Authors — Vadim Rizov
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“I Am Completely Oblivious to Risk When I Film”: Five Questions for The Other Side Director Roberto Minervini
Italian-born, American-based Roberto Minervini’s fourth feature The Other Side grew out of his previous film, 2013’s Stop the Pounding Heart. That hybrid documentary followed the (fictionalized) romance between Colby Trichell, a teen rodeo rider, and Sara Carlson, a young girl in a devoutly Christian family. Moving from Texas to West Monroe, Louisiana, Minervini’s new documentary starts by following Lisa, the sister of Colby’s dad Todd, and her boyfriend Mark. This is a dark story, one of drug abuse and disenfranchisement, and the second half plunges further into the backwoods, riding along with a virulently anti-Obama militia as they train and prepare to confront their perceived enemies. The […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2015 -
Six Questions for David Wain About Wet Hot American Summer and They Came Together
Moving with shark-like restlessness between webseries, TV and film, the prolifically talented David Wain has been on a particular roll of late. For his next project after last year’s tragically underseen/dumped romcom parody They Came Together, Wain has come back strong with Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, a Netflix miniseries prequel to his most widely/cultishly beloved film to date. Wain will be in conversation with his longtime collaborator Michael Ian Black at IFP’s Film Week on Sunday, September 20 (details and tickets here), and agreed to answer a few questions by email beforehand. Filmmaker: Like a lot of people who enjoyed They Came Together, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2015 -
Watch: Dutch Angles, Measured by Degree
In his latest video essay, the prolific Jacob T. Swinney pulls off a nifty trick in assembling a variety of dutch angles from film history. Instead of just stringing them together, he measures the angle of the camera by degree, quantifying extremity of effect in numbers.
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 3, 2015 -
Watch: Shapes of Rage in The Birds and The Brood
Want to start your day by seeing some enlighteningly disturbing parallels between The Birds and The Brood? This video by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin connects the dots between late Hitchcock and early Cronenberg; over at MUBI, there’s an essay to go along with it. If you’re familiar with both films, you’ll know this is probably not something to watch first thing in the morning — it’s strong fare.
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 3, 2015 -
Watch: Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia vs. the Original
In his latest video essay, Kevin B. Lee places the original 1997 Insomnia (directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg) on the left and Christopher Nolan’s 2002 Hollywood remake on the right. Juxtaposing the same sequence, Lee textually annotates the many differences in tempo, shot choices, framing et al., making it easy to see how two very different sensibilities approach the same sequence. More from Lee at Fandor.
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 28, 2015 -
For Cinematographers: A Chart To Quickly Set Hyper-Focal Distances on Digital Cameras
Earlier this week, I posted my interview with The Creation of Meaning director Simone Rapisarda Casanova, in which he mentioned a solution he came up with to save time on finding hyper-focal distances: I decided to use micro-four-thirds lenses from Panasonic and Olympus. They’re really small, the only drawback is manually focusing with them as they’re really made for auto-focus. I mostly shot in hyper-focal to keep the biggest depth-of-field possible. The marks on those lenses are kind of useless if you shoot like this, because then you have to have your smartphone to calculate the right hyper-focal distance every time. So […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2015 -
Watch: Jafar Panahi Speaks in Favor of the Iran Deal
Jafar Panahi has succeeded in making three features since being sentenced from filmmaking for 20 years, and now he’s contributed a brief video statement to We Support Iran Deal, a self-described group of “Iran’s pro-democracy & human rights activists, prominent artists, & cultural figures.” A full translation can be found here.
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 25, 2015 -
Discovering the Spiritus Loci: Simone Rapisarda Casanova on The Creation of Meaning
The primary subject of The Creation of Meaning — the second feature by the delightfully named Simone Rapisarda Casanova — is the equally delightfully named Pacifico Pieruccioni, who lives in a village at the very top of the Tuscan Alps. He makes a living by selling his goats’ milk, walking briskly from his home down to a tiny locker built into the woods so customers don’t have to walk all the way up the mountain to him. In the dark forest, it seems as if the liquid is glowing, as if the light bulb Hitchcock put in a glass of milk in Suspicion had been employed here. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 25, 2015 -
NYFF Announces Spotlight on Documentary Lineup
The latest slate announcement from the Film Society of Lincoln Center for this year’s New York Film Festival covers the documentary sidebar. There are several world premieres, including new work from Laura Poitras and New Yorkers’ first chance to see In Jackson Heights, Frederick Wiseman’s portrait of the Queens neighborhood. Here’s the lineup, with descriptions from the press release. Everything Is Copy Jacob Bernstein, 2015, USA, DCP, 89m Jacob Bernstein’s extremely entertaining film is a tribute to his mother Nora Ephron: Hollywood-raised daughter of screenwriters who grew up to be an ace reporter turned piercingly funny essayist turned novelist/screenwriter/playwright/director. Ephron comes […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 24, 2015 -
Watch: “A Conversation. With Walter Murch”
This year, the legendary Walter Murch received a “Vision Award — Nescens” from the just-completed Locarno Film Festival, and this neat short film was presumably made to accompany the presentation. Director Niccolò Castelli places Murch in a warehouse very much like Harry Caul’s setup in The Conversation. Murch plays with previously recorded analogue tape of him talking about how we’re introduced to the concept of music while in the womb, then talks about the process and history of the manipulations he just executed on the Revox. It’s a typical combination of Murch’s trademark bigger-picture thinking and acute technical knowledge.
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 17, 2015
