Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Michel Gondry Directs The White Stripes’ City Lights Video
Filmmaker Michel Gondry recently surprised The White Stripes with the simple, but mesmerizing (above) video for “City Lights.” “On his own and without anyone’s knowledge, the legendary filmmaker shot a video for ‘City Lights,’ which he sent them the other night,” according to Third Man Records. The video marks Gondry’s fifth visual collaboration with The White Stripes.
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Watch: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, Nine Cinematographers, One Vision
In honor of Janus Films’ new restoration of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, now playing in limited release, Fandor Keyframe shared this video essay about the ten hour-long films bound together by the Ten Commandments. Originally made for Polish television in 1988, the ten films focus on the residents of a housing complex in late-Communist Warsaw, Poland. Their lives intertwine as they face moral, ethical, and emotional dilemmas. Though the series was shot by nine different cinematographers, as the above essay shows, the overall vision was unified.
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Watch: How the French New Wave Changed Cinema
The above video essay provides an excellent introduction to the French New Wave, which helped re-invigorate French cinema post-WWII. Spawned by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and other Cahiers du cinéma critics-turned-filmmakers, the film movement introduced the notion of the director as auteur. A collaboration by Press Play and No Film School, this video essay is the second in a series on film movements, their histories and their enduring influence. You can watch the first film in the series, on German Expressionism, here.
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Watch: Andrew Bujalski on Chantal Akerman and Je, Tu, Il, Elle
This is fun: Andrew Bujalski, who was a student of Chantal Akerman’s at Harvard, speaks before an Austin Film Society screening of Je, Tu, Il, Elle, recalling his initial, intimidating encounters with her and noting Jim Jarmusch’s debt to this film in particular.
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Trailer Watch: Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women
Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women made its debut earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival where it received excellent reviews and was quickly acquired by IFC Films. In advance of its upcoming screenings at both the Toronto and New York film festivals, the film, which stars Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, and Michelle Williams, has its first trailer (above). Based on Maile Meloy’s short-story collection “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It,” the Montana-set film follows three women in an intertwining narrative. In his review of the film out of Sundance, Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov wrote, “Reichardt’s films take place in an atmosphere of heightened quiet, […]
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Trailer Watch: NSFW The Greasy Strangler
Set in Los Angeles, The Greasy Strangler follows Big Ronnie, a man who runs a disco walking tour along with his son, Brayden. When a sexy, alluring woman named Janet comes to take the tour, it begins a competition between father and son. It also brings about the appearance of an oily, slimy, inhuman maniac who stalks the streets at night and strangles the innocent — soon dubbed “the Greasy Strangler.” The off-kilter feature film debut by writer/director Jim Hosking features performances by Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar, and Elizabeth De Razzo as well as prominent genre film producers including Theo Brooks, […]
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Trailer Watch: Zach Clark’s Little Sister Mixes Goth with Religion
In Zach Clark’s Little Sister, which premiered earlier this year at SXSW, Colleen (Addison Timlin), a young nun and former goth, returns to her childhood home in Asheville, North Carolina where she faces her estranged dysfunctional family. During Colleen’s visit, things intensify with a little help from Halloween, pot cupcakes, and GWAR. The ensemble cast features Ally Sheedy, Peter Hedges, Keith Poulson, Barbara Crampton, and Kristin Slaysman. In a review of the film in Filmmaker, Howard Feinstein called Little Sister “an unaffected masterpiece,” writing that “Clark balances the melancholy with outsized bursts of joy.” Little Sister opens at The Metrograph in New York on October 14th and […]
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Watch: What Makes a Movie Scary? (via Lights Out)
This video from the Now You See It account gets into the mechanics of the precise timing, cutting and framing it takes to create truly effective scares in horror movies by comparing two versions of the same scene from Lights Out: staged first in the short film, then in the recent feature film expanded from it.
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RIP Gene Wilder
RIP the late Gene Wilder, whose passing at age 83 was announced by his family. Here he is talking with Merv Griffin in 1979, beginning by delving into his childhood and his parents’ influence in an interview for which the set was closed to encouraged personal disclosures. The Hollywood Reporter‘s obit is here.
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Music Video: Emily Wells’ “Pack of Nobodies,” Directed by Ben Foster
With five films in theaters this year, including specialty hit Hell or High Water, as well as a turn in the St. Anne’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire, actor Ben Foster is having what’s known as a moment. Now, add one other credit to his enviable run: his directorial debut with a music video for singer Emily Wells, “Pack of Nobodies.” And whereas most music videos feature performance and maybe one narrative storyline, Foster shoots Wells singing as well as five sets of actors in an interlocking series of emotional narratives. From the music video’s press release: The music […]
