Authors — Jessica Dunn Rovinelli
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“Everything About Women Interests Me”: Lizzie Borden on the New York Feminisms Trilogy
In 2022, Lizzie Borden’s virtually unseen first feature Regrouping was restored and given its first-ever theatrical run. That film joins the now-canonical Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986) in what some have termed her “New York Feminisms” trilogy, all three of which are now screening together on the Criterion Channel for the very first time. Together, the three films set a blueprint for a contemporary model of feminist filmmaking deeply situated in her place and time that prioritized discussion and conflict as ways of building something new. A long-time fan and recent friend of Borden, I sat down […]
by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on May 7, 2024 -
Breaking Bodies: Julia Ducournau on Titane
Following her breakout film, the high school cannibal romp Raw (2016), filmmaker Julia Ducournau doubles down on her predilections for freely reconstructed human flesh. The Palme d’Or–winning Titane strays even further from traditional narrative logic, emerging as a baroque investigation of the power of bodies to morph in response to the desires and violence of both people and machines. Taking its title from the metal plate installed in a young girl’s head after her father (Bertrand Bonello, in a fun bit of casting) crashes their car amid her aggressive fury, it is, yes, the movie where a woman fucks a […]
by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Oct 11, 2021 -
The Mankalorian: Two Approaches to Digitally Captured 35mm Looks
The last time I wrote about film color for this magazine was on the ways 35mm shooting and digital color combined in Uncut Gems and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to create contemporary looks strongly engaged with the past, resulting in what we might call a look “more filmic than film.” David Fincher’s Mank, along with a second season of the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian, gives us an opportunity to consider how digital and celluloid tendencies combine from the opposite direction—both were shot digitally, then graded to explicitly evoke celluloid. Once again, color grading and capture format […]
by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Dec 9, 2020 -
Quarantine Reading: I Am My Own Woman and Never, Ever Ever, Coming Down
As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we’ve reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. Today: Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on two trans autobiographical books turned into doc films. — Vadim Rizov Every book-to-film […]
by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Apr 2, 2020 -
Black and Blue: The 35mm Colors of Uncut Gems and Star Wars
Fall 2019 provided us with a massively budgeted 35mm feature in the form of J.J. Abrams’s The Rise of Skywalker (shot by Dan Mindel and colored by Stefan Sonnenfeld at finishing house Company 3) and a surprisingly visible A24 mid-budget art film in the Safdie brothers’s Uncut Gems (shot by Darius Khondji and colored by Damien van der Cruyssen at The Mill). In each case, the choice to shoot on celluloid was rooted in what could be termed (charitably) as a nod to film history or (uncharitably) a nostalgic gesture. I make no claims as to which it is, nor […]
by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Jan 23, 2020 -
From Audience to Utopia: Considering the Spectator in Pre-Production of the Queer/Trans Film So Pretty
I’m a director with one feature film to my name, and I also work as an editor and colorist. About a year ago, I was doing some editing consultation on an early draft of a documentary. Before I gave the director notes, I asked, “What festivals are you looking to have this play in?” He was taken aback. For him, a film—at least this sort, conceptualized as an art film—should be a pure object of creation, and industry concerns should be taken into account only after post-production is completed. I’ve come to disagree. Considering the potential audience and distribution channels […]
by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on May 24, 2018
