“The fact that at one time there was a camera in front of some people, which made them act in a certain way, and everything they may have thought or said or done at that time no longer has any importance. It is dead and gone; the only thing that counts is what remains, and what remains is a crystallization of it…It’s the moment when you pass from the stage of raw recorded reality into the dimensions of a film..."

By Christopher Small  Almost anyone who has spent a prolonged period at a film festival understands the soothing familiarity of a good pre-movie festival spot, those throwaway bits of business that bleary-eyed delegates sit through upwards of 40 times over the course of a week. Everybody reading this doubtless has their favourites; my sense is…

By Christopher Small Pondering some of the most memorable events of my fourth visit to Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, I find myself embarrassingly drawn to some of the most slavish metaphors of film criticism: film as a magician’s art, the cinema as a séance, and “the magic of movies.” Self-induced nausea aside, this lingering metaphor…