Alfred Hitchcock left a peerless legacy of the stylishly macabre. In this year’s Hollywood Portfolio, Keira Knightley, Javier Bardem, Seth Rogen, and other stars channel iconic moments from the director’s greatest hits. (see the whole slide show)

Spotted via Douglas Haddow’s Tumblr blog.

Previously on Skandalon : “Force By Northwest”

Tootsie is second in the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Laughs list. The film also feature Jessica Lange and Bill Murray. Sydney Pollack plays the role of Hoffman’s agent.

Dirty Harry, Don Siegel, 1971

idsgn (a design blog) – Now and then: How film titles have evolved

“Before the cinematic title sequences of today’s films, pioneered by the likes of Saul Bass and (more recently) Kyle Cooper, film titles were once a motionless work of art. In this ‘Now and then,’ we are pressing pause and exploring the art behind the film title.

Since the early days of cinema, artists have carefully designed film titles to captivate audiences and set the film’s mood. To bring attention to this often overlooked art form, Dutch graphic designer (and movie lover) Christian Annyas has put together The Movie Title Stills Collection. The website collects and neatly organizes film titles by decade, from the 1920’s to present. To illustrate how film titles have evolved over the years, we’ve chosen some of our favorites from the collection.”

“Carrotblanca is a 1995 8-minute Looney Tunes cartoon. […] It was subsequently released on video packaged with older Looney Tunes cartoons and was included in the special edition DVD, and later HD DVD and Blu-Ray, releases of Casablanca, the film to which it is both a parody and a homage.” (Wikipedia)

Watch Carrotblanca on Dailymotion.

Previously on Skandalon.

Conan the Nietzschean… Way to go, Conan.

The quote is taken from Twilight of the Idols (Die Götzen-Dämmerung, 1895). It’s the 8th maxim from the section “Maxims and arrows” (the very first section of the book, after the preface). Here is a slightly different translation : “Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” (tr. by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale here).

”Bicycle Thieves (Italian: Ladri di biciclette, also known as The Bicycle Thief) is a 1948 Italian neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Sica. It tells the story of a poor man searching the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle, which he needs to be able to work. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Luigi Bartolini and was adapted for the screen by Cesare Zavattini. It stars Lamberto Maggiorani as the poor man searching for his lost bicycle and Enzo Staiola as his son.” (Wikipedia)

Artist’s statement: “The artist began to notice totally black images within certain films, images that were invisible in normal conditions of perception. He spent years systematically sampling them from subtitled foreign-language films, photographing images directly on the television screen by using the slo-mo and freeze-frame buttons on his VCR. To date, his Excédents series comprises some fifteen black images, constituted by three subsets: cross sections (an integral part of the film), inserts (intertitle cards in silent films) and the actual Excédents as such, which are black shots grafted onto the film for no apparent reason.” (More).

About Éric Rondepierre: “In the early 1990s Eric Rondepierre started exploring the blind spots of cinema. His intervention consisted in choosing frames (the images that are projected at a rate of 24 per second on the screen, and that are invisible in a normal screening) in accordance with clearly defined criteria, and then excerpting them and showing them as large-format photographic prints. This economy of the image, which is often defined as “conceptual,” brings into play several different registers (text, painting, cinema, photography) with a rigour that does not exclude strangeness or humour.”(Read his biography).

Piranha, Joe Dante, 1978. [screen capture - 01:16:16]

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Joseph Sargent, 1974 [screen capture]

La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard, 1967