Authors — Ricky D'Ambrose
-
Border Crossings: Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada
The face of Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is a slab—gaunt, ashen, with a firm, unsmiling mouth. In front of the camera, he’s at once impassive and confessional before his two interlocutors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They’ve recruited the old man, a celebrated American documentary filmmaker now wasting away from cancer, to recount his life for posterity, in the process conjuring the young man (Jacob Elordi) Fife once was. Or was he? I’m not sure where Fife the Elder and Fife the Younger begin and end in Paul Schrader’s latest film. Nor could I tell you at which […]
by Ricky D'Ambrose on Dec 16, 2024 -
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Ricky D’Ambrose Speaks with James Gray about Armageddon Time
Armageddon Time returns the American writer and director James Gray to his childhood—or at least to a version of it. While its treatment of grade-school-age protagonist Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) and his dealings with the world of grown-ups in and around his home in 1980s Queens, New York, might not be, strictly speaking, autobiographical (Gray has been careful to distinguish between personal and autobiographical filmmaking), Armageddon Time draws upon the filmmaker’s childhood to fashion a story of a boy’s moral and aesthetic education that seems at once thoroughly lived-in and unsentimental. For nearly two hours, we watch as young […]
by Ricky D'Ambrose on Oct 11, 2022 -
“Our Society is Riddled with Contradiction and False Talk”: Hal Hartley on His Career
There’s something perverse to the notion that Hal Hartley’s three decades of writing and filmmaking amount to a “career,” as Metrograph would have it in the catalogue copy for its ten-day retrospective of his medium- and feature-length films. Whatever one thinks about Hartley, to say that his work represents a “career” means viewing the films episodically, as evidence of an enterprising filmmaker’s increasing personal ambition and competence. But if I’ve suspected anything from watching and re-watching Hartley’s films—including the shorts, which unfortunately don’t appear anywhere in the Metrograph series—it’s that they can’t so easily be assimilated in this way. I […]
by Ricky D'Ambrose on Jan 22, 2020 -
The Clear Identification of Priorities: Ricky D’Ambrose on Being His Own Graphic Designer
It was apparent early on that I would design most of the paper props for Notes on an Appearance: The film’s predecessor, a short called Spiral Jetty, relied, in a similar way, on a cache of fictitious newspaper and magazine clippings. Both films were made quickly, with meager ledger books (Spiral Jetty, if memory serves, cost less than $500; Notes on an Appearance was shot, edited, color-corrected and sound-mixed for less than $30,000); and both films were made without much infrastructure, relying on small, resourceful crews. Under these conditions, I became the films’ art director and production designer, learning and […]
by Ricky D'Ambrose on Jun 19, 2019 -
How to Stretch One Apartment into Five Locations: Ricky D’Ambrose on Making Six Cents in the Pocket
Ricky D’Ambrose’s Six Cents in the Pocket premiered at this year’s New York Film Festival. In a guest post, he explains how the film was made, in both technical and artistic terms. Six Cents in the Pocket was made improbably, at a pittance, with a cast of four and a crew of two, for eight days in February and March of 2015. Shot chiefly in one apartment serving at different times as two separate homes, a coffee house, antique store, and a picture-frame shop, the film was a chance to satisfy, in some small way, two needs: first, to make something — […]
by Ricky D'Ambrose on Oct 20, 2015
