Watch This: A One Hour Documentary about Werner Herzog from 1982

Nobody pronounces the words “prehistorical dinosaurs” like Werner Herzog. It’s something like “prehistoorical dino-sours.” If hearing and seeing a young Werner Herzog wandering around with a camera crew and musing pessimistically; playing soccer and talking about his favorite soccer player; riding the prow of a small boat and philosophizing about shipwrecks, etc; sounds like a […]

Wow! Gabriel Garcia Marquez Interviews Akira Kurosawa

Next week at AFS we’ll begin our Way Of The Samurai series with the Big One: SEVEN SAMURAI. To prepare, here’s a dialogue between filmmaking legend Akira Kurosawa and author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s an explosion of wisdom, as you would expect. Here is a sample: “Directors who make films halfway may not realize that […]

AFS Podcast: Retiring Director of Programming Chale Nafus on his Life in Film

30 years after beginning his tenure as a founding Austin Film Society board member and 12 years after joining AFS as Director of Programming, Chale Nafus is retiring at the end of August. AFS Programmer Lars Nilsen talks to Chale about his filmgoing life and his tenure at AFS. We had a conversation together that […]

Watch This: Howard Hawks 1972 Video Interview

Here’s a video of the legendary director Howard Hawks, in his unwanted retirement, relaxing on the deck of a yacht and talking about his career and philosophy of filmmaking. Hawks, with his deep voice and precise enunciation, sounds like he came out of a time machine direct from 1931. He speaks about violence in films […]

David Bordwell on the Art of the Martial Arts Film

Author, scholar and critic David Bordwell wrote the book on what constitutes film art, literally. His “Film Art: An Introduction” is one of the most widely assigned and perhaps the best ever basic textbook on general film aesthetics. He is brilliant across the board on the subject of filmmaking as storytelling and, best of all, […]

Morbid Movie Resource Alert: Ronald Bergan – Master of the Film Obituary

It’s always sad when movie people we love die, and we maybe see a paragraph at most about them in the news headlines. Sometimes we never hear about the person’s passing until we look the name up on IMDb and notice a dismaying and surprising date of decease. The British newspaper The Guardian devotes more […]

Thoughts On The BBC’s List of The 100 Greatest American Films

It feels like a relic from another time in a way, but the BBC has just released a list of the 100 Greatest American Films as compiled by a non-named group of reviewers, critics, broadcasters and authors. This used to be the kind of gambit that film magazines and other critical outlets would pull to […]

Don’t Mess With Barbara Stanwyck – You’ll Regret It

While researching Barbara Stanwyck’s TV career for our upcoming History Of Television show (which leads into our Stanwyck Noir Essential Cinema Series), I found this interesting fan magazine article about Stanwyck’s feelings about her BIG VALLEY costar Lee Majors. Not sure where or when it is from, but I did find contemporaneous articles about Majors’ […]

Watch This: David Lynch Interview from 1979

“It’s got to be a certain kind of comedy in order to make the switch into a sort of fear. In a lot of comedies you begin to feel too safe and then it’s hard to switch over. But this is a strange kind of comedy and it can easily slide into sort of a […]

AFS Viewfinders Podcast: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Moviemaker Dialogue

Filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour visited us here at AFS shortly after completing filming on her new movie THE BAD BATCH which stars Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey. She presented a screening (with an unforgettable Q&A) of her film A GIRL WALKS HOME AT NIGHT and then sat with AFS members at Austin Studios […]

The Magnificent Second Act of Barbara Loden

Barbara Loden in WANDA (1970) Barbara Loden, who was born on this day in 1932, had one of the most interesting career trajectories we can think of. From her beginnings as a teenage dancer and pin-up model through to her Actor’s Studio training and first roles on the legitimate New York stage to her television […]

Watch This: Jean-Luc Godard & Fritz Lang: A Dialogue In 8 Parts

“Maybe in our films we put our hearts… our desires, everything that we love or that has betrayed us. And I think one day, if there is someone who could analyze us, you and me, maybe he would know. I don’t know why I’ve made my films. Do you know?” – Fritz Lang Below is […]