenses,” said Marcus Hu, chair of the Academy’s Grants Committee. “This committee is honored to support them, and we look forward to seeing how their work impacts our historical understanding and appreciation of motion pictures for generations to come.”

Field is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Her book, Minstrelsy-Vaudeville-Cinema: American Popular Culture and Racialized Performance in Early Film, reassesses...

In 2015, Kino Lorber launched the successful crowd­funding campaign for “Pioneers of African-American Cinema,” a DVD box set that featured more than 20 feature-length and short films made by groundbreaking African American directors from 1915 to 1946.

The funds raised from the Kickstarter allowed the project to expand from a modest collection of films into a monumental five­-disc collection, loaded with extras and an 80­-page booklet. Now, the entire box set is available to stream on Netflix.

Read More: Kino Lorber Hires Nicholas Kemp as Director of Theatrical Marketing — Exclusive

Showcasing the works of Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, Richard E. Norman and many other legendary helmers, the streaming service includes films features like “Hell-Bound Train,” “Within Our Gates,” “Birthright,” “The Flying Ace” and many other titles. Some like “Hot Biskits” and “the Blood of Jesus” and “Verdict Not Guilty” and “Heaven-Bound Travelers” are also paired together.

“Pioneers of African-American Cinema” was a...

It's arrived -- thanks in part to a successful Kickstarter campaign, this nearly comprehensive compendium of American 'Race Films' is here in a deluxe Blu-ray presentation. Pioneers of African-American Cinema Blu-ray Kino Classics 1915-1946 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 952 min. / Street Date July 26, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 99.95 Directed by Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, Spencer Williams and Oscar Micheaux

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Black Cinema History? We didn't hear a peep about any such thing back in film school. Sometime in the 1980s PBS would broadcast a barely watchable (see sample just below) copy of a creaky silent 'race movie' about a 'backsliding' black man in trouble with the law, the Lord and his wife in that order. The cultural segregation has been almost complete. It wasn't until even later that I read articles about a long-extinct nationwide circuit of movie theaters catering to black audiences, wherever the populations were big enough to support the trade.

Nearly 500 ‘race films’ were produced in the Us between 1915 and 1952 but lost due to a combination of neglect and poor preservation, yet a new project shines spotlight on the early 20th-century films of Oscar Micheaux and others

Contemporary film-makers such as Ava DuVernay (Selma) and Nate Parker (Sundance prizewinner The Birth of a Nation) have recently delved into key moments in African American history for subject matter. But now a Kickstarter-funded restoration and distribution project – Kino Lorber’s ‘Pioneers of African American Cinema’ – aims to shine a long-overdue spotlight on the trailblazing wave of black American independent film-making that flourished in the early part of the 20th century.

Executive produced by Paul D Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and curated by historians Dr Jacqueline Stewart and Charles Musser, the project focuses on a thematically and stylistically diverse group of low-budget movies written, directed, starring and frequently funded, distributed and exhibited by black film-makers.

I say without any hesitation or hyperbole that Kino Lorber’s currently in the works Blu-ray DVD set, curated by film history professors Charles Musser at Yale University and Jacqueline Stewart at the University of Chicago, of early black films from the silent film era to the 1940’s, is the most important Blu-ray DVD collection set come out hopefully next year. Showcasing the films by pioneering black filmmakers such as Oscar Michaeux, the Norman Manufacturing Company, Spencer Williams and James and Eloyce Gist among others, the set has already attracted a considerable amount of attention by film scholars and people who just love movies, their history and lore, Needless to say, it ...

Second #6533, 108:53

1. Jeffrey’s reaction to the violence that has happened in Dorothy’s apartment shifts gradually in the moments that follow this shot from numbed horror to sorrow, as if what he sees before him (Dorothy’s husband and the Yellow Man, tortured and dead or dying) is in some sense the awful answer to his curiosity.

2. From Charles Musser’s The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907:

Sex and violence figured prominently in American motion pictures from the outset. In fact, such subjects were consistent with the individualized, peephole nature of the viewing experience: they showed amusements that often offended polite and/or religious Americans.

3. Jeffrey’s skinny white tie, the fact of it there, an empty signifier or a New Wave signifier?

4. From Theodore Cateforis’s Are We Not New Wave?

As contemporary as ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ [aired on MTV in 1981] undoubtedly was in its time, on...

