Tim Sutton’s Memphis is a sort of ethnographic rendering of slow cinema, at once alluring and incomplete. The Brooklyn-based director’s second film stars non-actor Willis Earl Beal in a quietly transfixing performance as a mysterious, errant musician, who slinks about the city, with little mind for his work. For its many hypnotic elements (the soundtrack not least among them), Memphis is at its most electrifying when Beal is allowed to lay into some unsuspected sycophant or do-gooder with exacting cool remove. Unfortunately, it’s a remove that often bleeds into the narrative, whose fragments leave the viewer with little to cling to. Kino Lorber will release the […]
Here we have the first official trailer from Magnolia Pictures for Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard, his first film since 2010’s old-school-wacky Kaboom. By all accounts White Bird is a return to the more somberly melodramatic terrain of teen sexuality and lingering trauma of his 2004 apex Mysterious Skin. The film film hits on demand/iTunes on September 25th, with theatrical release following on October 24th. You can also take this opportunity to catch up with Brandon Harris’ 2011 interview with Araki.
If nothing else, I owe Stan Brakhage for my irrational fear of childbirth ever since I was forced to sit through a collegiate projection of Window Water Baby Moving. Often polarizing for those new to the medium, it’s impossible to deny Brakhage’s ingenuity in his tactile use of film. His oeuvre seems to erase the boundary between method and the means by which to achieve it, which becomes all the more peculiar once you seem him in action. Phil Solomon, a fellow experimental filmmaker and collaborator, has uploaded a handful of videos of Brakhage, in the classroom and out, which The Seventh Art says will serve as the basis […]
Giacomo Mantovani sent over this test video to No Film School, which compares China’s OnePlus One smartphone camera with Canon’s 5D Mark III, which both have 1080p capacity. Some of the side-by-side comparisons aren’t exactly the same: some of the OnePlus One footage cropped 300% is from a 4K file, while the 5K Mark III is only 1080p. The non-cropped footage from both cameras is at 1080p. As Mantovani writes, “The sole aim of this test is to compare how the OnePlus One performs in respect to the Canon 5D Mark III in a ideal light condition. In this case […]
More than any other American director working today, Martin Scorsese retains perhaps the most encyclopedic set of knowledge when it comes to his cinematic forbearers. Two years ago, Fast Company distilled 85 references made throughout the course of a four hour interview on Hugo, and dubbed it “Martin Scorsese’s Film School.” Flavorpill went ahead and paired the majority of those titles with pre-existing commentary from the filmmaker’s documentaries, A Personal Journey Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy, to create a comprehensive video essay. Watch above for Scorsese’s insight into everything from Two Weeks in Another Town to Faces, Italian Neo-Realism (Rossellini) to pre-noir gangster films (Walsh), and much more.
“If pornography were high school, we would be the goth table,” says one of the subjects of Christina Voros’ forthcoming documentary Kink, which looks at Kink.com, the web’s largest generator of BDSM porn. Voros was one of our “25 New Faces of Film” in 2008; you can read that profile here. Since then, she’s been very busy, especially as a cinematographer. Notably, since 2009 she’s regularly served as James Franco’s DP on shorts and features, including the recent Child of God and As I Lay Dying. Kink promises to delve deep and familiarize viewers with the producers of BDSM porn. […]
Title sequences just aren’t what they used to be. Nowadays, if they aren’t entirely absent, opening credits are relegated to the corner of the frame, an afterthought accessory to a film’s first scenes. This video from Nora Thös and Damian Pérez entitled “The Film Before The Film,” examines the history of credit sequences from the first Edison films to the age of pioneering designers like Saul Bass and Maurice Bender, through the advent of AfterEffects in the 1990s. Ironically, with all the more tools now at filmmakers’ disposal, titles have recessed into something of a lost art outside of Bond films and other (relatively) aesthetically high-brow big-budgets. “The […]
Disney has a research division, and this video demonstrates something pretty cool they’ve been working on: an algorithm that automatically cuts together footage from multiple cameras. This isn’t entirely a new development: in the video above, the research team compares their results with those obtained using Vyclone, which kind of does the same thing. But Vyclone has trouble sorting footage in an orderly fashion if the camera pans between two separate actions happening in the same area, tending to randomly cut between the two. There are other advantages to Disney’s algorithm, which respects the 180-degree-rule when cutting between multiple sources, […]
With the Chris Marker series underway at BAM this week, it seems like a topical time to share this 2013 rumination on the essay film from Kevin B. Lee. Lee purports that the essay diverges from the rest of cinema in how it “[explores] its subject and at the same time [explores] how it sees its subject.” Words, images and sound interact and inform one another, producing a commentary that is often relegated to the external, or the conscience of the viewer. In his visual discussion of the three pillars of an essay film, Lee draws on Marker’s own Sans Soleil, Godard […]
Not too long ago I was asked to read a script, and when I finished I had one question: what year was this script set in? I wondered because the whole script revolved around people in different cities being completely unable to communicate with each other, to know what was going on in each other’s lives. Yep, this present-day film took place in a world where mobile phones had not been invented. You’d be surprised at how often screenwriters ignore today’s modern means of communication. And not just phones — in order to be truly contemporary, filmmakers must incorporate text […]