Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times Magnolia Home Entertainment – October 18 Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times visits one of our nation’s oldest and most-read newspapers at a time of existential crisis. Directed by Andrew Rossi, this documentary focuses on The Times’ media desk, tasked to cover, among other things, the crisis facing journalists today due to the Internet. At the center of the film is David Carr, a veteran reporter and ex-drug addict in the midst of a lengthy piece about the collapse of The Tribune Company. The film incorporates events like […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 23, 20121 John Peel’s Record Archive Regarded as one of the greatest DJs of all time, the legendary John Peel introduced British listeners to countless seminal bands – including The Buzzcocks, New Order, The Slits and Peel’s favorite band, The Fall – on his BBC Radio 1 show, which ran from 1967 until his untimely death in 2004. Now the Arts Council England, via its website The Space, has created an online archive of Peel’s radio shows, live sessions and, most remarkably, his incredible record collection. For fans of Peel and music in general, this website is a veritable rock-and-roll treasure […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 19, 2012Ganja & Hess: The Complete Edition Kino International – available now A bona fide cult film, the anti-Blacula, defiantly difficult and parochial, a vampire film in which the word itself is never used and its tropes mostly discarded, Bill Gunn’s miraculous Ganja & Hess is jolting and jagged, lyrical and mythic, as utterly unclassifiable today as it was at the time of its initial unveiling. Long lost following the rapturous reception at Critic’s Week at Cannes in 1973, where it received a seven-minute standing ovation before being butchered by its distributor into a sexploitation film and boxed up under six […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 19, 2012Click here to see Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2013.
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 17, 20121 The Chimerist If you’re a new iPad owner, you should know that there are reading options other than iBooks, the Kindle app and Instapaper. Indeed, while games and social apps get most of the iOS press, there are artists who are rethinking the book form for the tablet device. These innovators are chronicled at The Chimerist (thechimerist.com), a Tumblr blog by “two iPad lovers at the intersection of art, stories and technology.” Follow writer, editor and literary blogger Maud Newton and Salon co-founder Laura Miller and learn about new graphic novels (Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze), storytelling game apps […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 17, 2012BLANK CITY Lorber Films – available now A group of artist friends make no-budget, handmade films way outside the mainstream, often acting and crewing for each other while developing a defiant, totally alternative sensibility and star system. Mumblecore? No, I’m talking about the downtown New York No Wave film scene of the 1980s, a spirited and impossibly cool movement celebrated in Céline Danhier’s Blank City. Included are scenes from pictures like Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, Amos Poe’s The Foreigner, and, from the subsequent Cinema of Transgression movement, Richard Kern’s The Right Side of My Brain. As interviewer, Dahnier provides […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 17, 2012Mike Kelley, who passed away this month, contributed to Filmmaker once, in 1997, when he interviewed Harmony Korine about Korine’s debut feature, Gummo. From our archives, here is that interview. With a poetic, impressionistic take on film narrative, a visual style incorporating everything from elegantly framed 35mm to the skuzziest of home camcorder footage, and a startling mixture of teen tragedy, vaudeville humor, and sensationalist imagery, Harmony Korine’s first feature Gummo is perhaps the only recent film whose artistic strategies draw as much from visual art as the film world. (A gallery installation of work from Gummo opens at L.A.’s […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 13, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Wednesday, January 25 9:45 pm –EcclesTheatre, Park City] I remember watching the end of Hannah and her Sisters as a teenager, when Woody Allen finds out he’s not going to die from a terminal illness and then fails at a suicide attempt. How does he find the will to live again? He walks past a theater where a Marx Brothers comedy is playing, he slips in and loses himself in the magic of Duck Soup, and all his problems melt away. Of course, right? I mean, what better way for a person to celebrate life than to go […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Wednesday, January 25 6:30 pm –Eccles Theatre, Park City] When you are in the film business, someone, let’s say your dentist, will inevitably tell you a story that they think is a great idea for a movie. But they don’t know how to write a script, they just know how to clean teeth, so they want you to write it for them. If I had an idea that I thought would make a good novel, I would tell it to the poor guy who made the mistake of telling me that he was a novelist, because I don’t […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2012Some very sad news. A statement just released by the Sundance Institute reports: “It is with great sadness that the Sundance Institute acknowledges the passing of Bingham Ray, cherished independent film executive and most recently Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society. On behalf of the independent film community here in Park City for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and elsewhere, we offer our support and condolences to his family. Bingham’s many contributions to this community and business are indelible, and his legacy will not be soon forgotten.” Ray was a true indie film pioneer, as well as a […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 23, 2012