Earlier this week we posted this video with Joe Dunton discussing the lenses used by Stanley Kubrick in his films. (Note: unfortunately, that previous video has been removed by the uploader.) Here’s the next in a Kubrick cinematography playlist: various cinematographers on his use of the BNC camera and Zeiss f/0.7 lenses to shoot Barry Lyndon in natural light. (As a reader below notes, this is an excerpt from Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, which is recommended viewing.) Previously at Filmmaker, Jim Hemphill sat down with three of the film’s actors for a discussion of the making of that […]
Conde Nast’s short form original content and acquisitions site, The Scene, has just released the fantastic short Subconscious Password, from Academy Award winning animator Chris Landreth. Landreth stars in the Sundance 2014 premiering film as a man who has trouble recalling an acquaintance’s name at a cocktail party, and retreats into an inner mind game show in an attempt to drum up the correct direct address. Though you can’t quite enjoy the 3-D film as it was meant to be seen online, it’s still a rather inventive head trip.
“‘Therefore’ and ‘but;’ ‘meanwhile’ and ‘back at the ranch.’” Those are two storytelling axioms to keep in mind, suggests Tony Zhou, when structuring both a film and a video essay. Drawing on Orson Welles’ F For Fake, as well as the words of Alfred Hitchcock and Trey Parker, Zhou demonstrates how the juggling of parallel ideas and story lines are essential to any convincing film or argument.
Winner of the Best Narrative Feature award at the Atlanta Film Festival over the weekend, Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck’s God Bless the Child is a naturalistic, quotidian portrait of five children roaming the streets and marshes of Davis, California after their mother skips town. Machoian and Ojeda-Beck capture their characters with both formal remove and striking intimacy, as their interplay suggests the nature of young bodies left to their own devices. Though the Grahams — Harper, Elias, Arri, Ezra, and Jonah — exist in the film without any parental supervision, all five happen to belong to co-director Machoian, a relation which the pair were […]
April 3: 2015: EDITOR’S NOTE. We apologize, but this video is no longer viewable on YouTube. In this 12-minute video, legendary British camera innovator Joe Dunton (you can read up on him here) identifies every lens used by Stanley Kubrick and how they work. Learn about the Angénieux zoom lens that was the most popular in the world from 1966 to the early ’70s, more about the difficulties of shooting natural light on Barry Lyndon and many other aspects of the director’s technically meticulous productions.
Executive producer Spike Lee’s name is all over this trailer, but I’m excited to finally see The Girl is Trouble because of its writer/director, Julius Onah, who I selected as one of our 25 New Faces way back in 2010. At the time of his selection, Onah was prepping this movie, and since its shooting, he became attached to a David Koepp-scripted thriller starring Jared Leto. The trailer seems a bit of a standard issue “guns and a girl” thriller, but I read the original script, which married a film noir storyline with a smart take on the Lower East […]
A.G. Rojas, who two years ago we put in our 25 New Faces list, directs this provocative video from Run the Jewels depicting a prolonged, punch-drunk, balletic street fight between a cop (Shea Whigham) and a young black man (Keith Stanfield). Without dialogue, and just through the subtleties of their choreographed movement, the piece moves away from realism and towards a theatrical space, adding new levels of complex meaning to the track’s outraged aggression. If you start watching, then make sure to watch until the end. From The Skinny: Explaining the clip, Rojas said: “When Run The Jewels sent me […]
Here is a bizarre entry in the contemporary trailer cannon: a one minute plus edit that gives almost no insight into the narrative happenings of the film it depicts, jettisoning specificity for internet topicality. The argument, I guess, is you can glean something about Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope from the execution on display, but I’m inclined to think that with all the memes involved, this is an eye-grabbing attempt more than anything else. The film, which earned raves at Sundance — with the notable exception of Wesley Morris — opens June 19 from Open Road.
It’s not clear where this video uploaded by Eyes on Cinema derives from, and there’s no English subtitles, but here’s eight-plus minutes of rare footage of Federico Fellini directing 1974’s Amarcord. There’s fake snow to be packed together and set up, a typically Felliniesque array walking through it (a priest, a nun and a bull) and lots of Fellini slowly and decisively delivering directions on set.
Here’s another masterful film essay by Tony Zhou, this time on Akira Kurosawa’s use of movement in his films. Movement, you ask? Aren’t movies motion pictures and, thus, constructed around movement? Well, as a comparison scene from The Avengers shows, there is movement in the form of listless dolly moves and diffident head tilts, and then there is movement — elegant, multi-point master shots, vibrant background elements like wind and rain, and outsized expressions from actors that can replace pedantic dialogue. I especially like Zhou’s discussion of how Kurosawa cuts from stillness to movement. His appreciation here of Kurosawa has […]