Check out this awesome article about Famous Illinois Criminals, suggested to the site by the incredible James!

Sorry, this week is the very abbreviated holiday link post. Just didn’t have that much this week. Just hope my American readers had a good holiday. (I was very happy to have the time off.)

1. This week’s Must Look — as opposed to the usual Must Read — is actual celluloid strips of Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night being restored by the Motion Picture Academy, courtesy of Phil Solomon. Be sure to click through for the large images. First, there’s the hand-written title sequence and frames from the main part of the film, including visible tape splices, if you look closely enough.
2. So then, the Must Read is Electric Sheep’s write-up of Lewis Klahr’s Prolix Satori series that screened recently at the 54th BFI London Film Festival. Haven’t seen them myself, but they sound amazing.
3. Rhizome has a video example of the Paik/Abe Raster Manipulator, which manipulates the electron beam that “writes” onto a TV screen. It was invented by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe in 1970 and I prefer to call it by its other name: The Wobbulator.
4. And in case you haven’t seen it, Rhizome has a fancy shmancy new website that’s currently in beta mode.
5. Making Light of It has a lovely scan of an ad for the print version of the 1967 Film-makers Cooperative catalog. Hippie butterfly art included, and it included 200 film-makers and 600 films.
6. For Cineaste, Michael Sicinski reviews the colossal and amazing Treasures IV DVD box set and contemplates the “canonization” of avant-garde filmmaking.
7. Hmmm, I wonder what Jack Sargeant is up to lately?
8. Did you know animator Bill Plympton used to be a professional caricaturist?
9. Rodney Perkins analyzes the technical specs of the new Criterion Blu-ray release of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. It also happens to be one of Rodney’s “formative” films, as he says.
10. On the Peaches Christ website, Michael Varrati has yet another filmmaker you should know: Takashi Miike.
11. Chained to the Cinémathèque has Olivier Assayas’ defense of Steven Soderbergh’s Che, which apparently is a film about strategics.
12. This seems a little personal, but it is the holiday season. DINCA has the 2000 Christmas card Bruce Baillie sent to Jonas Mekas and the Anthology Film Archives.
13. Mike White’s Impossibly Funky book tour ended with a bang in the nation’s capital. And should Mike do at least one more print edition of Cashiers du Cinemart?
14. Donna K. went to the Roadside America/Miniature Village in Pennsylvania and had a grand ol’ time.
15. On Facets Features, Susan Doll runs through the troubled history of the adaptation of the book The Devil in the White City, about Chicago serial killer H.H. Holmes. I personally hope this film gets made someday as the book is incredible.