Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Jim Cummings’s Springsteen-Fueled Sundance Grand Prize-Winning Short, Thunder Road
Following a heartfelt public campaign to convince Bruce Springsteen — or, perhaps, his battery of lawyers, publishers and master owners — to let him affordably release his short film, Thunder Road, director Jim Cummings prevailed. The result is that this excellent short, fully deserving of Sundance’s Best Short prize, is now screening online, for free. Cummings himself stars as a young man who decides to evoke The Boss while eulogizing his mom at her funeral, and the short is an example of a game-changing work that can make a career. (Cummings is on every agent’s radar now as an actor […]
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Watch: Adam Savage Goes on a Walking Tour of the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition
For those of us who can’t make it out to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Adam Savage of Mythbusters gives us a brief tour of their Stanley Kubrick exhibition and reveals himself to be quite the Kubrick fan. Listen and watch as he views cameras from Barry Lyndon, costumes from 2001 and more.
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Trailer Watch: collective:unconscious
For the film collective:unconscious, producer Dan Schoenbrun brought together five directors to film each others dreams. Lily Baldwin, Frances Bodomo, Daniel Patrick Carbone, Josephine Decker and Lauren Wolkstein contributed the short films making up this unusual feature, which premiered earlier this year at SXSW. collective:unconscious will be released online for free in partnership with BitTorrent Now on August 9. Concurrently, the film will open for a weeklong theatrical run at Brooklyn’s Made in NY Media Center by IFP starting Friday, August 5. Check out the wild trailer in the meantime.
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Watch: Martin Scorsese Remembers Abbas Kiarostami
At New York’s School for the Visual Arts last Friday, Martin Scorsese spoke in remembrance of the late Abbas Kiarostami. He’d known him for some 14 years, and in this speech recalls both the last time they met — when they spoke about collaborating on a project next year — and the first, when they were both serving as Cinefondation honorary presidents at Cannes in 2002. Of Close-Up, he recalls how the film helped him “see the world again.”
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Watch: “The Original Ghostbusters Is Pretty Sexist”
The new Ghostbusters is set to release after months of trolling over its all-female cast. In his newest video essay at Fandor Keyframe, Kevin B. Lee takes a look at the six most prominent female roles in the 1984 version.
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Watch: Michael Mann’s Blackhat and “The Ghost in the Circuit”
Despite a divisive critical reception and box office numbers, Michael Mann’s Blackhat has spawned a number of video essays since its release in early 2015. In his essay, Federico Palmerini examines the spectral nature of the Internet and its relationship to the film.
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Jessica Oreck Explains the Uplifting Origins of the Bra
Filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga) has created a new series for TED-Ed, “In a Moment of Vision,” dubbed “an all-new, all-fun animated micro-series about the history of common objects.” The first episode tells the story of the invention of the bra, which you may be surprised wasn’t invented until the early 1900s.
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Watch: “Kiarostami: The Anti-Supercut Artist”
Kevin B. Lee, Chief Video Essayist at Fandor, set out to make a Abbas Kiarostami video tribute after his passing last week. Lee created this video to display his own learning process, realizing that Kiarostami’s films actively contrast with the deconstructive video essay form.
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Watch: “Like Requiem for a Dream“
Inspired by the rapid drug sequences in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, Candice Drouet envisions what other films could look like with a similar editing style. The latest Fandor Keyframe video essay reimagines films such as Drive, Pulp Fiction and Mad Max: Fury Road.
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Watch: The Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple Pitch Trailer
Blood Simple, the Coen brothers’ first film, is being released on DVD and Blu-Ray in September through the Criterion Collection. The teaser trailer that the two made to sell to investors has now surfaced online for the first time with the impending release of the restored 4k digital transfer. Joel and Ethan ultimately raised $550,000 towards the film that sparked their careers. Starting July 1 Blood Simple will also play in select theaters in collaboration with Janus Films in advance of the physical release.
