Category: media

For 16 years, Paris-based photographer Stephan Zaubitzer has been seeking out old movie palaces and photographing them. – The Guardian

“Wally Feresten, who runs the cue card department for the show and has been there for decades, explains everything from how cast members can tell their lines apart, why they’re written in a certain way and with certain spacing, how they’re positioned, and how they pull off the trickiest camera shots with them.” (video) — Gothamist

For nine months in 1969-70, Native American activist John Trudell made weekly broadcasts from the shuttered prison in San Francisco Bay, programs that aired on Pacifica Radio stations in California, New York, and Texas. They brought the injustices faced by indigenous Americans to the ears of more than 100,000 listeners — and earned Trudell an FBI file that ran to more than 1,000 pages. — Narratively

Last week there were thousands of layoffs at news organizations. Not just at traditional newspapers either. Buzzfeed, one of the buzziest new digital titles, downsized itself in an attempt to find a model that works. The news business has a number of business models at work right now, but it’s still unclear what will be successful. – The New York Times

Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (roughly, “I felt something when I saw that girl”) isn’t the first-ever lesbian movie from India — Deepa Mehta’s indie film Fire came out in 1996 (and extremists burned down a few theatres that showed it) — but it’s the first to come from the big Bollywood studio system, and its cast features some of India’s biggest stars. Sharan Dhaliwal writes about seeing the film with other Indian queer folks. — The Guardian

That’s the contention of the CBC’s Catherine Tait. Netflix is such a force in Canada it’s difficult for homegrown productions to compete. As countries struggle to protect their national cultures, streaming services such as Netflix have threatened the media ecosystem. – Toronto Star [paywall]

Asghar Farhadi on the impact of censorship in Iran: “Each director finds his own way of dealing with it. It’s claimed restriction can lead to even greater creativity. I believe that’s true in the short term, but in the long term it destroys creativity.” – The New York Times

In If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Baxton worked with location designers who knew the details both of the New York of today and of James Baldwin’s New York. That meant letting the Bronx stand in for Greenwich Village, and not letting Washington Square Park, which is “like Versailles” compared the park of Baldwin’s story, be itself. – The New York Times

William Jackson Harper wants dark-skinned actors to have a lot more choices – and for himself, personally, aside from playing a nerdy, dead ethics professor on The Good Place, he wants more: “Stories of the black community in the U.S. Like right after the civil rights movement, I’m really interested in that because I feel like there’s a shift that — I’ve asked my mom about it because I remember her saying that growing up in our neighborhood was very idyllic in a lot of ways. And it was a black neighborhood, and it was the ’60s, and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, OK.’ So at what point did the neighborhood become less idyllic?” – HuffPost