“Cinema is Montage.”—Sergei Eisenstein
While cinema was still only a toddler in the artworld, Sergei Eisenstein wrote several essays on his seminal theoretical concern: Montage Theory, and while he wasn’t the first to write about montage—Kuleshov had demonstrated his “effect” by at least 1921 and Pudovkin wrote about it in the mid-20s—Eisenstein’s definition of montage [...]
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Now that the Gears of War III beta test run has ended, I wanted to turn in a new direction here at Randomaniac—video games, of course.
Throughout human history, games of all types have held great artistic value—take chess: the concept, stratagems, and primitive narrative all merge with each unique piece/board design to create what can [...]
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The 2011 Cannes Film Festival is happening this week, and I wanted to give you a glimpse of Brian De Palma’s surreal 2001 Cannes Film Festival set-piece in Femme Fatale. This was the same Cannes where David Lynch won the Prix de la mise en scène [best director] for that year’s other Sapphically charged Noir dreamscape—Mulholland [...]
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Lance Henriksen has been making, on average, three and a half movies a year for fifty years. He’s a true workingman’s actor, and the sheer diversity of material that people have written about for this blogathon attests to that fact. Even more so than most beloved character actors, Lance has absolutely no fear of a [...]
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Escape from New York has never been taken very seriously. Its main character, Snake Plissken, is a cult icon of both sincere reverence and high camp, and as such he’s a figure of immutable ambiguity. Much of the film’s limited critical praise falls on its dour black humor which seems largely self-parodic by 2011 standards regardless of Carpenter’s [...]
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