Oliver Reed vs. Shelley Winters: A Battle to Remember
Actors Oliver Reed and Shelley Winters are both screen legends, and both were known for being difficult on set. Here they are together on the Tonight Show in 1975. Whether it was a dreadful booking mistake or a stroke of genius we will likely never know, but the results speak for themselves. Reed, always a […]
Guerilla TV Coverage of the 1976 Academy Awards
The San Francisco-based video collective TVTV was founded in 1972 by a group of technicians and other enthusiasts who were eager to seize the means of image-making. They were greatly aided by the development of portable video systems like the Sony Portapak. Shoulder-held video cameras were so uncommon at the time that the operators could […]
AFS Flashback: Richard Linklater Tells His Best Dennis Hopper Stories
Austin Film Society Founder & Artistic Director Richard Linklater hosted a screening and discussion series in 2014 called Jewels In The Wasteland. It featured 35mm film screenings of films that were released between 1980 and 1983, mainly films that Rick had seen as a nascent film lover and had not revisited since. All kinds of […]
That’s Entertainment! Watch the Nicholas Brothers Defy Physics and Gravity in this 1943 Musical Number
This clips starts out well enough with Cab Calloway and his orchestra in their inimitable groove. This is Hall-Of-Fame entertaining here – masters who have honed their craft in front of exacting and demanding nightclub audiences. If all we got in this clip of the 1943 musical STORMY WEATHER was Cab and company, we would […]
Who Killed the Chauffeur? INHERENT VICE and the Tradition of the Impossibly Convoluted Detective Plot
Paul Thomas Anderson’s INHERENT VICE is in theaters now and it is weaving its spell of confusion on audiences everywhere. The labyrinthine convolutions in plot may rightly be seen as the trademark of the author of the original novel, Thomas Pynchon. But there are honorable cinematic antecedents as well. The straight detective movie makes the […]
Richard Linklater Talks Film, AFS & Thin Lizzy on Marc Maron’s Podcast
This week Marc Maron’s WTF podcast presents an hour and a half interview with Richard Linklater. It’s interesting stuff. Of course they talk about BOYHOOD a bunch, but there’s at least a detour through the other Linklater career chapters and a whole segment about Phil Lynott, Thin Lizzy, Captain Beefheart and other musical influences. There’s […]
Happy Birthday Nicolas Cage – Watch this Extended 2014 Career-Spanning Interview
Happy 51st birthday to an actor who is never less than hardworking and conscientious, and is often brilliant – one of the most inspired actors around, in fact. I was not at this Nicolas Cage SXSW panel last year and I have been dogged by regret ever since. Thankfully an audience member shot it and […]
Essential Cinema Guest Programmer Zachary Brailsford on the Films of Jacques Rivette
Here’s a special contribution from guest programmer Zachary Brailsford. The Essential Cinema series UPSIDE-DOWN AND INSIDE-OUT: FIVE ENCOUNTERS WITH JACQUES RIVETTE begins Thursday January 8. When considering the length of a film, one most often will find films ranging from roughly eighty minutes to one-hundred and twenty, something it seems most people agree on as […]
Chale Nafus Presents an Avant Cinema Primer: Walter Ruttmann’s Not-So-Silly Symphonies
AFS Director Of Programming Chale Nafus contributes this piece, a corollary to his ongoing Avant Cinema screening series: German avant-garde director Walter Ruttmann is today best known for BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (1927). This was his entry into the “city symphony” genre, experimental documentaries depicting a day-in-the-life of major cities through hundreds of […]
Enjoy these Fire-breathing Jim Henson Commercials
Jim Henson was one of the great, visionary creators in the moving-image field. But before all the big projects and multimedia success, Henson and his crew paid the bills by making TV commercials. These commercials are witty, smart, funny and cool. You really get a sense of Henson’s varied and diverse skills here, and his […]
AFS Viewfinders Podcast Episode 2: Louis Black – Growing Up in Cinema-Mad New York in the ’60s
The new AFS Viewfinders podcast episode is up. You can listen to it here or search AFS Viewfinders in iTunes to listen to it there. In this installment we talk to Austin Chronicle editor, SXSW co-founder, AFS founding board member and Texas Film Awards Lifetime Achievement Award winner Louis Black. Louis Black, an unidentified Disney […]
MR. TURNER & NATIONAL GALLERY as seen by an art critic
This morning’s Times brought much delight with long-time art critic Roberta Smith’s take on her favorite new films about art, focusing specifically on MR. TURNER and NATIONAL GALLERY. She found that each of these films “says so much about the activity central to both making and experiencing art, which is simply the act of looking, […]
