The Last Picture Show: stark black and white cinematography
"Bogdanovich's coming of age story, set in 1950s rural Texas, is an achingly accurate portrayal of small-town life and the compromises and disappointments that mark the passage from adolescence to adulthood. In contrast to his contemporaries, who experimented with style and new filmmaking techniques inspired by the French New Wave, Bogdanovich looked back to classical Hollywood, utilizing stark black and white cinematography, deep focus and a traditional narrative structure. The film is striking in its lack of nostalgia for the past, focusing instead on the desperation of a dying community and way of life, embodied by the shuttering of the lonely movie house."
(Harvard Film Archive)
"The Last Picture Show", Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. With Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd. US 1971, 35mm, b/w, 118 min.
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The Last Picture Show: ode to a Texan small town
"It's hard to overestimate the influence of Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) ... on all those other elegiac movies about lost youth and crumbling dreams in small American towns that followed it in such huge numbers. We know the storylines, which never vary much. Boy meets girl. They fall in love and think their relationship will last forever but war/adulthood/pregnancy intervenes. Old school friends spend a last summer of high jinks together. They vow eternal loyalty to one another but then the autumn rolls in and their lives drag them off in very different directions. The visual clichés are familiar, too: by the final reel, the once teeming street is empty, with wind blowing the dust, or the old café where the friends used to meet is boarded up. ...
When Bogdanovich revisited Thalia with a belated sequel, Texasville, in 1990, the results were mixed at best. What had made the original so distinctive was the youth of the characters played by Shepherd, Bottoms and Bridges - their curiosity, innocence and their sense of yearning. Witnessing their travails in middle age simply didn't have the same impact. The real follow-up to The Last Picture Show wasn't Texasville but the films that were made - and are still being made today - in its mould."
(The Independent, 18 March 2011)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Art of the Title Sequence: a compendium
"A compendium and leading web resource of film and television title design from around the world. We honor the artists who design excellent title sequences. We discuss and display their work with a desire to foster more of it, via stills and video links, interviews, creator notes, and user comments."
(Ian Albinson)
Fig.1 Ian Albinson, David Horridge, M. Keegan Uhl, Bill Simmon (2011). 'A Brief History of Title Design', Music: RJD2 "Ghostwriter"
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Swine flu: Twitter's power to misinform
"Who knew that swine flu could also infect Twitter? Yet this is what appears to have happened in the last 24 hours, with thousands of Twitter users turning to their favorite service to query each other about this nascent and potentially lethal threat as well as to share news and latest developments from Mexico, Texas, Kansas and New York (you can check most recent Twitter updates on the subject by searching for "swine flu" and "#swineflu"). And despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform's unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter's role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu."
(Evgeny Morozov, 25-04-2009)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
