Filmmaker Videos
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Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva Premiere #PostModem Online
Miami-based filmmakers Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva — two of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces — have been touring the festival circuit with their short film, #PostModem, which they describe like this: “[It’s] a comedic satirical sci-fi pop-musical based on the theories of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists. It’s the story of two Miami girls and how they deal with the technological singularity, as told through a series of cinematic tweets.” For the first time this insanely infectious riff on virality and uploaded consciousness is online. Watch it above, and try to keep its K-Pop-styled song out of your head.
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Andrea Arnold’s D.P. Robbie Ryan on Why He Still Shoots Shorts and Getting The Shot Off Set
Best known as Andrea Arnold’s right-hand man, Robbie Ryan has a surprisingly large number of short film credits for a cinematographer of his standing. While the majority of d.p.s graduate to the feature format and stay put, Ryan has shot a whopping 14 shorts since his breakthrough lensing on Fish Tank. Beyond a steadier flow of income, short films afford Ryan a sort of trial period with directors. Speaking in an in-depth interview with Barry Ackroyd (d.p. of Captain Phillips, The Hurt Locker) at the 28:25 minute mark, Ryan puts it plainly: “I think the reason I do short films […]
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Nandan Rao’s Second Feature Hawaiian Punch Available Online
Following in the footsteps of his debut The Men of Dodge City, Nandan Rao has released his second film Hawaiian Punch for free on Kentucker Audley’s No Budge site. (Just because Kentucker is no longer making independent films, doesn’t mean he can’t afford to support them.) The 66-minute tropical excursion tracks two Mormons (Nicholas Boissonneault, Tor Kristian Anestad) through quotidien, Minimalist circumstances. Though Rao runs Simple Machine, which connects filmmakers with theatrical screening opportunities, at least a fraction of his loyalties appear to lie online.
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SXSW Trailer Premiere: She’s Lost Control
Following strong notices in Berlin, Anja Marquardt’s debut feature, She’s Lost Control, receives its U.S. premiere at this week’s upcoming SXSW Film Festival. The intense psychological drama, executive produced by writer/director Oren Moverman, considers the meanings and cost of intimacy through its focus on a professional sex surrogate. Premiering here at Filmmaker is the film’s newest trailer.
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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 […]
