Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Watch: Experimental Filmmakers Imaginatively Respond to the Pandemic in Cinema-19
In the brisk, 43-minute anthology film, Cinema-19, a group of experimental filmmakers respond to the coronavirus pandemic with diverse and imaginative results. The films are all 190 seconds long and, say the curator/organizers, filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler, “do not attempt to summarize the pandemic, but instead focus on the personal, the political, the sensual, the distant, the abstract, and the absurd.” Highlights include Courtney Stephen‘s poetic essay film on irises, hundreds of which she encountered on walks in the five-mile radius she and her mother were confined to during quarantine. (“This is a trick,” she says in voiceover. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 25, 2020 -
“I Wanted to Tell a Story Where the Atmosphere Was So Severe That It Literally Consumed the Movie”: Jeffrey A. Brown on the Environmental Horror of The Beach House
In his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, critic and theorist Mark Fischer differentiates between “the weird” and the supernatural as it appears in both literature and film. For example, the supernatural world of vampires, writes Fischer, “… recombines elements from the natural world as we already understand it….” These supernatural stories are contrasted with fictions based around suggestions and byproducts of natural phenomena, such as black holes. “… The bizarre ways in which [a black hole] bends space and time are completely outside our common experience,” Fischer writes, “and yet a black hole belongs to the natural-material cosmos […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 19, 2020 -
Trailer Watch: Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks
In what looks like a bit of a spiritual sequel to Somewhere — if you add a couple or more decades to each of the characters — Bill Murray plays a womanizing dad concerned about the possibly adulterous activities of his daughter’s husband (Marlon Wayans) in Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks. Rashida Jones plays the disbelieving daughter in a picture sure to bring the feels for the beauty of a pre-pandemic New York City. The film is forthcoming as the first venture between Apple TV+ and A24 and will be in theaters and online in October.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 19, 2020 -
US in Progress Seeks American Filmmakers with Works-in-Progress for Its Upcoming 10th Edition
Until September 7 American filmmakers can submit their works-in-progress to one of the leading European programs supporting new US filmmakers, US in Progress. Celebrating its tenth anniversary, US in Progress has always taken place within the American Film Festival in Poland and has consisted of events and a live pitching forum. For this edition — November 11-13, when international travel, particularly from the US, is uncertain due to the coronavirus pandemic — US in Progress will take place virtually while an in-person American Film Festival unspools in Wroclaw alongside the New Horizons Film Festival. “It’s the same structure as before,” […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 18, 2020 -
Steve McQueen, Chloe Zhao, Garrett Bradley, Azazel Jacobs and More: The New York Film Festival Announces its 2020 Main Slate
The New York Film Festival announced today the 25 films from 19 countries that comprise its 2020 Main Slate. “The disorientation and uncertainty of this tough year had the effect of returning us to core principles,” said Dennis Lim, Director of Programming for NYFF, in a press release. “To put it simply, the Main Slate is our collective response to one central question: which films matter to us right now? Movies are neither made nor experienced in a vacuum, and while the works in our program predate the current moment of crisis, it’s striking to me just how many of them […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2020 -
U.S. Genre Film Festivals Collaborate on Nightstream, a Collective Virtual Event
Five U.S. film festivals — Boston Underground Film Festival, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, North Bend Festival, Overlook Film Festival and Popcorn Frights Film Festival — are responding to the coronavirus pandemic’s challenges to the festival and exhibition landscape by creating a new virtual festival, Nightstream, that will run October 8 – 11. Programmers from all five festivals will curate the event, which will contain, according to a press release, “a mix of international horror, fantasy, sci-fi, vanguard, and underground films that capture the distinct curatorial spirit of each festival.” In addition, “Proceeds from the event will be shared with all participating filmmakers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2020 -
Sundance Announces 39 International Arts Organizations Receiving Pandemic Relief Funds
Sundance Institute announced today the 39 international media and arts organizations that will receive a total of $405,500 from its Respond and Reimagine Plan. Launched in April, the $1 million fund redistributes funds, according to a press release, to “directly support the urgent needs of artists, as well as organizations from around the world leading the field in support of artists from historically marginalized communities disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.” The grants are non-recoupable and are flexible in intent; they may be used to support individual artists or to “strengthen the organizations themselves in their ongoing work.” Earlier this summer […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2020 -
Watch: Lydia Cambron’s One-Woman 2001 Homage, 2020: an isolation odyssey
Brooklyn-based designer Lydia Cambron — whose commercial work focuses on retail environments and who is fascinated, according to her website, “in the narrative ability of products and objects” — has used her quarantine days to make a witty and poignant one-woman/one-apartment homage to the final sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. From Cambron: 2020: an isolation odyssey is a reenactment of the iconic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Restaged in the context of home quarantine, the journey through time adapts to the mundane dramas of self-isolation–poking fun at the navel-gazing saga of life alone and indoors. This […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2020 -
Watch: Kirby Ferguson’s Conspiracy Explainer, Trump, QAnon and the Rise of Magic
Kirby Ferguson, who landed on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2011 following this Everything is a Remix web series, is back with a new work that explains the QAnon phenomenon and places it in larger political context. For anyone who found themselves Googling “Marjorie Taylor Greene” this morning (Or was perhaps mystified by a colleague’s late-night email screed), the video offers a bit of a primer on the internet phenomenon as well as analysis. As Jason Kottke summarizes at Kottke.org, Ferguson sees QAnon as a form of magical thinking, breaking down six specific characteristics: 1. Obsession with symbols and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2020 -
Watch: Michel and Oliver Gondry’s Music Video for “Model Village,” by IDLES
Director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and brother Olivier, who previously worked together on music videos like the Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar,” have just released a new quarantine-made clip for the Bristol band IDLES. Using a blend of lo-fi animation (Michel’s cardboard cutouts shot by a suspended-overhead iPhone) and CGI (Olivier’s desktop wizardry), the clip, which suggests a Richard Scarry adaptation of Animal Farm, moves from a racist village to the moon. From an article on the video at WePresent: The song is really about the dangerous small-mindedness born out of villages which can sometimes act as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2020
