Authors — Jake Kring-Schreifels
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Silences and Explosions: James Harrison and Paul Cotterel on Crafting Blitz‘s Sound
At the beginning of Blitz, London is on fire. Against a night sky striated by German bombs, flames engulf obliterated city streets and brick buildings. A platoon of firemen scramble through dense smoke and charred remains to control an errant water hose, which whips around and knocks one of them unconscious. Within the foggy confusion, their shouts and commands get lost in the unrelenting, roaring soundscape, punctuated by distant air horns, panicked screams and a whistling aerial assault. It’s a blistering sequence, an aural nightmare that sets the mood for a war movie full of unexpected, terror-filled situations. Normally, sound […]
by Jake Kring-Schreifels on Dec 16, 2024 -
The New You: Aaron Schimberg on A Different Man
Aaron Schimberg has always had a personal interest in facial disfigurement. The New York–based writer-director was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate, along with other medical issues, and has spent the majority of his filmmaking career grappling with people’s perception of him. Much of that has manifested into his bold and sharp-witted filmography, which has considered questions about his place in the world and the ways cinema has shaped prejudice and attitudes toward disfigurement. “I write these films as therapy in some sense,” Schimberg tells Filmmaker. “It’s an ineffective form of therapy because I get done with them […]
by Jake Kring-Schreifels on Sep 18, 2024 -
Sounds that Cannot Be Unheard: Sound Designer Johnnie Burn on The Zone of Interest
When director Jonathan Glazer first pitched Johnnie Burn his dramatic vision for The Zone of Interest, the sound designer took a deep breath. Over the past two decades, the pair had developed a strong rapport, collaborating on a variety of commercials, music videos and long-gestating movies (most recently, 2013’s Under the Skin), experiences Burn remembers taking a physical and mental toll on him. But this rigorous new project—a Holocaust drama in which hellish audio is layered over otherwise idyllic imagery—promised to be the most challenging, counterintuitive and audacious job of his career. “To be honest,” Burn says, “I was really […]
by Jake Kring-Schreifels on Dec 15, 2023 -
Voices in the Room
One Night in Miami stages a heavy-hitting, all-night-long hotel room conversation among Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. In the aftermath of Clay beating Sonny Liston to earn the 1964 heavyweight title, the four talk in private about their fame and what to do with it in a white world. X challenges Cooke to take advantage of and subvert his palatable platform, to infuse his music for captive pale audiences with political outrage. During a year of moral reckoning, isolation and introspection, it was on schedule for those kinds of contentious discussions—about Blackness, protest and systemic inequality—to […]
by Jake Kring-Schreifels on Feb 10, 2021
