Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Previewing the 2015 True/False Film Festival
I’m an unabashed partisan for the True/False Film Festival (this will be my sixth consecutive year attending), which kicks off tomorrow and runs through Sunday. There are 37 features in this year’s line-up, plus four shorts programs, the first five episodes of Andrew Jarecki’s HBO mini-series The Jinx, and another five “secret screenings” — films identified in the program only by color, shown here prior to their official world premieres elsewhere. This is also the third year of the Neither/Nor sidebar, and this year’s edition is especially ambitious, a plunge into the largely underknown world of Polish documentary, complete with […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 4, 2015 -
Sons of Anarchy: Cymbeline at Film Comment Selects
In delivering the first fully 20th-century filmic transplant of Hamlet, Michael Almereyda made wondering how he’d update each famous beat part of the fun, from “to be or not to be” rendered as prince Ethan Hawke’s internal monologue against Blockbuster’s “Action” aisle (totally unexpected, too-obvious only after its execution) to the total collapsing of “The Mousetrap”‘s text into a wordless Lewis Klahr short. That 2000 rendition took place in sleek, ever-more-expensive Manhattan — the birthright setting of one of Shakespeare’s most familiar plays, which deserved nothing less. This Cymbeline‘s location is never specified, but you can see Bay Ridge A-train subway stops at the frame’s sides; it’s an outer-borough and upstate […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 3, 2015 -
The 2015 True/False Film Fest Lineup
Here’s the 39-film strong main lineup of this year’s True/False Film Fest, the increasingly-prominent annual documentary festival (with room for what that means) that takes place in Columbia, Missouri. Our coverage begins when the festival does; this year it runs from March 5th-8th. Almost There (Aaron Wickenden, Dan Rybicky) — “Almost There is a coming-of-(old)-age story about 83-year-old Peter Anton, an “outsider” artist living in isolated and crippling conditions whose world changes when two filmmakers discover his work and storied past. Shot over eight years, Almost There documents Anton’s first major exhibition and how the controversy it generates forces him […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 11, 2015 -
Successive Slidings of Displeasure: The Anti-50 Shades of Grey Campaigns
Any publication on the culture beat has been inundated by emails and pitches tied to anti-50 Shades of Grey campaigns. It’s predictable enough that the easily-alarmed conservatives at, say, Breitbart.com would be on that beat, but once you start delving into the tangled coalition against the Walmart-friendly BDSM adaptation, things get more interesting. There are certainly opponents who merely worry about a surge of libertinism overtaking the land, but they’ve done an uncharacteristically good job of making some unlikely alliances, and they’re just the tip of the fragmented iceberg. Let’s start simple, with organizations whose names aren’t entirely straightforward about the interests they represent. The National […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 10, 2015 -
“I Have One Camera Position Each Day”: Force Majeure Director Ruben Östlund
Structurally, tonally and formally indebted to Roy Andersson — not least in opening and closing to the sardonically mournful strains of Benny Andersson’s “Briggens blåögda blonda kapten,” along the lines of the other Andersson’s ever-present ambient musical commentary — Ruben Östlund’s second feature Involuntary lays out five situations in which people behave contrary to how they should. The entire thrust of Östlund’s multi-film project is summed up early, with an elementary school classroom recreation of Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment. A subject is asked to identify which line of several on a cardboard display is the longest. Everyone in the room says the shortest line is the longest, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 5, 2015 -
“I Argue that Cinema is Either Dying or Dead”: Peter Greenaway on Making Eisenstein in Guanajuato
“I argue that cinema is either dying or dead — it’s certainly changing very rapidly — so maybe now is the time to make a film about the greatest cinematic practitioner.” Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein In Guanajuato — focusing on 10 days out of the 14 months Sergei Eisenstein spent in Mexico shooting what would eventually be edited into ¡Que viva México! — is one of the more keenly anticipated titles premiering at this year’s Berlinale. Above is the first of a three-part documentary on the film’s production from Mexico’s IMCINE (the national film financing/production agency). There are two brief bits in Spanish; the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 4, 2015 -
Watch: Tony Zhou on Drive and “The Quadrant System”
This quick Tony Zhou video starts by breaking down a shot from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in which Carey Milligan and Ryan Gosling walk to their respective doors in a hallway, pointing out how the left and right sides give us two separate stories in one composition. Then Zhou moves on, repeatedly slicing the film’s frames in half vertically and horizontally. A model of textbook visual analysis, Zhou gets to the essence of what thoughtful shot composition looks like. Heed Zhou’s wise parting words: “You don’t need Steadicams or cranes or drones, or the latest 4K whatever. You need top, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 2, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 5: The Chinese Mayor, Cartel Land and City of Gold
The vast world of Chinese independent documentaries was finally acknowledged by Sundance with the inclusion of Zhou Hao’s The Chinese Mayor. That’s not to bag on the festival for an anomalous oversight: this exciting and politically urgent strain of films has been happening for 15 years or so but not often acknowledged by U.S. festivals at large. This is a very good starting point. The mayor of Datong, Geng Yanbo, confesses that he’s happiest with communing with China’s past, so it makes sense that he plans to revitalize the country’s most polluted city by restoring its ancient wall, part of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 30, 2015 -
“There is Always a Lot of Pressure to Keep Your Main Character Likable”: Advantageous | Director Jennifer Phang
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? Preparing the visualization and unfolding of the story and its themes, I had to plan carefully how we could scale our visual ambition with the resources available. In working with designers on the technology and the city buildings, I emphasized our Victorian Futurist aesthetic. It felt fitting for a story inspired by Victorian period novels. I’ve always been intrigued by stories about class mobility, devotion to family, and hidden […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 29, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 4: Experimenter, Station to Station and Listen to Me Marlon
It’s been far too long since Michael Almereyda’s last feature, 2009’s dreamy diary film Paradise; his 2015 return with not one but two features (the Ethan Hawke-starring Cymbeline adaptation Anarchy is set for release later this year) is overdue and very welcome. Experimenter, a pared-down biopic of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, ostensibly exists to hit the career highlights, but it’s far from standard issue. As in his career (the writer said with all the authority conferred by a quickly read Wiki), the film begins with, and is dominated by, Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments. The “teacher” sits on one side of a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 27, 2015
