Spotlight on Videos: Gomorrah (2008)

It’s easy to see why Martin Scorsese heaps praise (as well as his name, as presenter) on this film.  Besides the obvious subject matter, Gomorrah has the same type of motions and scope of a Scorsese film: long panning shots that go from vistas to walls to vistas, documentary-style camerawork and quick bursts of violence [...]

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Spotlight on Videos: In the Land of the War Canoes

“In the Land of the War Canoes” was originally called “In the Land of the Head-Hunters” and this was truer.  It was like watching “Nanook of the North,” a rare anthropological spy treat into ways of a people as extinct as the dodo.  Oh the precious scenes of what people wore and their dances and [...]

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Spotlight on Video: The Rape of Europa

The RISD library has recently acquired “The Rape of Europa,” a documentary film tracing the Nazi theft of art during World War Two, and the allied armies’ efforts to recover the stolen artworks. The film has been praised both for its rare archive footage, and for its narrative structure, which keeps viewers completely absorbed in [...]

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New in the Video Collection: Dario Argento Films

For those of you who are fans of the horror genre, we have a treat in store: the RISD Library has recently acquired a set of films by the Italian director Dario Argento, including these titles: Deep Red (1976); Inferno (1980); Tenebre (1982); Phenomena (1984); Trauma (2002); The Card Player (2003); and Do You Like [...]

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Spotlight on Videos: American Film Treasures IV

This 2-DVD box set, entitled American Film Treasures IV: Avant-Garde, 1947-1986, was released by the National Film Preservation Foundation in early 2009. The set presents a truly eclectic collection of 26 experimental film titles by filmmakers as different from one another as Stan Brackhage, Bruce Baille, Jonas Mekas or Andy Warhol. It is the [...]

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Spotlight on Videos: Surveying the First Decade DVDs

There are a number of video/DVD titles in the RISD Library which are the hidden gems of the collection, but few people know about them. We have decided to have a Spotlight on Videos feature every week, which will give brief summaries/reviews of some of these treasures. This week, the spotlight is on Surveying the [...]

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Academic Film Archive of North America AFANA

AFANA is an organization dedicated to acquiring, promoting and preserving academic film and other historically important films in the fields of art, history, social science, literature and science. With the help of the Internet Archive, they are preserving some truly hidden gems of non-feature film making in the U.S. Check out their website.
One of my [...]

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