Halfway through their year-long “Still Dots” blog experiment, the Walker’s Jeremy Meckler and Matt Levine discuss analyzing the film The Third Man, looking at one frame every 62 seconds: “It makes me feel like a real film scholar or a real nerd.”

The challenge of filming The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramovic’s silent three-month performance at MoMA, is the same one the artist confronts in her piece, says Matthew Akers, “To be present, to slow down, and to have a genuine connection with another human being.”

Martin Scorsese has thrown in the towel on 35mm: The Wolf Of Wall Street will be digital, says editor Thelma Schoonmaker. “It would appear that we’ve lost the battle. [He] just feels it’s unfortunately over, and there’s been no bigger champion of film than him.”

Influential film critic Andrew Sarris has passed away at age 83. Writing for the Village Voice and the New York Observer, he championed auteur theory, “the idea that a great director speaks through his films no less than a master novelist speaks through his books.”

“My ultimate goal in film-making is to make a film which includes a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world,” Yoko Ono said in 1967. Forty-five years later, she’s hoping you’ll upload smiles to Instagram or Twitter with the #smilesfilm hashtag.

Marina Abramovic says she was paid “so little” for her 2010 MoMA show, adding, “[T]hey completely ran over me.” She’s still fond of the museum’s director, however: She says Glenn Lowry is one of the “best-looking directors.”

Of 40 cats living at his studio, one comes and goes as it pleases, says Ai Weiwei in a trailer for the film, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which screens at the Walker July 25. “If I never met this cat that could open doors, I wouldn’t know cats could open doors,” he says.

The funereal fireworks that conclude Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s short film Ashes (streaming now at Mubi.com) are both a commentary on a medium that’s “transforming or dying” and a reference to his native Thailand: “She’s like a ship that is slowly sinking.”