Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Stray Links, 7/28-7/31
• For years, Bollywood star Salman Khan released one of his big films around the same time as Eid, the first day after the end of Ramadan. Last year he deviated from form and — as Nancy Tartaglione points out points out at Deadline — watched as rival star Shah Rukh Khan’s record-breaking Chennai Express took advantage of the slot. This year Salman’s back in scheduling place with his new film Kick, which is off to a good start — no thanks to the qazi (religious judge) at Bhopal, who in the middle of a sermon admonished his flock to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 31, 2014 -
R.I.P Robert Drew
A press release prepared by documentarian Robert Drew’s family announced his death today at age 90. Drew is remembered as a pioneer of cinéma vérité — now a term thrown around carelessly to denote just about any documentary assembled without talking heads or a narrator, which is a radical oversimplification of vérité’s possibilities. It’s not oversimplifying to note that Drew’s Primary (covering the JFK-Hubert Humphrey faceoff in the 1960 Wisconsin primary) and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (examining the administration’s standoff against segregationist George Wallace) are two of the key documents of the Kennedy presidency, whose levels of candor, access […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 30, 2014 -
Watch: Matt Brown’s DIY Set-Building Tutorial on Making Flats
Via our friends at No Film School, here’s an instructional tutorial from Matt Brown on how to make flats when constructing your own DIY film sets. Brown decided building his own elevator set was more practical and economical than finding a real one to shoot in; the flats are the fake walls necessary to build a set. For those not intuitively comfortable with tools or even navigating a Home Depot, Brown walks you through the necessary purchases, choosing the right sizes of wood, and the construction process, complete with detailed on-screen written instructions for pausable reference.
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 30, 2014 -
Lucy: The Hyena Montage Theory
In a statement published in the Nov. 24, 1962 Film Culture, Pier Paolo Pasolini thought about how a simple metaphor can be conveyed onscreen, starting from one solution he rejected as overall unsound: “Let us consider the following written or spoken statement: ‘Gennarino looked like a hyena.’ […] The attempt has been made to juxtapose a hyena with Gennarino by joining two frames: one showing Gennarino grinding his teeth and the other showing an actual hyena with its teeth bared. Now, I won’t say that something like this could never be done legitimately. But it would be inconceivable to think […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 28, 2014 -
Watch: “From Paper to Screen,” Two Minutes about On-screen Typography
A hat-tip, as usual, to David Hudson at Keyframe Daily for directing us to this graduate student short from Thibault de Fournas. In a brisk two-plus minutes, Thibault first explains the art of typography on the printed page — size, style, type, forms — then concisely summarizes the history of type’s on-screen presence, from its introduction as static intertitles to the opening credits innovations of Saul Bass. The short summons memories of a century of movies through letters that copy source fonts exactly: “Every single movie got one,” says a sentence about opening credits, each word in the style of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 28, 2014 -
Watch: “Satoshi Kon – Editing Space & Time”
We recently spotlighted Tony Zhou’s video essay on Michael Bay’s editing techniques, and now he’s come up with another fascinating editorial analysis. “Satoshi Kon — Editing Space & Time” examines the work of the late anime legend (Paprika, Perfect Blue) purely from an editor’s perspective, finding analogical techniques in Wes Anderson’s work while unpacking the director’s use of graphic matches, imaginative wipes and other transitions that underlined his concerns with the slippage between dreams and reality. It concludes with Kon’s final work, the one-minute short Ohayo (Good Morning). This is well worth a look, both for anime buffs and editors […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2014 -
Stray Links, 7/21-7/25
Starting this week, I’ll be posting a round-up of stray news items and articles — mostly film, though not all — that caught my eye. Let’s get started: • The great Michael Almereyda’s short film Skinningrove won the short film jury award at Sundance this year, and now you can watch it at the New York Review of Books. It’s about 15 minutes of photographer Chris Killip discussing and showing mostly unpublished photos of the titular Yorkshire village from the ’80s. • Here’s an interesting obituary for Thomas C. Senesac, owner of Chicago’s Acme Prop Rental, a company which got […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2014 -
Watch: The 50 Shades of Grey Trailer
“I don’t do romance. My tastes are very…singular.” The keenly anticipated, much-hyped first full trailer for 50 Shades of Grey is now here, having debuted during the Today show earlier today (corporate synergy at its finest: distributor Universal also owns NBC). Jamie Dornan glowers impassively, Dakota Johnson stares into his eyes, and eventually the whips come out. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson has certainly come a long way since 2006, when she directed an eight-minute short of a man masturbating in Death Valley for the arthouse porn anthology Destricted. “I find the whole porn thing a bit creepy,” she said at the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 24, 2014 -
Watch: The First Teaser for Michael Medaglia’s Creepy Deep Dark
Our ace webmaster Michael Medaglia is also a talented filmmaker. We’re happy to share the evocative, darkly handsome teaser trailer for his debut feature Deep Dark, the story of a talentless sculptor who gets help with his mobile sculptures from a talking hole in the wall of his mother’s house. His career takes off, but the possessive hole wants more. Clearly no good will come of this relationship. For more information, head to the film’s official website.
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2014 -
Moog Synthesizers at the Movies: Deep Cuts
Over at the website of the Bob Moog Foundation, electronic music historian Thom Holmes has an interesting post about some lesser-known cinematic uses of the Moog, the pioneering analog synthesizer popularized by Wendy Carlos with 1968’s Switched-On Bach album, which introduced the public at large to the idea of electronic sounds as more than simple novelties. Carlos would go on to the soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron, but many other movies in the ’60s and ’70s were quick to latch onto the instrument’s possibilities. Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause were among the Moog’s most productive practitioners […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2014
