Something to be thankful for while they're still around: Magazines. Of course, in one form or another, there will likely always be magazine-like entities with editors and contributors whose work will appear in numbered issues. But with tablets on the horizon, followed at some point in the future, however distant, by some sort of flexible, highly portable, wear-n-tear resistant e-paper, the magazine printed on paper, slick or matte, with that distinctive, sensuous blend of wood and ink smells, will probably go the way of celluloid.
As you read these words, the editors of one of Germany's most handsome and smart magazines devoted to film culture, Cargo, are hard at work on their fourth issue, which will round out their first full year. One of those editors, Ekkehard Knörer, is intrigued by the Zeitschriftengefühl - the feel of a magazine - replicated online by Issuu, which describes itself as "a leading digital publishing platform delivering exceptional reading experiences of magazines, books, catalogs, reports and more." True enough, but as Ekkehard notes, many of the freedoms offered by HTML go missing.
Perhaps because no single platform can do it all, IndianAuteur is presenting its new issue in an embeddable Issuu layout and as a downloadable PDF, even while posting several articles in the, well, traditional HTML format. Catherine Grant has your guide to these, and for her, one of the highlights is the interview with Australian critic Adrian Martin, who, by the way, is still planning to "launch his own website, containing around 3000 pieces of writing from 1979 to the present, in early 2010."
For years now, many of us have enjoyed sampling Cinema Scope on the Web. Now the Canadian film journal is selling subscriptions to digital versions of its full issues.
A new issue of epd Film is out, and yes, it's in German, but I do want to translate this snippet from Margrit Frölich's interview with Christian Petzold. What's to follow Jerichow?
"Dominik Graf, Christoph Hochhäusler and I are working on a project. It's called Spreewald. Each of us will shoot a 93-minute feature. All three films take place in the same summer in the same location and deal with the same crime. Three constellations, constantly overlapping, will tell this story. The three films are independent of each other, but I think there'll be a certain pleasure in seeing them all. After that, I'll be shooting a historical piece that takes place in 1976 in the GDR. It's the story of a doctor, a woman, who files an application to emigrate. Usually, you'd be thrown in prison for filing such an application. But there was a shortage of doctors. So the doctors were transferred to the country. Just such a case - a woman who's been transferred and waits for her lover in West Germany to arrange for her escape - is the subject of this film. It's the story of the last three months she spends in the GDR before that escape."
Speaking of German film magazines, belated congrats to Revolver for winning the DEFA Award for the "promotion of artistic creation."
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