Projected.

"The Significance of the Photographic Image in a Filmic Context" is a study of the varied employment of photographs in films.

"Most recent debates about the impact of digitalization on photography either advocate a rupture between analog and digital, or deny that there are any differences at all. The present project, however, wants to emphasize the continuity of several cultural aspects without denying the differences between the two ways of image-making. Paulius Petraitis’ text follows a trajetory around a less focused relation in film and photography and adds both to the so-called “classic” understanding of photographic images, as well as rejecting any rupture in the current cultural perception of photography." 

— Sahar Askari

Stanley Kubrick wrote many interesting letters. Here is one, that is especially curious, addressed to Roger Caras - vice president of the production company behind "2001: A Space Odyssey's" - and Mr. Caras' reply.

Woody Allen working on a set

"I hate when art becomes a religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in Interiors. I always feel the artist is much too revered--—it’s not fair and it’s cruel. It’s a nice but fortuitous gift—like a nice voice or being left-handed. That you can create is a kind of nice accident. It happens to have high value in society, but it’s not as noble an attribute as courage. I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks—laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state—those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor. The problem is that being creative has glamour. People in the business end of film always say, I want to be a producer, but a creative producer. Or a woman I went to school with who said, Oh yes, I married this guy. He’s a plumber but he’s very creative. It’s very important for people to have that credential. Like if he wasn’t creative, he was less."

  Building Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

Various legends surround Lang's Metropolis. Such as the use of 37 000 extras and its budget making it the most expensive film at a time (and still the most expensive German film when its budget is adjusted for inflation). Some of the most impressive miniature sets and early effects were used in this film.

There are, arguably, as many themes intersecting the film as there are stories about its making. Tom Gunning writes that Metropolis is a "blend of kitsch and monumentality, mechanical sexuality and over–the-top melodrama" as well as political critique and an utopian fantasy. It also portrays a clash between the new modern world of machinery (represented by Fredersen) and the old realm of beliefs (represented by mysterious Rotwang).

Flight scene from F. W. Murnau's "Faust" (1926) was a cutting-edge cinematic spectacle of the time. It was a high budget film and elaborate models were built for this scene.

One of the most exciting documentaries ever (technically it is more of an amateur film) is now available online.

Kon-Tiki documents an inspiring journey across the Pacific with a raft. Six crew members, led by Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl, took 101 days to sail a distance of almost 7 000 kilometers from Peru to Polynesia. The 16 mm film, shot by the members of the expedition, documents daily routines as well as tense moments. Poetic and beautiful it is both a sign of times and enduring testimony of the courageous adventure spirit of a human.

Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada on Alan Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

  Great scene from great film (Damnation by Hungarian Béla Tarr). It is one of my probably top 5 film scenes.

Song Over and Done by Vigh Mihály.

"The Clock" is a great video piece by Christian Marclay that is currently on display at White Cube gallery in London.

'The Clock' is constructed out of moments in cinema when time is expressed or when a character interacts with a clock, watch or just a particular time of day. Marclay has excerpted thousands of these fragments and edited them so that they flow in real time. While 'The Clock' examines how time, plot and duration are depicted in cinema, the video is also a working timepiece that is synchronised to the local time zone. At any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching 'The Clock' experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, making time unravel in countless directions at once. Even while 'The Clock' tells the time, it ruptures any sense of chronological coherence.

"The magnifying glass of the film camera will show you your shadow on the wall, something you live with without noticing, and it will show you the adventures and the ultimate fate of the cigar in your unsuspecting hand, and the secret – because unheeded – life of all the things that accompany you on your way and that taken together make up the events of your life."

"This is truly the art of the future."

Watch "Star Wars" ballet conducted by John Williams at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. No light-sabers but the intro music that starts ballet and each film from the series gives me shivers.

Interesting thoughts on "Star Wars" by Alex Carnevale in his article "The Jedi of Minsk":

Some parts of the culture stay parts of the culture. Usually they relate to cultural icons, whose identities are so frequently personified in the art and Sovietesque reproduction of the image that it becomes currency in every aspect of the society.

Star Wars, on the other hand, is probably destined to inevitably disappear.

Mission-based programming like Star Trek and Stargate is about the vagaries of human exploration. That's not Star Wars. It's about fear of technology, and a movie about fear of technology is probably not going to age all that well in the age of technology. That's the age we're in.