Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch and Poster: Jafar Panahi’s Taxi
Here’s the US trailer and poster for Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, the third film the Iranian director has made despite an official 20-year-ban on him making movies. Behind the wheel, Panahi criss-crosses Tehran, picking up passengers whose interactions with him again blur the line between fact and fiction. The film will be playing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival before in opening in New York on October 2, with limited national release to follow. A current list of scheduled playdates and more information from distributor Kino Lorber can be found here. You can also check out two scenes from the film we posted […]
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Aerial Los Angeles and “Droning for Good”
Filmmaker Ian Wood has posted his second overhead exploration of Los Angeles — its neighborhoods, landmarks, people and vistas. His footage is beautifully operated, color-corrected and edited, and amidst recent controversy over drone filmmaking comes with, on Wood’s Vimeo page, his personal rulebook for urban drone shooting: Droning For Good With all the controversy about drones, it’s important to remember that they can be (and often are) used responsibly. As with many emerging technologies, the laws struggle to keep up and we must employ a common sense approach to their use that is respectful to community, safety and the law. […]
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Trailer Watch: DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation
“Remix culture applied to cinema” — that’s the elevator pitch for DJ Spooky’s latest release, Rebirth of a Nation, a multimedia work that uses remixing, original scoring and various DJ techniques to interrogate D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation. Collapsing the three hour film into an hour of sound and image, DJ Spooky’s project critically analyzes the film’s legacy on both film grammar and the depiction of race in the more than a century since. Originally commissioned by the Spoleto Festival, Rebirth of a Nation has been performed around the world and is now available on CD, with […]
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Trailer Watch: John Magary’s The Mend
Hilarious, confrontational and compellingly disorienting, John Magary’s The Mend is one of the most striking independent films of the past couple of years. A SXSW ’14 standout, it reaches theaters this week with a run at the IFC Center in New York. Check out the trailer for this comedy of dysfunctional siblings and lost weekends, and return later this week for more on the film.
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Watch: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Extreme Close-Ups
Here’s a thorough, succinct look at the rather particular use of extreme close-ups in the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. Note how they are almost never routine inserts or signifiers — there’s always a motion to the shot, either within the frame or as the camera pushes in toward its subject. Check it out above.
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Music Video: Lana Del Rey, “High by the Beach,” Directed by Jake Nava
What was that Godard (or Griffith) line, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and…”? Lana Del Rey’s latest music video, “High by the Beach,” has just dropped, and it’s got a kind of Zabriskie Point-era Antonioni meets Andy Sidaris thing going on, with lovely handheld camerawork, a trendily minimal beachside house location (“no” production design is the new production design) and a blast of a finish.
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Trailer Watch: Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight
After a much ballyhooed pre-production script leak, The Hateful Eight is set to hit theaters Christmas Day from The Weinstein Company. Here is the first official trailer for Quentin Taratino’s eighth feature film, starring regulars Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Madsen and Tim Roth, alongside Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern and Demian Bichir as a motley crew of snowbound bounty hunters in post-War Wyoming.
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Watch: How to Read a Call Sheet
This succinct, no nonsense tutorial video from RocketJump Film School breaks down the various components of a call sheet, showing how to read each section and understand various acronyms. Best tip for those making a call sheet: make sure to include the address of the hospital nearest to your set, and make sure it has an ER. You never know.
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Pay Tribute to Bankrupt Columbia House with The Target Shoots First
Given the news that Columbia House — the mail-order CD club that famously promised eight CDs for a penny — is filing for bankruptcy, there’s no better time to (re)watch Chris Wilcha’s The Target Shoots First, his 2000 documentary about his time working there in the ’90s. What once played as a blackly funny portrait of trying to stay sane while working in a cynical corporate culture is now oddly nostalgic, given the relatively relaxed working environment. For more context, it’s well worth reading this AV Club piece by Annie Zaleski, in which she interviews four former Columbia House employees (including Wilcha) about […]
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Watch: A New P.T. Anderson Music Video for Joanna Newsom
Paul Thomas Anderson’s music video for Joanna Newsom’s new single is very much in the loose handheld mode of Inherent Vice. Newsom wanders Manhattan while reeling off some typically complicated lyrics and the camera follows in her wake. Her new album, Divers, is out on October 23.
