Both memoir and essay film, Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson is an astonishing work of cinematic analysis and alchemy. Comprised of material shot by Johnson for 24 different documentaries over a span of 25 years, it’s a movie made up of fragments, globetrotting scenes that tumble one after the other, announced by title cards listing the location and year of the footage but not the director. Included, too, in the footage is personal material, some for film projects of Johnson’s that have yet to be realized and some home movies shot of her mother in the months before she died of Alzheimer’s. […]
Filmmaker is heading, next issue, into our 24th year, and it struck me that if you strung together our interviews with Ira Sachs, who has appeared in this magazine since his first feature, The Delta, in 1996, you’d have a pretty good micro-history of the American independent film movement. Sachs is deeply ruminative about his own process, and he’s enormously self-aware about his own place in the broader moviemaking apparatus. I always look forward to reading the transcripts of his interviews, and there’s usually an answer or to that gets me thinking — or, in the case of his talk […]
Peter Kennedy Archive A kindred spirit to Alan Lomax (with whom he worked), Peter Douglas Kennedy collected British and Irish folks songs from the ’50s up through the aughts. The Peter Kennedy Archive, a new website, draws upon his ’50s recordings as catalogued in the British Library. The amount of raw material to draw upon is large (over 1,660 open reel tapes and 500 DAT tapes for starters. This site allows you to browse Kennedy’s reports to learn more about the circumstances of each recording or go through a performer’s index that can funnel you straight to those tapes already digitized […]
Whether he is pitching a movie, essaying the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer or teaching his Columbia Film Program students Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, writer, producer and now director James Schamus understands the power of discourse. In fact, if you’re a longtime Filmmaker reader, you’ll have read his arguments in these pages over the years, from his “Long Live Indie Film” debate with Ted Hope back in the ’90s of their production company, Good Machine, to his more recent — and mortal — “23 Fragments on the Future of Cinema” just a few issues ago. Now, Schamus continues one […]
Blood Bath “Wait, what happened?” asks Sid Haig at the end of the entertaining but nonsensical 1966 AIP flick Blood Bath, and one can’t help but wonder if it’s intended as a wry bit of self-critique on the part of screenwriter-director Jack Hill. Hill was neither the first nor the last filmmaker to work on Blood Bath, which had a tortured production history even by producer Roger Corman’s standards — and that is really saying something given Corman’s predilection for reshoots, extensive dubbing, and retitling to transform and resell his pictures. Blood Bath began life as Operation Titian, a lackluster […]
Is online distribution a boon to independent filmmakers or a boatload of false promises? Given that streaming/downloading is the primary way that many audiences are now consuming content, this may be the most pressing and important question for today’s business-savvy independent filmmakers. But it’s difficult to discern the answer. For one reason, the digital distribution revolution is always evolving, and what was standard procedure three years ago is no longer the norm. A few years ago, everyone was talking about multiplatform day-and-date hits Margin Call, Arbitrage and Bachelorette — starry films that received huge grosses through simultaneous theatrical and digital […]
Christine certainly isn’t a coming-out performance for Rebecca Hall, a prominent and regular presence at the multiplex since her breakthrough part in 2006’s The Prestige. But her turn as Christine Chubbuck in Antonio Campos’s Christine (out this October from The Orchard) is a devastating assault on a part of unusual complexity. Chubbuck was a Sarasota, Florida, TV journalist who shot herself live and on-camera in July 1974. In the absence of much biographical information, Craig Shilowich’s script portrays Chubbuck as a vector of dueling, uncontrollable contradictions. Hall nails a number of different personality conflicts: she’s a sometimes-beloved colleague with loyal […]
As a cinematographer, I’m always looking for the perfect marriage: the director I can lock eyes with to communicate volumes without uttering a word. Someone who knows how to use my work to its best potential, who can challenge my ideas about filmmaking and push me to reach places I didn’t think I could — and then keep going. In my dreams, it never starts and ends with one film. It’s a lifelong journey to seek out something greater. All my heroes have these sorts of relationships: the Coens and Deakins, Allen and Willis, Iñárritu and Prieto (maybe now Lubezki?!). When meeting with directors, […]
Liam Young is an architect, but rather than building skyscrapers or designing public squares, he makes movies. “I call myself an architect, but I solely work in the spaces of fiction and film,” he says from his studio in London. Indeed, his entire practice is devoted to interrogating the increasingly blurred boundaries among film, fiction, design and storytelling with the goal of imagining our future. Using speculative design and the conjuring of imaginary cities that are assembled from the physical world around us, he opens up conversations querying urban existence, asking provocative questions about the roles of both architecture and […]
Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur unfolds in obstinate silence. Shot duration is prolonged beyond the point of narrative or reason, and the narrative is oblique in the extreme. There’s a man, a woman and a child in various configurations: in a house, running through fields, separated and together. In extended tracking shots, the woman runs through a dark forest, illuminated by a relentless light that isolates her in high contrast, as if she were fleeing a prison-yard. The thrust of what’s being seen is unclear, and the silence grows oddly confrontational. Now the hour-long 1968 film has a score. Written and […]