Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate Launch New Web Series, Catherine
Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate — the 2011 25 New Faces who created the delightful Marcel the Shell with Shoes On — have a new web series, a 12-part “comedy of sincerity” called Catherine. Camp wrote in an email: It’s a comedy, but it’s also sincere and menacing and hopefully kind of evocative. In some ways it’s a response to the “awkward” comedy that dominates TV & movies right now. My secret hope is that it kicks off a new movement away from that kind of boring cynicism toward something with a live, beating heart. A single-entendre sense of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 25, 2013 -
Filmmaker Print Subscriptions Now Include iPad, Digital Access
A yearly subscription to the print edition of Filmmaker magazine now includes our iPad edition as well as full access to our digital archives — all for $18. That’s the short version of the recent changes we’ve made for subscribers. The slightly longer version, for those interested in how we’re conceiving of Filmmaker across our various platforms, follows. If you’re a regular reader of this site, you’ll have recognized that we’ve effectively created multiple editions of Filmmaker. Our website contains new, original content every day, and this content is mostly not contained in the print magazine. In fact, if you […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2013 -
On Indiegogo: Mitch McCabe’s Make Me Normal
The body and mind — filmmaker Mitch McCabe tackled the former in her excellent HBO documentary, Youth Knows No Pain, which looked at the plastic surgery industry and America’s fixation on staying young. Now, she says, she’s “pointing the camera in the opposite direction, at our internal selves.” Make Me Normal is her film about the mental health industry. From her website: MAKE ME NORMAL is a feature-length documentary film exploring recent controversies in the psychiatry field, the rise of diagnosed mental illness, psychopharmacology and our new definition of “normal”— all set against the backdrop of the filmmaker’s own roll-coaster […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2013 -
5 Recommendations for the Northside Film Festival
Kicking off this week in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Northside Film Festival once again has invited a number of community partners, including Filmmaker, to curate programs of new independent, foreign and retrospective titles. Filmmaker‘s pick is Nicolas Provost’s bracing The Invader, a kind of African immigrant on Taxi Driver, which is receiving its New York premiere. Provost is a Belgian visual artist and filmmaker who recently moved to Bushwick, and he’ll be attending the Q&A. Below are five picks — including The Invader — you can plan your calendar around this week. Go Down Death. Amidst all the cookie-cutter indies, Aaron […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 18, 2013 -
Serbian Shocker Clip Arrives on DVD from Artsploitation Films
Winner of the Best Feature Tiger Award at the 2012 Rotterdam Film Festival, Maja Milos’s Clip has stirred controversy on the festival circuit for its graphic and downbeat look at the sexual rebellion of a barely-teenage Serbian girl. The first feature of its young female director, and partially financed by the Serbian government, the film takes its title from its 14-year-old protagonist’s penchant for recording her drug-and-sex-fueled environments on her cell phone. Brandon Harris covered the 2012 International Film Festival Rotterdam for the Spring, 2012 edition of Filmmaker and below is his take on the movie. Clip is released on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2013 -
Apple Announces New Mac Pro with Upgraded Editing Capabilities
Alongside a Jony Ive-helmed refresh of its iOS mobile software, a long-awaited update of Apple’s Mac Pro line was finally announced at today’s WWDC. Replacing the large cheesegrater floor model is a computer one-eighth the size that resembles the classic Braun KF 20 coffeemaker. From the Verge: The new Mac Pro will be one-eighth the size of the old 40-pound Mac Pro. The new desktop, which stands 9.9-inches tall and 6.6-inches wide, will ship this fall. When it does, it’ll feature a blacked-out aluminum exterior and be small enough that it can sit on most desks. Inside, it will make […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 10, 2013 -
Music Video: KVB’s “Hands,” Directed by Alix Lambert
Filmmaker — and occasional Filmmaker contributor — Alix Lambert (The Mark of Cain, Bayou Blue) recently directed three dreamy, color-drenched music videos for the band KVB. Using a similar approach to performance footage but layering different imagery for each track, the three songs — “Captives,” “Hands” and “Shadows” form a loose trilogy. From the InCase/Room 205 site: While on a recent tour of the Western United States, London-based The KVB moved heaven and earth to make this wonderfully meditative 3-part episode possible. Working with award-winning documentary filmmaker Alix Lambert (The Mark of Cain), cinematographer Conor Simpson, engineer Griffin Rodriguez and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 9, 2013 -
Filmmaker Laura Poitras Co-Authors Bombshell Domestic Spying Report
Like everyone, on Wednesday I read Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian report, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.” I was outraged, but I can’t say I was shocked. I’ve known for some time —- since I was a teenager — that the NSA routinely scoops up all international communications. More to the point, I’d already written this info myself, on this site. In covering filmmaker Laura Poitras’s event at the Whitney Biennial last year, I described the presentation of her guest speaker, Bill Binney, the NSA whistleblower whose warnings have alarmed privacy advocates for years. I wrote: “Slides […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 7, 2013 -
City World Director Brent Chesanek
Among the discoveries at the 2012 edition of CPH:DOX was Brooklyn-based Brent Chesanek’s City World, which is part magic realist children’s adventure tale and part austere landscape documentary. Over precisely framed tableaux shot in his hometown of Orlando, FL — nearly all of them completely absent of people — Chesanek drapes the narration of a young boy mulling the breakup of his family and subsequent move, with his father, to this Southern city. As in another recent film, General Orders No. 9, contemporary landscape photography is presented as historical residue meant to be both meditated on and explicated. Drained of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 5, 2013 -
MoMA Launches “Harris Savides: Visual Poet” Series
Ten features shot by the late cinematographer Harris Savides are included in “Harris Savides: Visual Poet,” a series opening at MoMA today. Writes curator Anne Morra: A Savides shot is often characterized by a sensitivity to design and the striking mutability of light, and a special attention to the actor’s place in the composition. The films in this special tribute represent the wide range of his work, and the many directors who chose his camera to reflect their most personal stories. The series opens with Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, which was the film concentrated on by Zach Wigon in Filmmaker‘s remembrance […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 5, 2013
