Filmmaker Videos
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Watch (and Listen): Hearing A Nightmare on Elm Street
In our second Jacob T. Swinney video post of the day, here’s the critic and filmmaker’s tribute to the late Wes Craven, in the form of an analysis of the director’s use of sound in his horror classic. From the video’s notes: The first horror movie I ever watched was Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street”. Being a child, the film frightened me so badly that I didn’t view another horror film until my teen years. Despite the obvious tormentors of a man with a burned face, gravity defying whirlpools of blood, and a dying teen being dragged around […]
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Trailer Watch: Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia
Peppered with documentary elements, Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia returns the director to similar territory of his much heralded Russian Ark, this time among the hallowed halls of Paris’ Louvre. The film will explore the relationships between art and culture, war and power, throughout the centuries of the museum. Francofonia premieres in competition at Venice and will be shown in the Masters program at TIFF. Check out the first trailer above.
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Watch: POV Shots in the Coen Brothers’ Films
Here’s another nifty video from Jacob T. Swinney, this time bookending an assembly of the Coen brothers’ numerous POV with montages of their many dashboard-driving shots.
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Trailer Watch: Zia Anger’s My Last Film
Disconcerting: Zia Anger appeared on our beginning-of-career 25 New Faces list just this year, but she’s already titling her latest short, My Last Film. Clarification should come shortly; the film, which stars Lola Kirke, Kelly Rohrback and Rosanna Arquette, premieres at the New York Film Festival as part a New York-centric shorts program alongside other favorites including Dustin Guy Defa, Nathan Silver, Pacho Velez & Daniel Claridge and Joanna Arnow. In the meantime, a short, foreboding trailer, above, offers few clues.
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Trailer Watch: Jonas Carpignano’s Mediterranea
Jonas Carpignano made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2012 on the basis of his astonishing short, A Chjàna, about violence between African immigrants and police in Rosarno, Italy. His debut feature, Mediterranea, develops a similar storyline and premiered in Cannes this year. Check out the film’s foreign trailer, which just dropped.
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Watch: Behind-the-Scenes at Burning Man in As the Dust Settles
With the annual Burning Man conference underway, now is a good time to revisit what producer and editor Mike Hedge calls a “participatory documentary,” As the Dust Settles. Shot at the festival, the doc uses a number of collaborating directors (Roger Ingraham, Katheryn McGaffigan, Jamie Dee, Jeremy Lubman, and Tarynn Wiehahn) and generally superb cinematography to capture, says Hedge, “an intimate glimpse of what we discovered about love, the environment, the gift economy, reality, art, creativity, and ourselves.” As the Dust Settles is available on a wide variety of streaming and download platforms. As a special bonus, Hedge has provided […]
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Watch: Taiwan Food Adventures: “Lynn Chen Bites, Episode One”
I first met actress Lynn Chen when executive producing Alice Wu’s feature film, Saving Face, and, since then, I’ve followed her work across film and TV — from Dave Boyle’s features to the premiere of Fear the Walking Dead — but also podcasting and social media. A body image activist as well as actress, Chen has the most varied social media footprint of anyone I know. She’s recently carved out a second career as food blogger through her website and podcast, The Actor’s Diet, as well as food videos for Buzzfeed, where she’s scored over one million views in a […]
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Trailer Watch: Blue Velvet Revisited, Directed by Peter Braatz
Marking the David Lynch film’s 30th Anniversary, this Fall will see the release of Peter Braatz’s Blue Velvet Revisited, a feature-length documentary consisting of Super 8 footage the director shot on the North Carolina set of Blue Velvet. Braatz previously made a short film out of this material, No Frank in Lumberton, but now he’s pulled out all the stops, commissioning a brand-new soundtrack that excites me just as much as this footage does. That soundtrack, featuring new work recorded in 2015 by Tuxedomoon, Cult with No Name and John Foxx, is already available for pre-order on Amazon and iTunes. […]
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Watch: Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia vs. the Original
In his latest video essay, Kevin B. Lee places the original 1997 Insomnia (directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg) on the left and Christopher Nolan’s 2002 Hollywood remake on the right. Juxtaposing the same sequence, Lee textually annotates the many differences in tempo, shot choices, framing et al., making it easy to see how two very different sensibilities approach the same sequence. More from Lee at Fandor.
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Watch: Diametric Composition in Two Days, One Night
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are consistently lauded for their naturalistic brand of social realist dramas, but this video essay from Marshall Shaffer digs a little deeper, putting forth Two Days, One Night as an argument for the brothers’ masterful (and largely undiscussed) use of composition. Through varied backdrops and physical obstacles, the brothers repeatedly cleave their frames in two, reflecting the emotional discord between Sandra (Marion Cotillard) and her co-workers. The favoring of subtle and organic barriers, Shaffer argues, provides a nice contrast to the exacting compositions of Kubrick, Anderson, and other directors who are frequently cited as the gold standard.
