The writing featured in this section of the website will for the most part focus on articles and reviews related to Madison film culture from about 1990 to the present, with the exception of the last category, which will re-visit my dissertation from 2004.
Daily Cardinal (1990-1993)
I haven’t saved much from this period, but there a few articles and reviews that I want to re-visit mainly to track how my thoughts about film and my approach to writing about it has changed.
Isthmus (2000-2004; 2012 to present)
As I mention on the About page, I contributed over 60 film related articles and reviews to Madison’s alternative weekly Isthmus before it temporarily ceased print publication in 2020.
Most of my Isthmus contributions since 2012 are easily accessible at https://isthmus.com/topics/james-kreul/.
My 2000-2004 contributions are harder to find, since the online versions were at Isthmus’s The Daily Page (thedailypage.com). You can use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to find them, but that is not easy. So I’ll be posting some scans from my personal archive. Sometimes these will be related to blog posts, sometimes I’ll just post the scan.
Madison Film Forum website (2014-2019)
The Madison Film Forum legacy website can still be found at madfilm.org. The fact that I’m paying to keep that active was one of the motivations for starting this website (I might as well make better use of the hosting account.)
Since that website is still available, I won’t be posting very much material from it here. There are some formatting issues after changing the theme just before ending new posts, but everything there should be readable.
I will occasionally draw from those articles and reviews when discussing Madison film culture during that time. The most valuable section there is the Wisconsin Film Festival coverage from 2014 to 2018.
New York, New Cinema (Ph.D dissertation, 2004)
The full title of my Ph.D dissertation, completed in 2004, is New York, New Cinema: The Independent Film Community and the Underground Crossover, 1950-1970.
Some current developments have inspired me to take a fresh look at it, as well as all of my research documents. In addition to blog posts, I will also share here some interesting or amusing documents from my research folders, when permissible.