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Michael Berry reminds us it is essential to position Jia within the dual environments of the local Chinese film industry and international art house cinema to understand his political orientation and aesthetic personas (p. 14). I Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke i , containing a series conversations between these two heavyweight cultural icons in contemporary Chinese cinema, provides a comprehensive and profound view of Jia's film style. Jia Zhangke, one of the most important Chinese film directors and screenwriters, is a leading figure of the "Sixth Generation" movement of Chinese cinema. [Extracted from the article]

Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars: JILL GODMILOW, 2022, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. xi + 191, notes, bibliography, index, £94.00 (hardcover) £25.00 (paper) Godmilow offers her definition of postrealist cinema and explores the purpose of a useful postrealist documentary as an "antispectacular form" and examines the works of other filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel and Alain Resnais. In her book I Kill the Documentary i filmmaker Jill Godmilow speaks from the heart and proposes to challenge the conventional documentary and calls for different ways to make documentaries. [Extracted from the article]

Throughout the book it is addressed that the field of digital filmmaking and especially mobile and smartphone filmmaking as a unique form of creative practice is fast-developing, with new emerging techniques, forms and methods. The author establishes mobile and smartphone filmmaking as a unique film form and introduces his filmmaking modes as a theoretical approach for analysis. The positioning of smartphone filmmaking in a wider framework is challenging in its own right. [Extracted from the article]

"The Art of the Observer: A Personal View of Documentary" by David MacDougall is a book that offers insights into the role of an anthropological director in documentary filmmaking. MacDougall emphasizes the importance of selective observation and the connection between shots in a film. The book also provides a personal account of MacDougall's fifty-year journey as a filmmaker and world traveler. However, some critics argue that MacDougall's perspective may have a colonialist aspect and that his own story restricts his recognition of the significance of his documentary subjects. Overall, the book offers valuable insights into the filmmaking process but may leave readers with feelings of confusion and awkwardness due to unconscious bias in the author's wording. [Extracted from the article]

In 1953, Bellingham's KVOS-TV aired its first broadcast--Queen Elizabeth II's coronation--to audiences in northwest Washington State and southwest British Columbia. KVOS was the second television station in Washington and the first in British Columbia. As the station--and the popularity of television--grew, KVOS turned a persistent focus to attracting television audiences in the Vancouver metropolitan region and Vancouver Island. The station established a subsidiary in Vancouver in 1960 to produce commercials for local Canadian advertisers. This subsidiary grew into a full-fledged film production studio, Canawest Film Productions, which produced commercials, industrial films and animation for clients on both sides of the border. For a brief period, KVOS and Canawest fostered a unique relationship among an American broadcaster, Canadian and American advertisers, and cross-border audiences. Canawest was shuttered in 1977 after the Canadian legislature passed Bill C-58, ending tax deductions for Canadian companies advertising on American TV stations. This paper gives insight into the cross-border design of KVOS as well as Canawest's role in producing audiovisual material in the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, this paper reflects on the tensions between culture and economics in the face of financial incentive and policy intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Battle of Neretva, directed by Veljko Bulajić is one of the biggest war spectacles produced in Yugoslavia following the famous partisan battle with Axis forces during World War II. The film serves as a useful site from which we can understand the conventions of the Yugoslav war film while its exceptional production and exhibition strategies and reception history signal a critical turning point in the cultural understanding of the war film as a meditator of history. By studying the film's production, exhibition, and reception, aesthetics, and historiographical significance, and drawing upon original archival documents preserved in the Jugoslovenska Kinoteka/Yugoslav Cinematheque in Belgrade, this paper aims to identify, assess, and expose the layered significance of the film The Battle of Neretva, and to further map out its position within (Yugoslav) film history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those films directed by Stanley Kubrick have frequently been analysed and interpreted through the perspective of the producer-director's authorial control. However, documents in the Stanley Kubrick Archive can allow for the voices of a myriad of overlooked, forgotten, and even hidden labour to be restored to the history of these films. Focusing on A Clockwork Orange (1971), the article considers how that film was purposely promoted by Kubrick and his publicist at Polaris Productions as having almost been single-handedly produced and created by Kubrick. The article challenges and deconstructs this self-promotion myth of Kubrick's control by critically reading against the grain of archival documents such a progress reports, unit memos, and correspondence in order to uncover the extent to which other media labourers around the world were involved in, and continue to be involved in, the film's production, distribution, exhibition, and marketing. In taking this approach, the article aims to work towards a greater understanding of production hierarchies on A Clockwork Orange, to question the way in which archives of canonical film directors are used by researchers, and to examine how archives contextualise or even marginalise the voices of below-the-line media labourers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the history of Lydia Bailey, the only US studio-made film to depict the Haitian Revolutionary period. It asks why, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such an unlikely project might have seemed commercially promising enough to justify a significant production budget. The essay draws on private studio memorandums as well as public press discussions to shed light on the high stakes in debates over racial representation and colonialism/decolonization in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and to illuminate everyday assumptions of white supremacy as these shaped the making of the film and its promotion. Production files and a range of industry, daily and weekly mainstream white press and Black newspapers document the racial divide shaping the film's production and reception. The story of the making and forgetting of Lydia Bailey reveals the process by which transnational Black history and Black struggle became more public and legible in the wake of WWII anti-fascism and internationalism, and then was driven back off stage by the political mobilization of Cold War anti-Communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]