Filmmaker Videos
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Stuck in an Airport Overnight… “All By Myself”
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 […]
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Watch: David Fincher’s Zodiac and the Art of the Insert
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.
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Video: Steven Soderbergh Talks About Koyaanistqatsi Director Godfrey Reggio’s Work
“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″]
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Watch: Leos Carax Brings Rodin’s “The Thinker” to Life in Gradiva
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 […]
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Trailer Watch: POV’s 2014 Season Preview
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.
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Watch: Maurice Pialat’s Debut Isabelle Aux Dombes
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.
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Trailer Watch: Walter Potter, The Man Who Married Kittens
Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens is a new short documentary by The Midnight Archive webseries creator Ronni Thomas scheduled to have its premiere June 6th at the new Morbid Anatomy Museum at 424A 3rd Avenue Brooklyn, New York. From the Walter Potter Taxidermy website: This surprisingly tender and heartfelt film features never before seen footage of the great tableaux of eccentric Victorian anthropomorphic taxidermist Walter Potter and the collectors around the world who treasure them. You will meet in the course of this film tiny kittens in gowns attending a wedding or having a tea party; toads playing […]
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“Good Movies Don’t Get Seen:” Ted Hope at EbertFest
“I don’t actually think it’s worth my time to make movies right now,” said producer and Fandor CEO Ted Hope at an EbertFest panel last month. “If I really want to see a vibrant, ambitious film culture,” he continued, “I can help a lot more by trying to build a better infrastructure.” Keyframe Daily, the blog imprint of Fandor, is running a four part series from this conversation, the first of which was posted yesterday. In this excerpt, Hope puts forth six key issues which he hopes to address for the betterment of the independent film industry: 1. Independent film needs […]
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Trailer Watch: Ari Folman’s The Congress
At turns mesmerizing and confounding, Ari Folman’s The Congress was one of the more talked about titles of any Cannes sidebar last year. Though Drafthouse Films scooped up the rights less than a month after its Director’s Fortnight premiere, it’s only just now making it’s way toward theaters, with an official release set for August 29. A loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, Folman’s followup to the Oscar nominated Waltz with Bashir positions Robin Wright as a fictionalized version of herself, who agrees to replicate her once commodifiable actress for a movie studio’s gain. Playing on recurrent themes of aging in the film […]
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Trailer Watch: Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria
The premise for Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria is a ripe one. An aging actress, cast opposite the role that provided her breakout decades prior, is now tormented by her young colleague and the passage of time. Looks can be deceiving, but the trailer, released today ahead of tomorrow’s Cannes premiere, hints less towards introspection and more towards camp. Perhaps it’s the peculiar pairing of Juliette Binoche and the stunningly one-note Kristen Stewart, but the plot mechanizations wherein Binoche’s new role mimics her lust for the Stewart assistant character feel a bit trite. Here’s hoping Assayas proves me wrong.
