Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs
Venice Grand Jury Prize winner and all around critical favorite Stray Dogs will be making its way into American theaters sometime this year, courtesy of Cinema Guild. Here’s an early look at the film, via a Unifrance trailer, which centers on a homeless family in Taipei. There’s little plot to tell of, as director Tsai Ming-liang prefers to relate his characters’ circumstance through series of unbroken, often excruciating takes: a scene in which the father, ashamed at his inability to provide, role plays caregiver and destroyer with a head of cabbage is particularly striking. As a Cinema-Scope review noted, Ming-liang’s austerity can […]
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Watch: Projection Mapping and Creating the “Beam of Light” Illusion from Metropolis
Shanks FX’s latest instructional video centers on the in-camera effect of projection mapping. Beginning with the “beam of light ” effect, created by cinematographer and VFX artist Eugen Schüfftan (Metropolis, Eyes Without a Face), Joey Shanks demonstrates how with a camera, a one way mirror, a projector and a computer at the controls, you can create the illusion of a three-dimensional conic light. Shanks also explains how to render a light tunnel on an one-dimensional black board. Good low-budget techniques to keep in your backpocket for sci-fi, dream sequences and the like.
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Trailer Watch: Ira Sachs’ Love Is Strange
Despite being an out gay couple, Ben and George (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina) nevertheless find themselves shouldering nasty ramifications after they decide to tie the knot in Ira Sachs’ Love Is Strange. Premiering to near universal raves at Sundance, Love Is Strange charts the fallout from this seemingly basic right, with Ben and George jobless and couchsurfing amongst a close-knit group of friends, including Marisa Tomei and Cheyenne Jackson. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film on August 22.
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Trailer Watch: Hal Hartley’s My America
“What is my America?” That was the question asked 50 playwrights by Centerstage, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Their answers were filmed by Hal Hartley, who is exclusively debuting the resulting feature documentary, My America, on Fandor for its SVOD premiere beginning July 4. From Centerstage: Filmed by Possible Films, led by award-winning director Hal Hartley, these 50 monologues by writers including Anna Deavere Smith, Neil LaBute, Christopher Durang, and Lynn Nottage explore our particular American moment—the ideas and people that make the country what it is today. The responses, ranging from the political to the personal, form […]
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Trailer Watch: Justin Simien’s Dear White People
Dear White People was unsurprisingly divisive at Sundance, where some viewers questioned what they saw as its muddled provocations. Sight unseen, however, this just released trailer makes the film’s aims and strategies rather apparent. Directed by Justin Simien, the satire follows the experiences of four Black students at a predominately White university. With only a few shorts to his name, Simien’s brilliant concept trailer — whose opening is quoted almost verbatim in the above trailer — went viral, sparking a widespread debate and healthy Indiegogo campaign. It’s an exemplary instance of pre-production marketing, and Simien was able to follow through on its promise. Dear White People will […]
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The Hands of Robert Bresson
Filmmakers, how much attention do you pay to a single body part, to a gesture? This elegantly beautiful supercut on “the tactile world of Robert Bresson” by Kogonada for Criterion shows the great French director’s notoriously precise skill is applied even at the slightest hand gesture. There are no faces in this video yet the drama of these scenes is palpable.
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Watch: The Trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick
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 […]
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Sound Design and Silence in the Work of Martin Scorsese
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 […]
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Watch: Lars von Trier’s First Short, an Animated Movie Made When he was 11
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 […]
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Watch: 45 Minutes of Jean-Luc Godard on Goodbye to Language
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 […]
