The fifth magnum opus by Luchino Visconti, Le Notti Bianche based on a short novel by Dostoevsky is undoubtedly an experience that is not easily forgotten. The original story written in Russian is taking place in St Petersburg during the ‘White Nights’ or a brief period of just over a months from the end of…
Category: Filmmaking
Burtinsky. Watermark
My first encounter with Edward Burtinsky took place at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London where the screening of his documentary, ‘Watermark’, accompanied by a Q&A session, was organized a couple of years ago. In ‘Watermark’ Burtinsky tackles a very important topic of water, the origin of life, related to survival itself. His film…
An Auteurist History of Film
‘An Auteurist History of Film’ by Charles Silver (1940-2016) is a little gem of a book conceived by its author as a series of short introductory notes accompanying film screenings from the New York’s Museum of Modern Art film collection that took place between 2009 and 2014. Covering true masterpieces of film making as diverse…
Trashed
If you haven’t watched ‘Trashed‘ (2012), the award-winning environmental documentary created by Jeremy Irons, featured in the official selection of Festival de Cannes (2012) and screened at the UK parliament, you should do it right now. Not only does the film shock and inform about the current state of affairs with waste around the world,…
Manufactured Landscapes
Edward Burynsky’s book, ‘Manufactured Landscapes‘ published by Yale University Press is an important environmental photography album focused on the impact of our production and resource extraction activities on the Planet. Exploring the otherworldly entropic landscapes of copper and coal mines in the USA, urban waste collection sites, nickel tailings river in Canada and the ship-breaking…
Light Keeps Me Company
A brilliant documentary, ‘Light Keeps Me Company‘ featuring a celebrated cinematographer Sven Nykvist, directed by his son Carl-Gustaf is a sincere and detailed story of a master filmmaker, who collaborated with Ingmar Bergman on ‘Persona’ (1966) and many other films. Filled with warm and highly personal memoirs by Ingmar Bergman, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Vittorio…
My Voyage to Italy
If you haven’t seen Martin Scorsese’s celebrated documentary ‘My Voyage to Italy‘ (1999) you should grab your copy now before they get out of stock. This is by far the best introduction to Italian Neorealism I have ever seen. Starting with the early precursors of this movement, ‘Ossessione’ (1942) and ‘La Terra Trema’ (1948) by…
Eisenstein on Montage
Serigei Eisenstein (1898-1948), a master of montage as a creative cinematographic tool and very much a person of his time, considered montage as a dialectic collision, out of which a new meaning emerges. He emphasized ‘the principle of optical counterpoint as one of the significant principles of visual conflict and considered several types of ‘cinematographic’…
What makes an image cinematic?
What makes an image cinematic? The top cinematographers were asked this question and their answers were incredibly diverse. “A cinematic images is a combination of a lot of factors: a desire, imagination, ability to move the audience. The time of the day, the lenses, lighting is everything, composition, set design, background. Focal length, changing angles,…
Eco Art Gallery 