paul_schrader

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A campaign has been launched for writer-director Paul Schrader to regain editing control on Dying of the Light, which has reportedly been taken over by the producers.

Watch a David Lynch-produced trailer for his upcoming exhibition at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts:

BFI London Film Festival has announced its full line-up, including the long-delayed SerenaPhoenix, Leviathan, The Duke of Burgundy, and more.

Israel, Germany, and France will have their own Life in a Day films, Variety reports.

Watch a video essay on the 100 most iconic shots of all-time:

Nick Cave will be attending NYC screenings of 20,000 Days on Earth for a Q&A and a performance.

At The Criterion Collection, Michael Koresky on Terence Davies:

Terence Davies crafts images that are beholden only to his own artistic sensibility and are unique in narrative cinema for their compositional daring. “I’ve no idea where my style comes from. I’ve not studied painting, I’ve not studied sculpture, it’s all just visual intuition,” he once said. One of the most talked-about shots in all of Davies’s films is a galvanizing image about two-thirds of the way into The Long Day Closes. In Davies’s published script, it is inconspicuous: the simple sentence “Hold on floor” in no way augurs the impact of the scene as it appears on-screen. As eagerly remarked upon by detractors as well as fanatics, this image is used as an example of both the impressionistic lengths to which he will go and the limits the narrative cinematic form can handle. It was even a primal moment for Gillian Anderson’s relationship with Davies—before she was courted to star in The House of Mirth, she claimed to have been emotionally stricken by it in The Long Day Closes: “I remember sitting in the theater and bursting into tears. There was just something about it that was so rich and so full and said so much, even though it was centered on a rug. I was just blown away by it,” she told the Guardian. The responses of many audience members were quite different, according to Davies on the audio commentary track for the BFI DVD edition of the film, who says that the shot “caused a lot of controversy. I cannot tell you how apoplectic with anger some people get!” Since it is an immaculate synthesis of all the concerns I have raised as quintessentially Daviesian (music, lighting, color, composition, perspective) as well as an example of the implicitly and unusually confrontational nature of his art, I will dwell upon this image for the remainder of this section—appropriate, since Davies’s camera dwells upon it for an inordinate amount of time.

TCM will screen 24 hours of pre-Code films every Friday this month, Anne Thompson reports.

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