Filmmaker Videos
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What Do You Want From Me? (I Asked You A Thousand Times)
Credited to a fellow by the name of Savage, What Do You Want From Me? (I Asked You A Thousand Times) gets at more than just the familiarity of that knee jerk line. Writes the maker of this clip collage: “Driven by a fascination into the cult of celebrity and the desire to be famous being a ubiquitous career aspiration in many, this collection of hundreds of film clips delivers an insistent, repetitive and seemingly pointless question that offers as much empty promise as the fame to which so many seek.” This grim probe, “perhaps a wider paradox to the […]
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Antonioni and Robbe-Grillet on Modernism, L’Avventura and Blow-Up
There’s a case to be made for viewing any old film in the theater, but few seem to demand the widescreen format like the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. Every frame of L’Avventura, the first entry in his monumental early 60s trilogy, is unusual and breathtaking in its construction. In the above video, fellow filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad) discusses how Antonioni’s rejection of meaning and a closed-circuit narrative defined the Modernist aesthetic. Positioning him against the plot heavy Hitchcock, Robbe-Grillet notes the elusiveness of Antonioni’s intentions: “What you see is very clear, but the meaning of the images in constantly […]
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Visitors’ Godfrey Reggio on 4K, Black and White Cinematography, Long Cuts and Philip Glass
For our Winter issue, experimental documentarian Godfrey Reggio, along with his producer Jon Kane and d.p. Trish Govani, explored the significance of selected stills from his latest film Visitors. A revealing exercise for any filmmaker, Reggio’s excerpts carry far more weight than they would for most: the eight shots account for more than 10% of the film. Comprised of only 74, 4K black and white shots, the Philip Glass-scored Visitors is a meditation on the act of spectatorship, as the viewer unflinchingly gazes at 70+ second takes of faces, swamplands, disembodied hands and the moon. In the above video for The Creators Project, Reggio extols […]
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After Trayvon: Short Doc on Trayvon, Stop and Frisk, and Racial Profiling
Two years after the death of Trayvon Martin, filmmaker Alex Mallis releases online After Trayvon, a short doc shot last summer after the day’s wrap of his latest feature. Mallis, who associate produced and was a cinematographer on Keith Miller’s film, Welcome to Pine Hill, introduces it here: Last summer, a day after George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, our cast and crew wrapped a day of filming in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn for the upcoming feature, Five Star. Informal conversations throughout the day, between takes, and a fully equipped film crew, […]
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The Pirate Cinema: A Real Time Collage of File Sharing
Ever wonder what a data visualization of every file transfer bouncing around the internet airwaves might look like? The Pirate Cinema, from artist Nicolas Maigret, has rendered something close to it. Described as a “cinematic collage generated by peer-to-peer network activity,” the project is comprised of arbitrary clips from real time BitTorrent file sharing. Users IP addresses and countries are displayed in the upper corners, turning purportedly private transactions public. For Maigret, “this horizontal network architecture…recalls the utopian vision of openness and free appropriation that arose in the early days of the Internet.”
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Forty Years in Flames
We’re excited to feature this story from our friends at Narratively, a platform devoted to untold human stories. Narratively explores one theme each week and publishes one story a day, and this week is all about “The Movie Life.” In this Narratively video by Emily Kwong, after a barn fire destroys a lifetime of master reels and priceless memories, one documentary filmmaker picks up the pieces of his career’s cruelest plot twist. From the Narratively site, here’s more: Richard Searls is a warrior among documentarians. He has an indent on his forehead from getting bumped with a tripod leg and […]
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Cut Copy’s “We Are Explorers” Video Released With DIY 3-D BitTorrent Bundle
For the video to their single “We Are Explorers,” Cut Copy paired with the Tokyo-New York creative lab Party to relate the tale of a couple of 3-D printed night owls. Cinematographer Sesse Lind shot roughly 200 figurines, printed from a yellow, UV-reactive filament, under black light flashlights, only at night, to achieve the desired effects. The result is downsized nocturnal epic whose scale belies its ambitions. To accompany the release, the creative team packaged a BitTorrent Bundle that includes the musical track, the video and the 3-D printing files, so that fans can craft and upload their own versions. With the […]
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Exclusively Streaming Here: “25 New Face” Ian Clark’s MMXIII
Filmmaker is delighted to be streaming exclusively Ian Clark’s third feature, MMXIII, on our site until February 27. Clark was one of our “25 New Faces” in 2012, off the back of his gorgeous short Searching for Yellow. A resident of La Grande, Oregon, where he also co-programs the Eastern Oregon Film Festival, Clark beautifully captures, in quiet moments and small details, the essence of small-town life in the Pacific Northwest. Clark previously made the features Pool Room and Country Story, and now with MMXIII has made an expansive third feature that was described as follows on the EOFF website: An experimental self-portrait, […]
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“Just Like You” Music Video Shot Over Nine Months
Director Matthew Riggieri and d.p. Michael Patrick O’Leary set a camera in concrete to film the music video for Bosley’s “Just Like You.” Then, they left it there for nine months, and built an outhouse on top of it, so that no one could steal it. With its quick cuts, the result isn’t a time lapse per se, but it does give you some idea of the changing seasons.
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“Walter Murch: From The Godfather to the God Particle”
Legendary film editor, sound designer, writer, translator, amateur astronomer and director Walter Murch needs no introduction. (Oh, what the hell, his credits include The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tetro and more.) In addition to being a great filmmaker, he’s also a great teacher and talker about film. Here, at the 2013 Sheffield Doc Fest, where he accompanied the doc, Particle Fever, he gives an inspiring speech on film editing, technology, audience expectation, how film grammar is changing with digital technologies, and physics. Don’t miss this.
