Associations & Organisations
British Film Institute - Excellent and in-depth site from the venerable British Film Institute. Highlights include the series "BFI Archive Interactive" which includes excellent interactive studies on British cinema. A recent one was Paul Merton on Early British Comedy.
Culture.ca - This website is an initiative of the Department of Canadian Heritage, and functions as a one-stop gateway to all aspects of the Canadian cultural scene, including history, politics, sports, and art. Contains an impressive range of up-to-date links and cultural information, including streamed segments from the CBC Television Archives.
Electronics Arts Intermix (EAI) - Non-profit resource for film, video and interactive media art. Includes substantial video streaming samples of many of their artists, including Chris Marker, George Kuchar, Ken Jacobs, Carolee Schneemann, Michael Snow, and Douglas Gordon.
FIAF - Site for the Journal of Film Preservation. Amazingly, the site includes full text (pdf file) access to the excellent association journal.
Film Festival World - Excellent, valuable online resource for everything connected to the world of the film festival. By far the most complete, organised, and up-to-date resource on film festivals from all over the world. Resources include a listing of International film academies and awards bodies and links to film journals and e-zines.
Film Sound - Extensive, one stop location for everything you wanted to know about film sound.
Film Studies Association of Canada - Organ for Canada's long running Association that brings together film scholars, students, researchers, and teachers from all over the country.
Filmsound.org - The internet's foremost resource on matters of film sound theory and practice.
FIPRESCI: The International Federation of Film Critics - Website for the important film critics organization, FIPRESCI. Includes a link-up to their relatively new online film journal, "Undercurrents," an interesting section where film critics write about film books that influenced their intellectual history, and much more.
Intute - Intute is a free UK-based online resource which acts as a massive storage for the every increasing area on reputable online journals/essays in every conceivable area. Its main target are UK students, lecturers and researchers in higher academics, but obviously anyone seeking research in their particular area will benefit from Intute.
Screen Directors Guold of Ireland - "Established in 2000, the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland (SDGI) is the representative body for directors involved in the Irish and international audiovisual industry. These include directors of feature films, fiction, animation documentary, television drama, short films, video art and commericals."
The Independent Media Arts Alliance - A national network of independent film, video and new media production centers, distributors and exhibitors from all over parts of Canada.
The Italian Page - A one-stop destination for all things Italy related, spanning culture, art, film, education, travel, health, sports, architecture, and history.
The School of Sound - The School of Sound is an organisation that has staged an annual -and now, biennial- international symposium on the creative use of sound in the arts and media. The next SOS takes place in London in April 2009. You can learn more about their related activities, including their journal, "The Soundtrack," at their website.
Woman Make Movies - A non-profit organization which promotes and distributes films from all over the world made by and about women. Their catalogue contains over 400 titles in all genres, with an emphasis on documentary and experimental.
By Way of Montreal
Cinémathèque Québécoise - Montreal's venerable cinema treasure which houses major retrospectives and selections from its own vast archive collection. Also includes an invaluable library of film books, periodicals, newspaper clippings, posters, etc., which is a mine of information for scholars and students.
Cinema du Parc - An important Montreal venue for alternative and independent cinemas. Not afraid to mix the popular with the esoteric.
Cineroute - A gateway into the National Film Board of Canada's vast film collection.
Infliction Film - Website where you can get information on films made or produced by Mitch Davis, who also programs for Fantasia, and the Cinema du Parc theatre. Great links page.
DVD Reviews
DVD Beaver - A website specializing in DVD quality control. The place to go if deliberating between competing DVD issues of a film. You''ll get the technical comparison, complete with bit rate compression, film stills, and commentary.
Masters of Cinema - Serious, erudite in the best sense possible. Covers art house DVD releases across all DVD regions. Great for making your mouth water over DVD's you don't have but would die for.
Filmmakers
Ingmar Bergman Face to Face - English version of the award winning Swedish website on Ingmar Bergman, launched on May 22, 2006. An excellent reference site for works by and about Bergman.
Stan Brakhage on the Web - Filmmaker red Camper's labour of love on the late Stan Brakhage. Extensive material covering the life of America's seminal avant-garde filmmaker.
The Island of Sokurov - Offical website for the Russian director.
Journalism and Criticism
Bright Lights Film Journal - Once a print magazine, now an intelligent journal of film criticism. Equally compelling with popular film and the more esoteric.
Canuxploitation - All you need to know about Canadian exploitation cinema (and there's more than you'd expect!).
Cinema Scope - Cinema Scope is one of, if not the, best Canadian film magazines on the market, featuring intelligent criticism, festival coverage, and interviews. Their website offers content information on current and back issues, subscription information, and some web only content.
European Films.net - Privately run website aimed at promoting European cinema. Covers films that are in-production and recently released across the world. Good source of production credit information with an extensive archive of film reviews.
Korean Film - Excellent site on Korean cinema. Includes book/film reviews, purchasing links, festival updates, industry analysis, etc.
Oddity Cinema - As the title suggests, Oddity Cinema is a webzine which tackles the weird and the wonderful in bite-sized morsels of critical commentary, capsule reviews, interviews, trailers, plugs for upcoming releases, etc. What sets it apart from most online review sites is its interactivity, with readers able to add their own comments to reviews. The design is colorful and attractive, yet remains functional and easy to navigate.
