John Menick Blog | Archive for ‘Filmmakers’

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been more than slightly obsessed with John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’ve probably seen the film a dozen times or more. I’ve read, and highly recommend, the Anne Billson’s BFI study. I’ve defended it to fellow film buffs as one of the best films of the 1980s, period. I even worked at a place called The Thing, gleeful noting on a daily basis the secret connection between my employer and my not-so-guilty pleasure. But this goes way beyond any kind of fandom I’ve ever seen. Way beyond.

For more Thing insanity please see outpost31.com.

From Dis Voir:

Following his research in Poetics of Cinema, 1 on new narrative models as tools for apprehending a fast-shifting world, Raul Ruiz makes with Poetics of cinema 2 an appeal for an entirely new way of filming, writing and conceiving the image.

“Eleven years separate these lines from the first part of my Poetics of Cinema. Meanwhile the world has changed and cinema with it. Poetics of Cinema, 1 had much of a call to arms about it. What I write today Poetics of cinema 2 is rather more of a consolatio philosophica. However, let no one be mistaken about this, a healthy pessimism may be better than a suicidal optimism.

‘Light, more light,’were Goethe’s last words as he died. ‘Less light, less light,’ Orson Welles cried repeatedly on a set—the one and only time I saw him.
In today’s cinema (and in today’s world) there is too much light. It is time to return to the shadows. So, about turn! And back to the caverns!”. R.R

Available from Amazon.

From Wim Wenders Room 666.

I was too late in finding out about the Werner Herzog talk this Friday to get tickets, but in the meantime there’s Tom Bissell’s The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog.