Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Monica Peña’s Hearts of Palm
Miami-based filmmaker Monica Peña’s debut feature, Ectotherms, was a provocative discovery out of the Miami Film Festival that scored a great review in Variety from Guy Lodge and which announced Peña as someone to watch. Just dropped, then, is the teaser trailer to her second feature, Hearts of Palm. Suitably mysterious and with arresting imagery, it is described simply as “a love story told through science, literature, and music, invoking Miami’s mystical undercurrents.” For more on Peña, read her interview with Sarah Salovaara about the distribution of Ectotherms. And, if you’re in Miami, join me, Peña, Jillian Mayer and Carla […]
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Watch: Leah Shore’s Mindbending Charles Manson Animation, Old Man
Leah Shore made our “25 New Faces” list in 2013 on the basis of her totally trippy animated short, Old Man, which traverses the entirety of 20th century history, from Hitler to Kennedy, the bomb to Michael Jackson, in a rapid-fire, image-morphing five minutes that’s voiced by imprisoned cult leader Charles Manson. The recordings came from a series of tapes Shore obtained by Marlin Marynick, a psychiatric nurse. Explains Sarah Salovaara in her Filmmaker profile on Shore: Marynick forked over approximately 10 hours of audio recordings, which resulted in Shore “sitting in a dark room for two months and going […]
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Watch: Shading and Cutting in Cassavetes’ Shadows
Amid all of the internet’s Kubrick/Anderson/Fincher devotees, few video essayists turn their scalpel toward Cassavetes, perhaps in part because his directing prowess is not so easily distilled. Kevin B. Lee has thus chosen to focus on the opening 14 shots of Cassavetes’ debut Shadows, and how he uses incisive editing and lighting to convey the shifting sentiments in a series of scenes between the two lovers Leila and Tony. Check it out above.
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Trailer Watch: Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli Me Tangere
To celebrate the November 18 Blu-Ray and DVD release of Jacques Rivette’s opus Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, the French label Carlotta Films has put out a 2 minute trailer for the 775 minute film. For those of us who don’t own a region agnostic Blu-Ray or DVD player (but live in the New York area), it’s worth trying to catch the film at BAM, showing in four parts from November 4 – 19.
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Watch: “Capturing the Moment: In Search of Adequate Images”
A bit of a rant, Stephen Murphy’s video essay “Capturing the Moment: In Search of Adequate Images” springboards off a diatribe against the epidemic of smartphones at concerts to riff off of Werner Herzog’s long-ago warning that we as a society need to find adequate images. What are these adequate images, and how do we define them? Murphy has some thoughts, and some high praise for A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as well.
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Watch: $5.15/Hr., Richard Linklater’s Rejected HBO Pilot From 2004
HBO is normally very serious about making sure no commissioned and rejected pilots ever make it into public view, so I’m not sure how Richard Linklater’s rejected 2004 pilot made it to Vimeo or how long it’ll stay there. $5.15/Hr. was, per its title, intended to be an immersion into the lives of underpaid restaurant employees slacking around Austin. I recall seeing an uncharacteristically acerbic Linklater presenting the pilot at SXSW in 2004, with the words “You know how they say it’s not TV, it’s HBO? It’s TV.” If only television had been so good in those days as it reportedly […]
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Watch: Tony Zhou’s “Vancouver Never Plays Itself”
Vancouver is the third-biggest filmmaking city in North America, and yet it’s always a stand-in for somewhere else: New York, Shanghai and San Francisco are all possibilities. What does it mean to be “ubiquitous and invisible” at the same time? In his latest video essay, Tony Zhou examines the many tricks used to disguise the city (from planting USA Today newspaper stands everywhere to making sure the camera looks down outside, lest it accidentally capture mountains that don’t belong to the city), then issues a stirring call for Vancouver to, for once, play itself.
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Trailer Watch: Celia Rowlson-Hall’s MA
Here’s your first look at MA, the debut feature from one of our most recent 25 New Faces, Celia Rowlson-Hall. The dialogue free film just received its world premiere in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival, and I was fortunate enough to catch a work-in-progress screening back in April at Tribeca. Be sure to keep an eye out for it on the circuit in the coming year.
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Trailer Watch: Josh Mond’s James White
Here’s the first trailer for Josh Mond’s Sundance winner James White, starring Cynthia Nixon and Christopher Abbott as a cancer patient and her alcoholic son. As his mother leans on the eponymous character for emotional stability, James spirals into self-destructive pattern, in what’s a tightly controlled, affecting character study. The Film Arcade will open James White on November 13, 2015.
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Errol Morris Asks Donald Trump about the Meaning of Citizen Kane
In this interview clip from a shelved Errol Morris project, businessman and now presidential candidate Donald Trump muses on the meanings of Orson Welles’ classic film, Citizen Kane. Trump doesn’t diverge from critical orthodoxy about the film, but it’s still interesting to hear him take away the standard lesson that money isn’t everything. Still, as Jason Kottke notes, Trump can’t just help himself from throwing in conversation-ending misogynistic aside. From Morris’s site: The Movie Movie, an aborted project, is based on the idea of taking Donald Trump, Mikhail Gorbachev and others and putting them in the movies they most admire. […]