Truth-in-Cinema - Quirky but intense website dedicated to the cinematic spiritual heavyweights (Tarkovsky, Bergman, Ozu, Sokurv, etc.).
Publishers, Labels, and Retailers
British Film Institute - Excellent and in-depth site from the venerable British Film Institute. Highlights include the series "BFI Archive Interactive" which includes excellent interactive studies on British cinema. A recent one was Paul Merton on Early British Comedy.
Cult Epics - Independent DVD label which specializes in esoteric arthouse, erotica, and horror cinema. Their releases are always a labor of love with care, commitment, and excellent supplementary material.
Fab Press - UK publishing house run and operated by the indefatigable Harvey Fenton. Genre material done with passion, style, and intelligence.
Fangoria - Website that both promotes and adds material to the long running horror magazine.
Filmmaker Magazine - Online organ for the magazine dedicated to independent cinema. Includes additonal material not featured in the print version.
Index DVD - Independent video distribution label which strongly promotes Austrian (mainly) and East European political and avant-garde artists. Their DVDs are beautiful works of art in themselves, with stylish see-through covers, copious (bilingual) liner notes and artist bios.
The Criterion Collection - Home of the DVD company committed to the promotion of International cinema. The name has become synonymous with quality, and the yardstick by which other DVD transfers are measured.
Theory, History, and Analysis
Bright Lights Film Journal - Excellent, eclectic film journal that manages to nicely blend a scholarly yet readable approach to a variety of subjects ranging in equal measure from the horror genre to experimental cinema.
Camera & Pen - An elegantly designed website by filmmaker/writer Tim Cawkwell that features "intelligent" musings on cinema, with an emphasis on avant-garde and spiritual cinema (Bresson, Tarkovsky, Dreyer, the Holocaust, plus Cawkwell has authored a book entitled The Filmmaker's Guide to God in 2004). The site's title, which is a reference to Alexandre Astruc's caméra-stylo,' and is appropriately subtitled "Intelligible writing about intelligent film," also includes snippets of Cawkwell's aborted (he stopped making films in 1987) practical creative career under the heading "own work." A site well-worth visiting.
Caracult and Fuorivista - Two interesting linked Italian websites, one, Caracult, exploring the broader cultural sphere with a slant toward the esoteric and the anthropological, and the other, Fuorivista, a cinema journal featuring varied approaches to marginalized cinemas and an inclusive understanding of cinema (the journal is interested in all aspects of cinema, aesthetic, industrial, spectatorial, etc.).
Cineaste - Online link-up for the longstanding film magazine, which now includes web only material that supplements the monthly paper editions. Cineaste continues to publish excellent, well-informed criticism informed by all aspects of film art: the social, political and aesthetic.
Cinema of Malayalam - Website dedicated to the cinema of Kerala, the southernmost costal state of India. This website contains an extensive database of national and international award winning films and directors of Malayalam (the language spoken in Kerala) cinema.
David Bordwell’s Film Blog - There are many film blogs on the web, some good, some not so good. As you might expect from one of the pre-eminent film scholars of his generation, this one from David Bordwell is good, very good.
Film Studies For Free - Great blog that is more than a blog: a wealth of resources for online scholarly writing on film that is 'open access' (free). There is a lot of really good stuff written on the web of value and this site does a great service in promoting this.
Film-Philosophy - Film academia meets the web. The most extensive free online archive of book reviews and theoretical essays.
Images: a journal of film and popular culture - Intelligent analysis of popular genres. Includes an excellent "In Focus" section on Italian Gothic Horror film.
Incite! Journal of Experimental Media & Radical Aesthetics - "INCITE! is a new journal dedicated to the discourse, culture, and community of experimental film, video, and new media. Merging handmade and online platforms, this hybrid publication addresses the lack of critical attention afforded film and media artists working today. In addition to scholarly articles, INCITE! publishes aesthetic statements, manifestos, artist projects, multiples, archival documents, interviews, reviews, and hastily drawn plans. Stationing ourselves at the cross-flow of research, scholarship, and creation, we encourage personal writing, critical poetics, and radical approaches to film and media (editor, Brett Kashmere).
Reverse Shot - Independent, quarterly film journal with intelligent and eclectic writing. Highlights include selected 'director symposiums' where the editorial board features who they feel are expressive voices in the contemporary cinematic landscape. Past symposiums include Jim Jarmusch, Tsai Ming-liang and Olivier Assayas.
Rouge - Rouge, edited by Adrian Martin, is a simple, user-friendly online film journal which is all about the writing, and mantains one of the highest standards of writing of any online film journal.
Screening the Past - One of the few refereed online film journals.
Senses of Cinema - Huge, very well supported film journal that is perhaps the best of its kind. Each new issue has enough material to keep you reading for hours.
Ubuweb - A wholly independent, wonderful resource on the avant-garde, poetry (in all its forms) and, to quote Ubuweb, "outsider arts." Includes many sounds, music, books, essays, poems, interviews, radio spots, and critical works that have been salvaged from obscurity, or at least made readily available through their website.
Vertigo - Vertigo is an international film magazine covering the best of independent and experimental film. This is the recently added online version of its hard copy magazine of the same name, which has been documenting global screen culture since 1993.
Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema - Excellent website dedicated to pre-cinema and early cinema. The site is based on a book entitled Who's Who of Victorian Cinema edited by Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, which can be purchased through the website.
