Authors — Steve Macfarlane
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“I’m Actually Trying to Create a Film for Women”: Anna Biller on The Love Witch
Over the last decade, Los Angeles-based film artist Anna Biller has eked out a small but fervid following; watching her films is like undergoing hypnosis by means of feng shui, wherein the viewer is lulled into a stilted, cheeky and brilliantly manicured simulacra of golden-era Hollywood staging, blocking and delivery. However indebted these forms are to their masculinist forebears, Biller is not content to be considered a pastiche artist: in the below discussion she concedes that her choices are guided by what gives her cinephilic pleasure, although — because? — the feminist interrogations of her work are impossible to ignore. She […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Jun 23, 2016 -
“The Only Film in the Canon Which had a Black, Gay Man as its Lead”: Director Stephen Winter on Jason and Shirley
“Free love? That’s the only love I can afford!” Stephen Winter’s Jason and Shirley is no mere behind-the-scenes reenactment of the circumstances that would add up to Shirley Clarke’s seminal 1967 Portrait of Jason, but rather a full-bore interrogation of what Clarke’s documentary cost its participants during shooting. To those ends, the film’s rendition of gay hustler Jason Holliday (portrayed here by Jack Waters) is remarkable: it sketches out Jason’s dreams and nightmares in brazenly emotional flights of inward fancy, made all the more jarring by Waters’ unflinching, body-pressurized performance. As Clarke, writer Sarah Schulman gives off an uncanny with-it […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Jun 17, 2015 -
Not “Making Bad Movies with State Money”: Roy Andersson on A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
I used to dismiss the films of Roy Andersson for their coldness and repetition; a mistake. While the Swedish filmmaker’s camera hangs at an ever-stiffer remove, each scene he shoots is suffused with minute power dynamics, rendering the players — aimlessly shuffling to and fro, outfitted in sepulchral pancake makeup — both tragically pathetic and pathetically hilarious. A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Contemplating Existence, the 73-year-old auteur’s latest, caps Andersson’s so-called “human existence trilogy” with a surprising rumination on repressed cultural memory stitched within the director’s signature vistas of human cruelty. Andersson has been perfecting this droll, widescreen aesthetic […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Jun 5, 2015 -
Iain Marcks on Navigating Ambition, Directing Actors and His Short Film, Switched
Imagine you’re neighbors with a film-world colleague. With that unmistakable, breathless post-postproduction glow, he asks you to take a look at his new short film – and while it’s certainly slick, with grist for conversation to spare, there are a few things you can’t help but think could have been done differently. The film is a head-on tackle of an intrinsically repugnant (some would say “problematic”) genre, the rape-revenge picture. It turns tables on audience expectation by pitting a witless pickup artist (Joe Mischo) against a woman he meets at a bar (Kara Elverson) who, duly, kidnaps and ties him […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Apr 4, 2015 -
Julia Marchese on The New State of The New Beverly and 35mm
Cinephiles on both coasts were rattled by Julia Marchese’s blog post last Friday entitled “I Will Not Be Censored,” concerning her departure from Los Angeles’ beloved New Beverly Cinema. Anyone who’s been to the New Bev within the last dozen years will recognize Marchese, for many the welcoming public face of the recently beleaguered rep house. But following a steady trickle of involvement from Quentin Tarantino — first paying the theater’s bills out of love, then becoming its owner, and finally, in September, announcing he’ll be directing a majority of the programming — Marchese was isolated within the staff, and […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Oct 27, 2014 -
Animal Portraiture: An Interview with The Strange Little Cat Director Ramon Zürcher
For this correspondent’s money, the film to beat so far in 2014 is Swiss filmmaker Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen), a dazzlingly low-key schematic diagram of a single day’s ebb and flow in a German apartment. Zürcher cracks the space open like a dollhouse, but his exacting frames don’t create drama; rather, each individual component — a kettle, a ball, a clock, the nominal tabby, a regularly screaming child or any of the extended family members shuffling in and out of Zürcher’s rooms — invites the viewer’s attention as they often repeatedly intersect. Between narrative scenes, Zürcher stops for montages […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Jul 31, 2014 -
Five Questions With Open Windows Director Nacho Vigalondo
Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo is criminally underappreciated in the States, dating back to his brilliantly circuitous 2007 debut Timecrimes. Hopefully that wrong rights itself with Open Windows, a film that manages to take place entirely within the screen of a consumer laptop. Elijah Wood stars as Nick, a sweet-cheeked fanboy who, through an online contest, wins a date with current It Girl Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey.) But she cancels. Instead, Nick gets a phone call from a fed-up admin for her website, who remotely connects Nick’s laptop to Jill’s cellphone, offering a bit of peep-show revenge as a consolation prize. This means […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Mar 15, 2014 -
Five Questions With Last Hijack Directors Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta
Femke Wolting & Tommy Pallotta’s experimental doc Last Hijack sees the venn-diagramming of a rigorous interview style and breakout swatches of rotoscoped animation, ala Waking Life (which Pallotta produced.) In lieu of philosophical digressions or convoluted dream sequences, the filmmakers use animation to depict the unfilmable: nailbiting raids by Somali pirates, led by one Mohamed Nura, who casually recounts his adventures to the filmmakers between mouthfuls of khat. Never feeling doctrinaire, the film takes an earnest stab at correcting the way the West considers seaside piracy, delineating a cycle of corruption and violence starting with Mohamed’s father. Wolting and Pallotta […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Mar 14, 2014 -
Five Questions With The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Director Brian Knappenberger
In a time of endlessly self-spawning bio-docs about the rich and prominent, Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy carries a legitimate current-day charge. The film is both a dogged investigation in the tradition of Errol Morris or Josh Fox, and a hugely emotional oral history of Swartz’s life — which ended when the activist committed suicide in January 2013. Swartz was facing a federal investigation after he downloaded a cache of academic journals (including, but by no means limited to, JSTOR) from the main computer network at MIT, with a possible penalty of up to 35 years in prison. Indicted […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Mar 8, 2014
