Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Editor’s Letter
Filmmaker is heading, next issue, into our 24th year, and it struck me that if you strung together our interviews with Ira Sachs, who has appeared in this magazine since his first feature, The Delta, in 1996, you’d have a pretty good micro-history of the American independent film movement. Sachs is deeply ruminative about his own process, and he’s enormously self-aware about his own place in the broader moviemaking apparatus. I always look forward to reading the transcripts of his interviews, and there’s usually an answer or to that gets me thinking — or, in the case of his talk […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 25, 2016 -
Five Questions for Stephen Elliott about The Rumpus Lo-Fi Film Festival
The debut edition of The Rumpus Lo-Fi Film Festival unspools this coming Saturday, July 30, at the Brewery Arts Complex in Los Angeles. Encompassing four features and two panels, the one-day event is, according to author, filmmaker and The Rumpus founder Stephen Elliott, an extension of the literary site’s personality and ethos into the film festival world as well as a kind of a DIY battle cry. Frustrated by the festival rejection notices he was receiving for his third feature, After Adderall, Elliot surveyed other filmmakers about their festival submission experiences. He published the results in a much-debated blog post […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 24, 2016 -
Points North Institute Announces New Shortform Editing Residency to Take Place During Camden International Film Festival
As the photo above indicates, Camden, Maine in the fall is a pretty idyllic place to get one’s head out of an urban edit room and gain perspective on one’s project. Apropos of that, the newly formed Points North Institute — a year-round organization that will produce the Camden International Film Festival as well as other events in Maine — has made its first major announcement: a new shortform editing residency. The week-long residency takes place during the Camden International Film Festival (September 15 – 18) and brings four selected filmmakers and/or journalists to Maine to work on their doc […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 22, 2016 -
Watch: Jim Cummings’s Springsteen-Fueled Sundance Grand Prize-Winning Short, Thunder Road
Following a heartfelt public campaign to convince Bruce Springsteen — or, perhaps, his battery of lawyers, publishers and master owners — to let him affordably release his short film, Thunder Road, director Jim Cummings prevailed. The result is that this excellent short, fully deserving of Sundance’s Best Short prize, is now screening online, for free. Cummings himself stars as a young man who decides to evoke The Boss while eulogizing his mom at her funeral, and the short is an example of a game-changing work that can make a career. (Cummings is on every agent’s radar now as an actor […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 19, 2016 -
Watch: Adam Savage Goes on a Walking Tour of the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition
For those of us who can’t make it out to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Adam Savage of Mythbusters gives us a brief tour of their Stanley Kubrick exhibition and reveals himself to be quite the Kubrick fan. Listen and watch as he views cameras from Barry Lyndon, costumes from 2001 and more.
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 19, 2016 -
Alan Vega, 1938 – 2016
Alan Vega, half of the epochal punk electronic music duo Suicide, died yesterday. He was one of the greats. With Suicide partner Martin Rev, Vega laid the groundwork for industrial electronic music, and much more, as he mixed noise with melody, free-form floating song structures with the terse songwriting economies of doo-wop. The band — starting with its title — was a provocation, but also a salve (or, as Bryan McPeck and Matt McAuley from ARE Weapons wrote in their interview with Vega, “optimistic, life-affirming shit”). Songs dealt with psychotic killers and social unrest and love and optimism. “Dream, baby, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2016 -
Jessica Oreck Explains the Uplifting Origins of the Bra
Filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga) has created a new series for TED-Ed, “In a Moment of Vision,” dubbed “an all-new, all-fun animated micro-series about the history of common objects.” The first episode tells the story of the invention of the bra, which you may be surprised wasn’t invented until the early 1900s.
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 13, 2016 -
Les Cowboys Writer/Director Thomas Bidegain on Contemporary Westerns, His Journey to Directing, and the Importance of the “B-Book”
In theaters now from Cohen Media, Les Cowboys is the directorial debut of acclaimed French screenwriter Thomas Bidegain, best known in recent years for his collaborations with French director Jacques Audiard. (He has co-scripted all of Audiard’s films following The Beat My Heart Skipped.) In an age when the value of the cinematic medium is being challenged, Bidegain has made a haunting and bold first feature that is both intimate as well as epic in scope. It’s a film steeped in the history of cinema, drawing both visual and narrative inspiration from classic American westerns. At the same time, Les […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 5, 2016 -
Cinema Great Abbas Kiarostami Dies at 76
One of cinema’s great masters, Abbas Kiarostami, whose pictures could be intimate and human-scaled while also self-reflexive and bracingly political, died today in Paris. The Palme D’Or winner — for Taste of Cherry in 1997 — passed away following treatment for gasto-intestinal cancer. Speaking to The Guardian, director Asghar Farhadi said, “He wasn’t just a film-maker, he was a modern mystic, both in his cinema and his private life. He definitely paved ways for others and influenced a great deal of people. It’s not just the world of cinema that has lost a great man; the whole world has lost […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 4, 2016 -
Watch: Aphex Twin’s New Music Video Directed by 12-Year-Old Ryan Wyer
It’s been over a decade since Richard James released a storied string of Aphex Twin music videos, including the fiendish hip-hop musical extravaganza Windowlicker (directed by Chris Cunningham and embedded below). But, today, a surprise new video dropped from James’ upcoming EP, Cheetah, and it revisits several classic Aphex Twin tropes — namely, kids and disconcerting James’ masks. In fact, the director is a kid — 12-year-old Ryan Wyer of Rush County, Dublin. Check out “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная mix]” above.
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2016
