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Making Sense of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Monumental Life’s Work
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Roberta Multiple Lies Down Beside Construction Chart (Michelle Larson), 1978. Courtesy of the artist and Hoffman Donahue, Los Angeles / New York. Copyright Lynn Hershman Leeson.
Last year, I stumbled on a bootleg copy of Twists in the Cord (1994), an experimental documentary shot on video by Lynn Hershman Leeson. I’ve followed the prolific artist for years, but I had never heard of the piece until… Read more
Silver Linings Playbook: Meet the New Indie Distributors
Wicker
Has there ever been a good time to launch an independent film distribution company? Maybe not, admits Danielle DiGiacomo, former executive at Utopia and The Orchard, and one of the partners at a new distribution outfit launched at Sundance called… Read more
Crafting a Personal Poetics: The Pleasures of Critical Writing
24 Frames
In January, I’ll teach another version of my favorite class, “Creative Critical Writing,” a graduate writing workshop dedicated to exploring diverse techniques for writing about—and with, next to or nearby—film, video, still images, sound and other media forms. Moving beyond… Read more
Hits & Misses: The Sundance Class of 2025
Han Gi-Chan, Youn Yuh-Jung and Kelly Marie Tran in The Wedding Banquet
By conventional measures, the 2020s have not been very good for the movies. At mid-decade, there’s the nagging sense that the pre-COVID years represented glory days that will never be recaptured. Corporate media consolidation, the dominance of streaming and short-form… Read more
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One Trillion Possibilities: The Internet Archive and the Vanishing Open Web
Twelve slashed zeros and a one, made of wood and latex paint, stand tall on the roof of the former church where the Internet Archive is headquartered in San Francisco. The organization commissioned this artwork by Jesse Walton to mark an unusual achievement this autumn. For the past 30 years, the digital library has preserved websites, and its collection now exceeds a trillion pages. It’s a mind-boggling milestone that speaks to both the deluge of websites created and edited over the decades and the organization’s concurrent endeavor to catalog digital content in its vastness. The way we access web pages […]
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The More Things Change: How the Independent Film Business Has Changed Over 33 Years
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” says veteran distribution and marketing executive Ira Deutchman. In the business of independent film “before it even had a name,” Deutchman helped market films such as John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence in 1975, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense in 1984 and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape in 1989. For Deutchman and others working at the dawn of the American independent film movement, our current era of corporate consolidation, economic uncertainty and urgent need for dogged do-it-yourself showmanship isn’t so different from the past. “With the rare exceptions […]
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Analog Treasures: Joanne McNeil on Digitizing VHS
The word nostalgia tends to come up whenever analog media gets discussed. “I’m not against it,” Jessica G.Z., the founder of T.A.P.E. (Teach. Archive. Preserve. Exhibit.), told me. “It’s just not my interest.” What interests G.Z. is the durability and continued potential of formats and technologies that were more widely used in the past. Take home movies, which are at the heart of programs at the Los Angeles–based nonprofit. The organization offers magnetic media digitization services to the public at a sliding scale. Someone might come in with a video tape that has been stored in terrible conditions for decades. […]
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Media in the Middle: The Emerging Media Arts Program at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Asked about the fundamental goals of the program of which she is founding director, Megan Elliott is expansive and enthusiastic. “We have a very strong interest in the myriad places our students can go as storytellers, makers, artists, entrepreneurs and innovators, not just within the film industry, but far beyond it,” she explains. She acknowledges that these ambitious goals also pose challenges. “There is always a tension that exists within any design, architecture, arts or media program about how you teach both technical and creative skills that are rigorous and experimental, and how to hold space for all of that.” […]
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Sleep Dealers: Engineering Dreams with AI
Saelyx Finna told me about a dream she had. In it, the filmmaker was trying to alter the dream itself by typing prompts into an AI interface. She wanted to change the dream while she was dreaming it, but it wasn’t working and the dream went dark. When she woke up, she thought about the logic of her dream. “Of course it didn’t work,” she said about the AI intervention. “I was trying to access an external tool to change my internal experience.” Finna’s dream points to something very contemporary: how quickly our inner lives are becoming entangled with changing […]
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Independent Rescue Mission: The Future Film Coalition’s Ecosystem-Saving Activism
Indie Avengers, unite! OK, perhaps the MCU isn’t the best analogy for an all-volunteer group working to keep independent film alive, but as Future Film Coalition producer and board member Sanjay Sharma says, “The streamers have lobbyists, the studios have the MPAA, but there really isn’t a nationwide nonprofit that is looking after this ecosystem, so we need the Avengers of indie film. Nobody else is fighting for us.” Announced during the Sundance Film Festival, the Future Film Coalition was formed to create a bulwark against threats to the field by, as described on the organization’s Substack, the “business practices […]
