Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from our colleagues across the Internet — and, occasionally, our own writers. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
With the passing of legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis, watch his only directorial feature, Windows, and a video essay on his career. [Vulture/Press Play]
At The Dissolve, Matt Singer looks at Frank Capra‘s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington:
True to Capra’s approach, Mr. Smith is not an intellectual exercise about the fine points of the United States government. Like its director, it doesn’t dawdle over details; not once does this film about the U.S. Senate utter the words “Republican” or “Democrat,” nor does it ever reveal which state Senator Jefferson Smith hails from. (The unpublished book the film is based on, Lewis R. Foster’s The Gentleman From Montana, takes a decidedly less ambiguous approach.) Written, shot, and released in the midst of one of the most tumultuous periods of American history, Mr. Smith barely addresses any of the many important issues of its day, from the Great Depression to the war that had just broken out in Europe.
MIT is developing a glasses-free 3D projector.
At Smug Film, John D’Amico posits Michael Bay as a Futurist director:
Michael Bay is one of the best in the world at depicting motion, and the Transformers series, for all its storytelling incompetence, may be his masterpiece in this regard. The series, particularly Transformers 3, are all in theory a battle between good guys and bad guys, each named and catalogued with action figures and stats. But unlike the pedantic Pacific Rim—which is an accountant’s analysis of a fight—Transformers, in practice, throws all that away and becomes essentially a long series of swirling lights and noises. It’s the explosion of color through time. It’s beyond the infinite.