2019/09/15

Letter to the Editor (dir: Alan Berlinger)

A beautifully constructed personal essay on the history of the last 40 years as reflected in photos that appeared in print editions of the New York Times. During that time, Berlinger diligently extracted and catalogued the photos from physical copies of the paper, many of the images showing the imperfections of the source. 

All told, there are 7,185 still images presented over the 88 minutes of the film. As each is only on screen for a few seconds, it’s over-whelming to take in, but the ordering of images is masterful, often providing motion where none exists in a single frame. 

It’s also an elegy of sorts to the print newspaper industry, as it struggles to survive in an increasingly digital world. 

As part of my on-going discovery of linkages between films, there is a photo near the end of the Gardens in the Sky park in Singapore, the same location used at the end of "The Whistlers". 

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