Edits Quarterly is not only a good e-zine* about film and photography. It has probably the best webdesign I’ve ever seen. Period. (Hat tip to Wired Webmonkey — it seems the same authors launched an e-zine about baseball.)

* Do people still make these anymore? This is so 1990s!

I finally went to see The Artist, and I truly recommend it. Michel Hazanavicius’ film might be a prime target for the usual criticism by some — after all, here’s yet another film in which filmmakers as a class pat themselves in the back, or that is a feel good lighthearted romatic comedy that becomes escapism fed to the opressed masses, or etecetera, etecetera —, but what matters is The Artist is really, really good.

So good, that even if you don’t give awards and nominations much authority, consider this: two years after the big Oscar favourite was James Cameron’s Avatar — that is, a 3D high-tech extravaganza (which would ultimately lose to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, and deservingly so, but still) — the big ‘Best Picture of the Year’ favourite is a silent, 4-by-3 aspect ratio, black and white film. Further in The Future from Avatar, the special effects sequences (possible spoiler alert) of the likely Best Movie consist of the existence of direct sound, and its visual effects don’t go much further than casting a really cute and well trained Terrier.

That such a thing can happen is one of the reasons I love film.

Update (27/02): The Artist and Michel Hazanavicius did win Best Picture and Best Director, as predicted. For once I was happy with the Oscar results. Not that it actually matters that much from the point of view of film historians (just as an example, does anyone care the horrid Shakespeare in Love once won Best Picture?), but these Academy Awards still certify the ascent of a silent film into popular film canon for the first time since sound film became widespread more than 80 years ago. There’s a wonderful sense of closure in that, as if last night’s Oscars gala ended at the beginning, in May 1929.

I would like to think that story is finally over. Now we can move past Hollywood, and end the madness.

Dean Walton’s sci-fi film posters.

Interesting advertising idea: Canal+ film production flowcharts.

Like.

I don’t have much care for ranking lists, so let’s call this 100 Good Film Noir Posters.

Not as blatant as copyrighting silence, but still: I’ve recently attempted to upload my short film The Things We Found in the Attic to YouTube, which features a Creative Commons-licensed version of a rather famous cello piece composed by J.S. Bach I lifted from the Archive.org Community Audio collection. But try to get that past YouTube’s automatic cops! Despite the fact the composer has been dead for 260 years, therefore back in copyright only by early 22nd century (if copyright expansionism keeps its current pace), YouTube’s audiofingerprinting system flags the music as owned by Sony BMG (they might ‘own’ another performance, but who cares?), banning the video from a list of countries consisting of… all there is, basically.

Strangely, Web searches (not just on Google, which can’t obviously be trusted on this) are rather thin on this issue of false positives in YouTube audio fingerprinting system; a surprise since I expected this issue to be rather recurrent. Perhaps people just give up. Anyway, here’s a YouTube version of The Things We Found in the Attic that doesn’t violate any imaginary copyrights. With a link encouraging you to watch the infringing version.

Movie posters from an alternate universe.

Wired: Photo Enlargers Loom Like Dinosaurs of the Film Age. Requiem for a technology. Even if film is still marginally hip, making color prints in a home lab is just insanely difficult, compared to scanning and (eventually) printing on an inkjet. And since you can’t flaunt your enlarger in public, unlike that old FM of yours, why put up with inconvenience?

Somehow I found myself thinking this is a photo of Werner Herzog’s car.

By the way, I watched My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done a few weeks ago and I do recomend it. Its animals: flamingos and ostriches. (via Pedro Quintas)