On one level, this movie is the simplest thing you've ever heard of: a handful of nerds spend 62 minutes talking about books. As with Fendt's previous feature, it seems amateurish on the surface: there are a couple slow pans, but mostly it's still camera placements in direct light. At one point, Fendt shoots a guy with a window in the background so that the outside sky seems blown-out: a big cinematography no-no. There's one very long shot of a…

I just finished teaching a class on the contemporary international art cinema and I was struck how closely my students' ratings of the films that we watched tracked the movies' IMDb ratings. And I was struck how stridently -- perhaps unthinkingly -- my own tastes seemed to have veered in the opposite direction. For instance, my students' favorite film (and the most highly rated on IMDb (8.4) of those I included) was Asghar Farhadi's A SEPARATION; my students' least favorite…

It's funny that so much of the dominant discourse about silent cinema these days is about "modernity" -- every new academic book about silent film recently feels obligated to link movies from the 1920s to the railroad, the telegraph, advertising, the consumer economy, etc. -- as if the use of the root "modern" will somehow legitimate the films for an audience that might not appreciate them if it thought of them as merely melodramatic entertainments. But my experience with silent…