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 […]

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 […]

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 — […]