Here we have the longest trailer yet for The Knick, the 10-episode Cinemax series photographed and directed by the nominally-but-not-quite-yet-retired Steven Soderbergh. It’s still not clear what will go down in Soderbergh’s portrait of NYC’s Knickerbocker Hospital at the turn of the century. “More has been learned about the treatment of the human body in the last five years than was learned in the last 500,” Clive Owen promises in a strained voice, but the trailer’s imagery — sex, blood, rioting crowds — promises the kind of bad craziness ideally required to push serial narrative TV. Related: the director’s posted […]
This effectively concise visual essay from Tony Zhou examines the significance of silence in the films of Martin Scorsese and modern cinema at large. From Raging Bull, in which Scorsese combines a dolly zoom with a hollowing “numbing effect, as if you’re hit in the ear too many times,” to the iconic Goodfellas scene where Joe Pesci comically dupes Ray Liotta, Zhou considers how silence is consistently “derived from character…[which] lets the director build a full cinematic structure around sound.” Sound, for Scorsese, is no mere secondary player but rather a device to develop thematic and situational texture, like how the violence in Raging Bull‘s ring is […]
A hat-tip to Amber Frost at Dangerous Minds, who’s drawn attention to Lars von Trier’s first effort The Trip to Squash Land: A Super-Sausage Adventure, which appears to have been online for a few years. There seems to be no English-language information on the internet about how or why an 11-year-old von Trier made a two-minute animation centering around rabbits and some kind of sausage creature, but the effect is suitably disorienting and bracingly unenlightening. Here we have two minutes of a strummy folk song backing a stop-start story of some kind of nature utopia or other without the faintest […]
Canon Europe recently conducted a 45 minute interview with Jean-Luc Godard on Goodbye to Language and the resulting conversation is pretty incredible. One could parse through the exchange for hours, but it’s best to watch for yourself and hear Godard on the everything from the melancholic underpinnings of “SMS,” the boundary-less nature of 3D, the fickle ways of language (“montage” vs. “editing”) and exploiting spatial imbalances (the creation of reverse shots). The interview also features a few short clips from Goodbye to Language and the following comment on its title: “When I say ‘farewell’ to language, it really means ‘farewell,’ meaning to say goodbye to […]
A cancelled flight, early morning rebooking and when a hotel is not a possibility — being stuck overnight in an airport brings on a particularly eerie kind of melancholy. To kill the time, I suspect some camera (or just smartphone)-toting Filmmaker readers might try to create a Twilight Zone-ish horror short, impromptu slasher flick, or perhaps a Winogrand-inspired visual tone poem. Marooned in the Las Vegas aiport, Richard Dunn reached for another inspiration: Celine Dion. His iPhone-shot video, above, resulted in a personal response from the singer, who offered him tickets to her show (and use of her bathroom) next […]
Within David Fincher’s filmography, Zodiac has always struck me as something special, if not anachronistic, for its handling of the police procedural genre. Perhaps it’s because, despite legions of so-called confessors, its true-life case was never closed. Appropriately, the film seems less concerned with tidy plotting than the psychosis — personal, collective and social — such a lingering mystery can create. Still, for all the film’s meta-textual aspirations, Fincher is, at heart, a narrative filmmaker and does relate the necessary details with a compendium of insert shots. They are all spliced together here in this supercut from Josh Forrest.
“I saw Koyaanisqatsi in 1983, when it came out, so I was 20,” Steven Soderbergh explains in this interview clip about Godfrey Reggio’s influence on his work. “It was pretty significant to be that age and an aspiring filmmaker and to see that.” Soderbergh has long been vocal about his admiration for Reggio’s movies, having served as one of the presenters of the Qatsi trilogy as well for the director’s latest film, last year’s Visitors. The film is available for DVD, Blu-Ray and digital download purchase tomorrow. [jwplayer player=”1″ mediaid=”86264″]
Galerie Gradiva, a swanky, new Parisian gallery, hired Leos Carax to fashion a promotional riff on Boy Meets Girl ahead of its opening on May 28th. Shooting within the newly furbished space, Carax crafts a cutely subversive portrait of man and woman as nude model (NSFW?) and legendary sculpture. Fed up with his status as gallery poster boy, Rodin’s “The Thinker” airs his grievances to his partner, as Carax animates the bronze with both dialogue and camera movement. The miniature of Rodin’s masterwork is just one of many notable pieces in the gallery that features Dali, Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse and so forth. Watch it […]
POV, the PBS series for “documentaries with a point of view,” kicks off its 2014 season on Monday, June 23 with Jason Silva’s powerful and inspiring When I Walk. The following weeks feature many other Filmmaker favorites, including American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, Big Men (pictured), After Tiller and the broadcast premiere of the boundary-breaking The Act of Killing. Check out the complete schedule here and the trailer above.
Who would have guessed that Gore Verbinski was such a big Pialat fan? The good folks at The Seventh Art dug up Maurice Pialat’s first film from 1952, entitled Isabelle Aux Dombes. With its disjointed imagery — carcases, body parts, flea-covered horses — this silent short calls to mind the brooding sequences of The Ring, except that it’s, you know, better. The experimental horror show is rather far removed from Pialat’s feature work, which tends to derive terror from the household setting. Nevertheless, I’d be curious to hear it with a musical accompaniment.