Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: A Tribute to Raoul Coutard
The Criterion Collection pays tribute to the late DP Raoul Coutard (who died last week, on election day) with a video collecting remarks he made during interviews for their editions of films he shot. It includes specific comments on Breathless, Jules and Jim and Z, as well as the gorgeous theme for Contempt, which is always welcome.
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Trailer Watch: Pablo Larrain’s Jackie
Pablo Larrain’s Jackie is one of my favorite films of the year. You can read my interview with the director in the current print edition of Filmmaker, and you can see more of the film in this new trailer, just out from Fox Searchlight. It’s more revealing than the earlier teaser trailer Stephen Garrett wrote about here, and, in some ways, quite different in tone, foregrounding the political mythmaking element of the story. Check it out above.
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Trailer Watch: 95 and 6 To Go, Directed by Kimi Takesue
Screening yesterday at DOC NYC and now headed to RIDM is Kimi Takesue’s 95 and 6 To Go, both personal and metafictional in its story of a filmmaker, Takesue, and her recently widowed grandfather finding common ground within the director’s unproduced featured screenplay. Here’s the film’s synopsis: In 95 and 6 To Go, a resilient widower’s memories become intertwined with the fictional screenplay his granddaughter is writing, revealing the fine line between life and art, rumination and imagination. Filmmaker Kimi Takesue captures the cadence of daily life for Grandpa Tom, a retired postal worker born to Japanese immigrants to Hawai’i […]
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Trailer Watch: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
When it played Art of the Real last year, Astra Taylor singled out for Filmmaker the absolutely essential documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. She wrote: Story has crafted a profound and political film that, while not sensational, is quietly shocking — even if you are already steeped in the project’s central theme. By taking an innovative and unexpected approach to the subject of mass incarceration, Story reveals just how deeply entrenched the problem of over-policing is…. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an impressive, genre-subverting work, and one that deserves to be seen on the big screen. It is […]
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Watch: A Scorsese Fast Dolly Zoom-In Supercut
From faces to guns to cocaine to pasta sauce, the fast dolly zoom-in is one of Martin Scorsese’s go-to expressive camera moves. Here, Jorge Luengo Ruiz compiles four-minutes of them in what is both great mid-day cinematic eye candy as well as something of a critique. Ruiz writes: Martin Scorsese’s penchant for a specific kind of zoom, one where he runs the camera right up to the face of his subject, falls somewhere in between the subtle and the obnoxious. Seduced as we are by the style and panache of Scorsese’s oeuvre, we let this habit of his pass us […]
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Watch: Tony Zhou on Marvel’s Lackluster Scores and Temp Track Mediocrity
In this video essay, Tony Zhou gets deep into why the Marvel Connected Universe — the highest-grossing franchise of all time — sports not one memorable musical theme that people can recall. The answer involves a crippling dependency on temp tracks bordering on the potentially lawsuit-worthy, making this a good look at the general state of Hollywood musical scores beyond the MCU.
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Watch: The Look of Fear
Just in time for Halloween, Fandor shares the above video essay which analyzes how film can effectively convey fear. Spanning 1920-2014, the video highlights the best reaction shots featuring “the look of fear.” In the accompanying essay, Daniel Mcilwraith explains, “This video asks you to contemplate several questions within these faces of fear. Which gender is most burdened with the look of fear? Which is more effective: paralyzing shock or a piercing scream? I asked myself why the look of fear was so persistent in horror cinema—perhaps it can tell us more about the human face as the most powerful cinematic spectacle.”
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Watch: Walter Murch’s Six Criteria While Editing
Walter Murch speaks in this video about his top six considerations while editing, from emotion and story down through the more technical considerations of keeping the audience’s eye moving. Oddly, the video (edited by Max Chatfield) begins with a lengthy montage of opening credits logos from some of the films Murch has worked on and ends with an end credits montage of same; the meat of the comments starts around the 50-second mark.
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Watch: Effie T. Brown’s 2016 Film Independent Forum Keynote
“You have a story to tell that’s worthy. You have experience to share and you have a valid point of view,” producer Effie T. Brown told the audience during Sunday’s inspirational keynote at the 2016 Film Independent Forum at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles. Brown, who produced films such as Dear White People and Real Women Have Curves, is executive VP, production and development for TV and film at Lee Daniels Entertainment. Brown spoke of the need for diverse creators and told the audience they can make a difference with their wallets. “The next time there is a movie where there is […]
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Watch: “Whiplash: From Short to Feature”
Jacob T. Swinney’s new video essay intercuts the short and feature versions of Whiplash seamlessly, showing how close the first incarnation was to the final feature project. And it’s also probably the only legal way you can see parts of the original short for now.
