The first film documentarian and 2012 MacArthur “genius” Laura Poitras saw in art school was avant-garde artist Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970). Included in our Renegades exhibition, the experimental work “blew holes in my mind” and shaped her future work.

For its Stanley Kubrick show, LACMA has created a free app to share documentation from the director’s career. Included: a 2001-era letter from Kubrick to Roger Caras asking, “Does IBM know that one of the main themes of the story is a psychotic computer?”

Nominees for the Independent Spirit Awards have just been announced and one of the titles that keeps coming up is Beasts of the Southern Wild, which screened at the Walker in June and is up for four prizes, including best feature and best director.

A Walker artist-in-residence in 2002, Alan Berliner won Best Feature-Length Documentary at the just-closed International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam for First Cousin Once Removed, a brutally frank look at the decline of Edwin Honig, a poet and translator.

Nov. 25 marks 65 years since the first Hollywood blacklist was released, baselessly naming suspected communists or sympathizers. The Hollywood Reporter commemorates the day with a look at its role in fanning the flames and an apology from the son of its founder.

From Godard to Scorsese, filmmakers are too enthralled with text, says British director Peter Greenaway, “and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.”

Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s personal manuscripts, notebooks, and letters will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s in London. Along with papers, the archives include photographs of the artist’s later life. The archives have an estimated worth of $160,000.

James Richards won the 2012 Jarman Award for innovative film-based work, but shortlisted artists Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, who come to the Walker next year, won something too—a commission for a piece to be broadcast on British television.