Scanning the Tribeca slate, it’s hard not to wonder what exactly “Tondoscope” is. The capsule for Gust Van den Berghe’s Lucifer claims this is an aspect ratio of his own devising, and this video provides some clarity on what that mean. You can watch a trailer here, but the basic idea is that Tondoscope is a circle. In this nine-minute video, Van den Berghe explains the origins of his idea, and his DP and assorted representatives of the University of Brussels make it happen. From carving the lens to sound mixing (tricky when characters restricted to a circle move not […]
Opening March 20th at the Media Center in Dumbo is Anja Marquardt’s atmospheric debut, She’s Lost Control. Recently nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards, including Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay, the film stars Brooke Bloom as a graduate student/sex surrogate who emotionally abandons herself to one of her more violent patients. At SXSW last year, where the drama had its North American premiere, I wrote that “Marquardt uses the untraditional avenue of sex surrogacy to explore the contradiction at the crux of her character study,” in portraying a woman who has trouble practicing the very intimacy she preaches.
For his next semi-unlikely move, Errol Morris is making six shorts for ESPN Films. This first installment, The Subterranean Stadium, delves into the world of electric football. With guidance from “commissioner” John “Larue” DiCarlo, Morris uses his typically on-point interview skills (and offscreen, typically astonished-sounded questions) to guide us through a game whose players claim, plausibly, is as complex as chess.
Initially unable to raise the $3 million budget for Whiplash, Damien Chazelle made a proof of concept, 18-minute short film that premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Now available online, the short looks to be more or less an exact excerpt of the feature script, distilling Fletcher’s emotional manipulation, rage, and abuse into three consecutive scenes. The precise editing, gliding camerawork, and J.K. Simmons’ high octane performance are all on display, though the short — presumably for budgetary reasons — lacks the isolated, brooding mood and dark yellow color pallet of the feature version. Also notable is that Johnny Simmons was […]
Not to go overboard with the Paul Thomas Anderson supercuts (but to go a little overboard with the Paul Thomas Anderson supercuts), here is a nice essay from Jacob T. Swinney that strings together a selection of long shots from the director’s first six films — a nice contrast to his application of close-ups in Boogie Nights. Emphasizing the unmoored nature of Anderson’s characters both psychologically and contextually, Swinney notes that “We are often presented with characters lost within the frame, and therefore have trouble connecting with said characters–we become isolated ourselves.”
You can’t say that Rishi Kaneria doesn’t know what he’s interested in when he makes his supercuts. Following logically on the heels of “Stanley Kubrick: Red,” which looked at that director’s use of the color, now we have “Red & Yellow: A Wes Anderson Supercut.” Red’s on the left, yellow’s on the right, and there’s an oddly disproportionate emphasis on his 2007 short Hotel Chevalier.
Newlyweeds filmmaker Shaka King made the slightly unorthodox decision to release his short film Mulignans online almost immediately following its Sundance premiere last month. Turns out, King never thought of Mulignans as a festival hopper, but a piece of work meant to be seen by “as wide an audience as possible as soon as possible.” Currently at 61,000 views and counting on Vimeo, I asked King to elaborate on his decision: We initially made Mulignans for the web, but a couple friends suggested I enter it into Sundance…and I’m glad I did. But the ultimate goal was always to get it out there […]
Followed by what promises to be an amazing discussion between filmmakers and subjects alike, John Lucas’s documentary The Cooler Bandits will be screened Thursday, February 26 in New York at Columbia University. The event is free and open to the public. For Filmmaker, Alix Lambert wrote about the film and talked to Lucas while The Cooler Bandits was in post-production. An excerpt: The Cooler Bandits is the film’s title as well as the crew consisting of Charlie, Donovan, Frankie, and Poochie, who were all teenagers in 1991 when they spent the better part of the year robbing restaurants. Collectively they […]
This one’s zippy: a two-minute supercut of close-ups of objects and gestures in Boogie Nights, mostly the former. Taken out of context, a formidable amount of art direction and fetishistically shiny framing comes to the forefront. Entitled “Boogie Nights — Close-ups, Objects etc.,” this is the first video uploaded to the Vimeo channel of Justin Barham, who notes, plaintively, “If I knew people were going to actually see it I’d have given it a cool title.”
In conjunction with the Museum of Moving Image’s first ever cinematographer-centric retrospective, Reverse Shot has produced a small tribute to Gordon Willis’ work on Woody Allen’s Interiors. Staging their own recreations of the film’s many portraits, editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert examine how Willis’ lighting contributes to the emotional interiority of Diane Keaton’s character, Renata. By casting her in shadows for the majority of the film, Willis reinforces her isolation. It’s an important consideration of how cinematography can not only set the external tone of a film, but also play a necessary role in the characterization of its inhabitants.