Here’s a fascinating optical illusion based on the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect.” Simply put, two faces will appear grotesque when the viewer focuses on a cross between them. This discovery won the second prize in the Vision Science Society’s Best Illusion of the Year Contest of 2012, and this video by Matthew B. Thompson using celebrities to illustrate the effect went viral. I’m just catching up with it now, though (courtesy, by the way, of Unscathed Corpse) and am posting it because it truly is a trippy effect. Watch the video above while focusing on the cross in the center.
The Tate Gallery in London launched a great little series of videos today entitled Film meets Art, in which prominent U.K. directors discuss their appreciation for and how they were influenced by a particular British artist. Above, Christopher Nolan talks about his love of Francis Bacon’s work and how it shaped his rendition of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.Nolan says that Bacon was his favorite artist from a young age, which I find to be very unusual and striking idea. (What kind of a childhood did Nolan have that this was how he saw the world?) Mike Leigh […]
Precious and Lee Daniels’ The Butler director Lee Daniels spoke recently at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he received an honorary degree. Towards the end of the clip, Daniels talks about his reasons for making the latter film, which he describes as a father-son love story, and what his own teenaged son thought of it.
The use of Rammstein in a trailer is most often a very bad sign, but somehow it works here in the first — and very NSFW — full-length trailer for Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Previously, as Sarah Salovaara noted on this site, Von Trier and co. created a new form of trailer through the staggered release of clips. Today’s release is the more traditional — and to my mind, more effective — one. Abrupt changes in music and tone, a mixture of shooting formats and fantastic moments with Charlotte Gainsbourg create a vibe that’s not unlike a punk version of […]
Hobo With A Shotgun director Jason Eisener cut this fantastic trailer for Abel Ferrara’s 1981 revenge thriller, Ms. 45, which is being re-released December 13 with VOD following March 25. Check out Drafthouse Films’ fantastic remastering job as evidenced by the clips here. Ms. 45 stars the late great Zoë Lund as a shy seamstress who, after multiple assaults in one 24-hour period, goes on a killing rampage against all the men in New York. For more details on the release, with nationwide theatrical dates, visit the film’s page at Drafthouse Films.
Filmmaker and media activist Laura Hanna — a co-founder of the production company HiddenDriver and director of docs Gattis, James and Hammer — has directed this short documentary about composer and sound artist Matana Roberts’ recent “stop and frisk” encounter on the Williamsburg bridge. Produced by Creative Time Reports and found on their site, it is introduced thusly: As the composer, saxophone player and sound artist Matana Roberts walked across the Williamsburg Bridge one night in May, she asked herself a familiar question: “How am I going to survive as an artist in this town?” It was too enchanting an […]
I’m not totally optimistic about Wes Anderson’s upcoming The Grand Hotel Budapest — which will open the Berlinale early next year — but watching his latest offering has somewhat raised my hopes. Castelo Cavalcanti, a short film made for Prada, is a charming, self-contained little effort about a racecar driver (Jason Schwartzman) who crashes in the tiny Italian village of Castelo Cavalcanti, which just happens to be his ancestral home. Written and directed by Anderson, it was shot by Darius Khondji and filmed at Rome’s legendary studio, Cinecittà.
The Borscht Film Festival does great work, not only playing films already on the circuit but also specially commissioning shorts by Miami-based filmmakers for the event. Amy Seimetz’s When We Lived in Miami was the most notable of these from last year’s fest, and from the previous year that distinction arguably went to Barry Jenkins’ Chlorophyl. The short by the Medicine for Melancholy dirctor is, finally, online. And for a little background, check out Borscht collective member Andrew Hevia’s post for Filmmaker‘s own The Microbudget Conversation about how the film came about.
I’m a fan of Brandon LaGanke’s short film Play House, writing in my print magazine SXSW report, “Play House is an elegantly disturbing suburban horror short in which the defeated apathy of a wife, daughter and son is revealed to be sickeningly explicable.” The short has just gone up on Vimeo where it is a Staff Pick. Check it out above.
The premiere of Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors, hosted by Steven Soderbergh and with Phillip Glass’s score performed live by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, was my most singular experience at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. As I wrote in the current issue of Filmmaker: Glass’s haunting soundtrack is among his best, while Reggio’s film is a radical departure from hyperkinetic works like Koyanisquatsi that presaged the visual language of our connected age. Shot in black-and-white and containing less than 60 cuts, the lulling Visitors is mournful yet concerned elegy for a world in which experience has been subsumed by spectatorship. Amusement parks […]