Second #6298, 104:58

Another dissolve.

1. This one from a montage that’s as expressionistic and compressed as anything in any of Lynch’s films. Having been strapped into the gurney and loaded into the circa 1960s ambulance in all its hallucinatory, candy apple red, hearse-like terror, Dorothy struggles against her bindings, screaming, “Hold me! I’m falling! I’m falling.” The frame captures Dorothy’s dream-terror as it slowly dissolves into a shot of the ambulance siren, a moment that is both horrifying and deadpan, as the dull wail of the siren lends a sort of flat, matter-of-factness to sequence.

2. From Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company, University of California Press, 1991.

Two multishot films made early in 1901 are significant for yet another reason: they made use of a dissolve. In The Finish of Bridget McKeen, [Edwin S.] Porter dissolved between the main narrative gag in the kitchen and the tombstone gag.

Second #6110, 101:50

1. Jeffrey has his hands full. There is Mike (who, in one of Blue Velvet’s weird tonal shifts, has suddenly become apologetic and even Jeffrey’s ally), and there is Sandy helping the naked Dorothy into the backseat of Jeffrey’s car which will take them to Sandy’s house, where, stark naked in the living room, Dorothy will call Jeffrey “my secret lover” in front of Sandy and her mother, and where she will tell Sandy that Jeffrey “put his disease in me.”

2. The shot is so heavily coded with cinema’s past that it’s as if fragments of a frame from Rebel Without a Cause had somehow slipped

into the future and found their way into Blue Velvet. The saturated colors act as a sort of warning, a warning that time is collapsing in on itself. The tail lamps on Mike’s car reference the past,...

Detour into a Dissolve

A frame from between posts 120 and 121.

By the 1830s, he [Henry Langdon Childe] had developed and perfected the [magic lantern] technique of ‘dissolving views,’ in which one picture faded out as the next one faded in. The images were aligned on the screen and the light remained a constant intensity, creating a smooth, gradual transition. This permitted a wide variety of effects that had not previously been possible. (From The Emergence of Cinema, by Charles Musser, University of California Press, 1990.)

A dissolve is the superimposition of a fade-out onto a fade-in, achieved by reversing and them re-filming using film that has already been used once. [George] Méliès first used this technique, which originated in magic lantern displays, in the late 1899 Cendrillon (Cinderella), and then frequently thereafter to link scenes in multiple-shot films. From the beginning, the dissolve was usually not used for trick effect, but rather to create a smooth transition from...

Beverly Hills, CA . The life and career of silent film star Gloria Swanson and camera movement in classic Hollywood cinema will be the topics explored by Cari Beauchamp and Patrick Keating, respectively, who have been named Academy Film Scholars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Academy.s Institutional Grants Committee selected the pair for the honor on the basis of their manuscript proposals. Each will receive $25,000 from the Academy to aid in the research and writing of their projects.

Beauchamp, an independent film historian and author of five previous books, will research and write the first comprehensive biography of Gloria Swanson (1899.1983) whose iconic career spanned from silent films to television and included her Oscar®-nominated performance as Norma Desmond in .Sunset Blvd.. The book will explore the actress and producer.s influence on film production and the culture at large, as well as her off-camera life...

The 'Imaging Asia' Festival organized by Netpac – Cii will be held in New Delhi from 18 - 22 August 2010. Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (Netpac) India and Confederation of Indian Industry (Cii) are organizing this five-day International Conference and a series of cinema-related events in New Delhi to broaden the scope and vision of Asian Cinema.

Symposia, screenings, workshops, cultural events will mark this event during which 30 films will be screened across multiple venues in Delhi. With a Girl of Black Soil directed by Jeon Soo-ii, Korea (90 mins.) will open the festival.

50 plus film personalities from Asian countries will attend the festival. Among them will be luminaries like Charles Musser, head of the film department at Yale University; Michel Reilhac head of Arte Cinema, France; distinguished film makers like Xie Fei from China, Nick Deocampo from Manila, Jocelyn Saab from Lebanon, Garin Nugroho from Indonesia; festival directors, film producers, scholars like Jeannette Paulson Hereniko,...