Summer’s still upon us, so it’s not too late to post this improvised commencement speech given by director David Lynch this past June at the Maharishi University of Management. Presented with a Doctor of World Peace honoris causa degree, Lynch, a proponent of Transcendental Meditation, gives a typically anodyne set of answers to students wanting to balance the practicalities demanded by the job market with the searcher for a higher consciousness. Time, Inc’s Motto provides a complete transcription of the talk. Here is Lynch answering a question about his own school years. From Motto: I was very lucky. I was […]
collective: unconscious, the anthology film in which independent filmmakers interpret each other’s dreams, is being released this coming Tuesday, for free, via BitTorrent. Today, producer Dan Schoenbrun — who, by the way, has just launched a regular column here at Filmmaker — has posted one episode of the film (a teaser, if you will). It’s Lauren Wolkstein’s adaptation of Frances Bodomo’s dream. (And, hey, another Filmmaker aside: both directors are veterans of our 25 New Faces series.) Here’s the one-line for Bodomo’s dream given to Wolkstein: My PE class and I are stuck in a volcano and we’re being made […]
Billed as an “interactive love story set in the multiverse,” Possibilia, a short film from the dynamic writing/directing duo known as Daniels, tells the story of a couple (Alex Karpovsky and Zoe Jarman) on the verge of a break-up with 16 potential outcomes that are left to the viewer. The project, which screened at both Sundance, Tribeca, and other festivals back in 2014, now gets an online release over at Eko (previously Interlude), the interactive video creation platform. Like Daniels’ recent feature Swiss Army Man, Possibilia relies on humor to subvert the genre and push the conventions of the medium. Filmmaker recently […]
Movies in 5 Minutes made this Andrei Tarkovsky tribute featuring seven of his films. The video is the latest in a tribute series that has included Michael Mann, Ingmar Berman, and others.
From 2001, it’s Martin Scorsese discussing Stanley Kubrick with Charlie Rose. They start with The Shining and go from there.
The New Yorker recently commissioned filmmaker Kevin McAlester to recreate a 70-year-old drive through downtown Los Angeles. The resulting split-screen tour of the same streets in the downtown L.A. neighborhood of Bunker Hill in the 1940s and today shows how much the streets have changed and the city has grown. By the 1950s, the neighborhood, which had previously featured some of the city’s most elegant mansions and hotels, had been turned into low-income housing, according to The New Yorker. The area was highlighted in several noir films as well as in The Exiles, the 1961 film which chronicled the lives of young Native Americans living in […]
“The eye of the camera always manages to express the interior of a character,” according to the late filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. The latest video essay (above) by Daniel Mcilwraith at Fandor meditates on Pasolini’s use of the close-up to capture the interior of his characters. “Pasolini’s faces are often confrontational, breaking the barrier between screen and spectator. There is something unnerving, yet often playful, about making eye contact with those on screen,” writes Mcilwraith. What do you see when you look into the eyes of his characters? Check out the video essay above and draw your own conclusions.
In his newest video essay, Kevin B. Lee breaks down how the Bourne series has changed the style of film fighting as the series continued. As he notes in a supplementary essay at Fandor, “At times it feels like a hodgepodge of fight shots dropped in random, non-linear order—something approaching an impressionist abstraction of action filmmaking. So it was somewhat of a revelation that, upon taking a fight scene from The Bourne Ultimatum and slowing it down to half speed, I could actually discern that one split-second shot from a fight linked up rather well with the next, in a spatially coherent linear sequence.”
To celebrate the 90th Anniversary of Buster Keaton’s classic film The General, throughout August Portland’s historic Hollywood Theatre and Oregon Film will present a state-wide tour of the film with a new live score composed by film composer Mark Orton. Above you can check out a trailer for the film presentation. Considered one of the best comedies of the silent era, The General finds hapless Southern railroad engineer Johnny Gray (Buster Keaton) facing off against Union soldiers during the American Civil War. When Johnny’s fiancée, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), is accidentally taken away while on a train stolen by Northern forces, Gray pursues the soldiers, using various modes of transportation in […]
It’s one auteur illuminating similarities with another’s work in another split-screen video. This time around, it’s Stanley Kubrick on the left and Andrei Tarkovsky on the right.