Though I’m a huge Stone Roses fan and a big admirer of Shane Meadows, for some reason I was not aware that, to celebrate the band’s return after a 20-year absence, the director of This is England had been commissioned to make a documentary about Ian Brown and co. This is the first trailer for the film, which looks like it will be both a look back at the group’s history and an intimate chronicling of its surprising resurrection. The Stone Roses: Made of Stone is out in the UK in June, but as far as I’m aware there are […]
Our friends at Vimeo passed on this short piece by Olivia Speranza shot at NAB. In just three-and-a-half minutes, she scopes out several interesting pieces of gear: The first big takeaway from this year was 4K’s continuing spread into cameras and display devices. If you haven’t heard yet, 4K is the next level in image resolution. As our hunger for pixels knows no limits, we’re seeing more cameras that can shoot at this higher image size that boasts four times the pixels of the 1080HD format. As you can imagine, 4K televisions are now being manufactured, but they remain both […]
In a moment where American independent cinema seems to be primarily focused with character and regional setting, Antonio Campos stands in stark contrast with his peers. Concerned with intricate problems posed by framing, camera movement and editing, Campos used a formal investigation into the medium to guide him through his debut feature, Afterschool, which is a kind of materialist examination of how reality is affected by the digital representation thereof. With his latest film, Simon Killer, Campos is less concerned with a topical milieu than he is with the mental state of the troubled eponymous individual; in the process of […]
In the final clip from this roundtable discussion between host Russell Constanzo and directors Alex Karpovsky (Red Flag), Ry Russo-Young (Nobody Walks), Antonio Campos (Simon Killer) and Craig Zobel (Compliance), the quartet talks about the advantages of budgeting for reshoots and how they managed to edit during production. From April 1, the full hour-long roundtable conversation from which this clip is taken will be live on 4/1 at RamblingOn.tv.
A must-see for not just fans of The Shining but anyone who has been obsessed by a movie, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, opening today, is a documentary about a group of online fans, scholars and theorists who have dedicated their lives — or at least their leisure hours — to unpacking bizarre, alternative interpretations about Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic. Above, recorded last year at the Cannes Film Festival, I discuss with Ascher the origins of his film, why you never see the faces of his interview subjects, and Fair Use. Ascher is interviewed in the latest issue of Filmmaker by […]
One of the Storyscapes projects I’m looking forward to at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival is A Journal of Insomnia, an “interactive fresco” combining confessions from insomniacs the world over and gathered since 2012. The “unique nocturnal premiere” happens April 18. From the press release: The original idea for the project comes from Hugues Sweeney, Executive Producer of NFB French Program’s Digital Studio in Montreal. Hugues explains that, “This is not a traditional Web documentary. It is a genuine attempt to push the boundaries of the genre by merging art and design with technology and social media, to create a […]
Here, via a YouTube user named Michael McNulty, is an incredible piece of nearly psychedelic mash-up collage art for our media overloaded, scheduled impacted era. All six Star Wars films played side by side, at once. I’m not the hugest fan of the series, and I have to admit, I find this completely hypnotic.
After going four years without making a studio album, Sigur Rós finally released Valtari last May and just today announced that a new record, Kveikur, will drop this June 18. The band, now a three-piece after the departure earlier this year of Kjartan “Kjarri” Sveinsson, has a darker and more primal sound as evidenced in the track “Brennisteinn,” which translates as “sulfur.” The track’s video, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, perfectly captures the band’s heavier sonic palette.
In this week’s episode of Rambling On…, host Russell Costanzo talks to directors Alex Karpovsky (Red Flag), Ry Russo-Young (Nobody Walks), Antonio Campos (Simon Killer) and Craig Zobel (Compliance) about the parameters they put on success, and the pitfalls of being too focused on the perceived success of their movies. Check back next week for another episode of the show, exclusively here on the Filmmaker website.
Sharing a booth at the SXSW trade show were the teams behind the forthcoming Digital Bolex RAW-file camera and Beyond the Bolex, a new documentary film by Alyssa Bolsey, whose great grandfather invented the celebrated and influential camera. I stopped by the booth on the last day of the conference, and spoke very briefly to one of its inventors, Joe Rubinstein, above. In my video, Rubinstein says he expects the release of the camera soon. Red Shark News has reproduced a post from the Digital Bolex forum by member James M, who also stopped by the booth and provides more […]