Filmboeken

Tijdens een opvallend woelige prijsuitreiking werd het jubileumboek 25 Encounters uitgeroepen tot beste filmpublicatie van het jaar.

Het was met afstand de meest roerige prijsuitreiking in de achttienjarige geschiedenis de Louis Hartlooper Prijs voor Beste Filmpublicatie. Niet eerder werd een winnaar daar woedend terechtgewezen, zoals IFFR-directeur Marjan van der Haar overkwam.

De niet ingebonden, getypte vellen in de doos The Shining: A Visual and Cultural Haunting zien eruit alsof ze persoonlijk door schrijver en winterconciërge Jack Torrance zijn getikt. De doos – meer een kunstwerk dan een traditioneel boek – bevat onder meer essays, illustratiemateriaal en interviews met Shining-acteurs Shelley Duvall en Danny Lloyd. Een (duur?) hebbeding voor eenieder die alles maar dan ook echt alles wil weten over Stanley Kubricks horrorklassieker The Shining (1980).

Frankenstein, was just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction.

Everyone knows about Mary Shelley, creator of, Frankenstein, who was rumored to keep her late husband’s heart in her desk drawer. But have you heard of Margaret "Mad Madge" Cavendish, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier (and liked to wear topless gowns to the theater)?

If you know the astounding work of Shirley Jackson, whose novel, The Haunting of Hill House, was reinvented as a Netflix series, then try the psychological hauntings of Violet Paget, who was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women in the Victorian era.

You’ll meet celebrated icons (Ann Radcliffe, V. C. Andrews), forgotten wordsmiths (Eli Colter, Ruby Jean Jensen), and today’s vanguard (Helen Oyeyemi).

Curated reading lists point you to their most spine-chilling tales.

Bloody Women traces changing gender dynamics in the horror film industry to explore how women have played a crucial role in defining the genre of horror understood as a scholarly discipline, cultural institution, and site of pleasure. While acknowledging that women in the industry face ongoing challenges, this book focuses on their diverse contributions as creators, consumers, and critics of horror, showing how women have been essential in shaping the goals and methods of the genre. Aimed at both scholarly and general readers, the chapters bring together the expertise of filmmakers, festival programmers, and scholars to argue that women have effected a reimagining of horror.

To this end, the volume considers a range of historical and theoretical issues relevant to gender and the genre of horror, broadly conceived. The collection explores, for example, female-directed horror films as a distinctive enterprise, one that is potentially marked by unique cinematic techniques and topical concerns. The book also moves into a more public domain, probing how the cultural experience of horror is transformed when the genre’s major festivals and conventions are developed and directed by women. Together, these essays offer a wide-ranging investigation into the stakes of women’s growing prominence in the horror industry. Most centrally, Bloody Women analyzes how the ethics, investments, and objectives of the genre shift when women deploy horror for their own enjoyment.

Al jaren beweert Quentin Tarantino te stoppen na het maken van tien films om zich volledig te kunnen wijden aan het schrijven van filmboeken. Met de publicatie van Cinema Speculation lijkt hij zijn belofte te houden. Tijdens de internationale promotietournee doet hij ook het Amsterdamse Carré aan.

Op zondag 2 april is het zover: Quentin Tarantino komt naar Nederland. Fans kunnen vanaf morgen een kaartje kopen voor zijn optreden in het Amsterdamse theater Carré. Daar zal de regisseur voorlezen uit zijn nieuwe boek Cinema Specualation en vertellen over films uit jaren ’70, de hoogtijddagen van de Hollywood Renaissance waar hij zich zo door heeft laten inspireren.

De drie-akten-structuur die als algemeen geaccepteerde basis voor filmscenario’s geldt, sluit minder gangbare personages en verhalen buiten. In haar boek Inclusive Screenwriting for Film and Television legt de Amerikaanse scenariodocent Jess King de verborgen normen bloot die verstopt zitten in de zogenaamd neutrale scenario-wetten en komt ze met alternatieven.

Written from an international perspective, this account of the origins of the cinema begins in 1833 with the introduction of optical toys for reproducing movement and ends with a thorough examination of the first full year of projected moving pictures in 1896. Comprehensive and verifiable, with citations that support each individual entry, the book examines the events that culminated in the establishment of the moving picture world that was the dominant visual medium of the last century.

Drawing on a range of international sources, this chronology is a readable, vivid account that corrects many longstanding errors in the story of moving pictures while at the same time recording the astounding diversity of ideas, apparatus, personalities, and exhibitions that turned a passing novelty into a major industry.

Populated by dreamers, inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs with widely different skills, interests, and backgrounds, the many origins of the cinema are all recorded here in a rich tapestry that has been woven with attention to the detailed shape and placement of each individual thread. The result is a fully indexed reference that reflects the state of modern scholarship and should be useful over the long term as both a reference to the period of early cinema and as a starting point for further research.

"Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition..." (Roland Barthes)

In Spookbeeld van de vrijheid analyseert filmwetenschapper Peter Verstraten de tien films van Alex van Warmerdam. Daarbij zoomt hij in op het rollenspel en het ‘poppenkastgeweld’ van diens vreemde personages.