Filmmaker Videos
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The Act of Killing Wins Documentary BAFTA; Director Oppenheimer’s Speech Edited Online
The radical documentary, The Act of Killing, won yesterday the Best Documentary prize at the 2014 BAFTA Awards on Sunday night. In his speech, director Oppenheimer thanked his anonymous co-director, who is not able to publicly reveal his or her role in the film, and said the picture “is helping to catalyze a change in how Indonesia talks about its past…” But one section of Oppenheimer’s speech was omitted from the video, above, that BAFTA posted online. His acceptance speech also included this section: I urge us all to examine ourselves, and acknowledge that we are all closer to perpetrators […]
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Video: Ellen Page Comes Out as Gay at Conference for LGBT Youth
Actress Ellen Page (Juno, X Men: Days of Future) came out as gay yesterday at the Human Rights Campaign’s inaugural Time to THRIVE conference in Las Vegas. “I’m here today because I am gay,” Page said in a moving speech at the conference dedicated to LGBT youth. “And because… maybe I can make a difference. To help others have an easier and more hopeful time. Regardless, for me, I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility. I also do it selfishly, because I am tired of hiding and I am tired of lying by omission.” In the speech, in […]
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Behind The Scenes At The Criterion Collection
You’d be hard pressed to find a modern movie lover who doesn’t own at least one DVD/Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection. With a catalogue of hundreds of auteur and contemporary titles, Criterion is just as much about preservation as it is curation. This video from Gizmodo takes you behind the scenes at Criterion’s Gramercy office and inside the process of restoring Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent. Beginning with a negative from the Library of Congress, the print is scanned, color corrected, retouched and sound edited before making its way into one of the company’s signature disc covers. I recently visited the office to interview […]
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How Camera Movement Shapes A Narrative
Ryan Connolly of Film Riot is a rather perky fellow, but he’s also got some good insight into how camera techniques affect a film’s narrative. Connolly begins with a simple scene of two actors walking across a yard, examining how a dolly versus a tripod versus a handheld shot conveys tonality to the audience. A tripod pan, for instance, may insinuate that the actors are being watched. Connolly covers a number of mechanisms — including the implications of a jib — in the above video, which serves as a helpful reminder that the camera should always being doing more than […]
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Short Film: Spark and Light, by So Yong Kim
Commissioned by the designer Miu Miu as part of a series of seven films, “Women’s Tales,” Spark and Light is a lovely and wonderfully executed short by Treeless Mountain director So Yong Kim. Riley Keough, in a sensitive, affecting performance, plays a motorist stranded in snowy Iceland as she’s on her way to visit her dying mother in the hospital. Dreams, memory and reality all merge as Keough’s character turns her moments alone into a hypnotic emotional journey. Special mention to Eric Lin’s subtly expressive cinematography.
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Trailer Watch: Matt Wolf’s Teenage
Oscilloscope Laboratories has released the trailer for 25 New Face Matt Wolf’s inventive documentary Teenage, which uncovers the genesis of youth culture at the turn of the 20th century. Comprised of archival material, recreations and narration lifted from diary entries — courtesy of Jena Malone and Ben Whishaw’s dulcet tones — the film had its world premiere at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and will be released in New York on March 14. According to a recent Vogue article, Wolf is currently at work on a documentary about Eloise illustrator Hilary Knight at Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s production company.
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Shanks FX Demonstrates the Low-Budget Illusions of the Space Flight
Before there was Gravity, there were sliders and stop-motion. In their latest informational video, the masterminds at Shanks FX demonstrate the old-fashioned illusion of the space flight, as seen in Star Wars, Close Encounters, Star Trek and beyond. With a mere DSLR, some rigging and a model, they’re able to produce animated sequences of ships in flight.
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Trailer Watch: Richard Ayoade’s The Double
Given the breadth of his reverential cannon, it’s surprising that the number of Dostoyevsky adaptations remains relatively slim. The English comedian Richard Ayoade has brought a noted flourish to his translation of The Double, the Russian giant’s novella about a man haunted by his far more confident and aggressive doppelgänger. Well received at Toronto and Sundance, the film, which stars Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska, will open in the U.S. on May 9, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. I, for one, am interested in seeing the typecast Eisenberg working to convey some bull-headed magnetism as the titular character.
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Ken Burns Finds New Audience with “Past Is Present” App
“There is no such thing as history,” Ken Burns says at the top of this short promotional clip for his new iPad app, Past Is Present. It’s more like a series of recurrences: “not cycles, but patterns.” To help the average eye better examine such connections, Don MacKinnon conceived, directed and produced this interactive exploration of common threads in Burns’ work. Clips from the likes of The Civil War and Baseball are grouped by both theme and time period, allowing its user to make scenes “20 years apart, suddenly interrelate in a new way.” Burns offers up interviews and his own clip assemblies, determined by […]
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Can You Explain Your Work to Your Parents? Dan Fox’s Audience Appreciation
Who is your audience? For all of us, argues Frieze co-editor and art critic Dan Fox, it starts with our parents. Soon, though, it — or, perhaps, our conceptions of it — change. In this video, based on a talk he gave at The Kitchen, Fox “…presents a personal perspective on how we think about audiences as we grow older, and as our responsibilities evolve.”
