The Criterion Collection posts an excerpt from Hollis Frampton’s Surface Tension (1968), which the late artist described as “a single dolly shot from the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge to the lake in Central Park,” condensed down to 160 breathtaking seconds.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tilda Swinton are on the Thai island of Yao Noi this weekend to promote local art and film. “Like planting a garden,” Swinton says, “we’ll grow the seeds and empower the community, and hopefully create a new kind of cinema.”

Among efforts to stop piracy after counterfeit copies of A Trip to the Moon surfaced, Georges Méliès (1861-1938) began shooting with twin side-by-side cameras. In the process, he may have accidentally made 3-D films, according to archivist Serge Bromberg.

A national theater owners’ group believes 20 percent of movie houses won’t be able to convert to digital projection, prompting one owner, Mike Hurley, to ask, “Does it matter that a thousand small theaters may close in the USA? What would be lost?”

“Why did the brilliant men who worked for Thomas Edison feel that they needed to use this new technology to show the world ‘boxing cats’ is a question that has boggled the minds of film historians for over 100 years.”

Documentarian Errol Morris on a trick learned from a PI to get folks to talk: “He’d flip open his wallet, show his badge and say, ‘I guess we don’t have to tell you why we’re here.’ More often than not the guy starts bawling like an infant, ‘How did you find out?’”

Who votes on the Oscars? White men, mostly. A new study finds that the membership of the awards’ body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is nearly 94 percent white and 77 percent male. Blacks and Latinos each make up 2 percent or less.

Diegetic sound is the part of a film score that characters can hear: background music in a car, as opposed to music that adds suspense for audiences. So what exactly is digetic camerawork? John Powers looks at the film Chronicle to explain.