kogonada first caught our eye two years back with his exploration of symmetry in the works of Stanley Kubrick, followed by Wes Anderson a year later. But before both auteurs were associated with a centered, exacting aesthetic, Buster Keaton applied a looser construct of symmetry to his brand of physical comedy. The above video from Vince di Meglio looks at how the central framing of nearly 30 of Keaton’s films allows for head-to-toe humor in relation to both objects and space.
In his first interview in 13 years, The Deer Hunter/Heaven’s Gate director Michael Cimino sounds off on the greatness of American Sniper and why Clint Eastwood should be president, writing novels published in France he’s afraid to have published in the US, and much more. It’s a good time to revisit the start of Cimino’s career, when he was a Madison Avenue commercial director, and a very successful one at that. This 1967 ad was part of a $1.7-million United Airlines campaign and it’s very of the period — literally colorful, musically brassy, casually sexist. More background on the commercial here.
In this excerpt from the Criterion Collection’s supplements for their now-out edition of Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 Don’t Look Now, Graeme Clifford discusses the fine art of keeping people off-balance without being too obvious about it. “There is a comfortable way of editing, where people want to be unaware of cuts,” he explains. “In most movies, that’s generally the way you want to go. But in this movie, I deliberately cut an unusual rhythm. I would hold shots when there’d seem to be no reason to do so, or I would cut off them too quickly, or I would cut to things that were […]
Robert Altman’s formative years working in episodic television are examined by Violet Lucca in this Film Comment video essay. Highlighting one of his two Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, Lucca argues its foregrounding of a disintegrating female psychopath anticipates Altman’s later studies of women with fragmented psyches (Images, Three Women). After finding his autuerist signature on Bonanza! and examining one of his most famous contributions to Combat!, the essay concludes with a look at Altman’s Bus Stop episode “A Lion Walks Among Us,” controversial enough amongst widespread hysteria about juvenile delinquency and violence on TV to merit Congressional questioning of ABC president Oliver Treyz.
Here’s a true deep cut, evidently taped off New Jersey’s WNET and now resurrected on the internet. This ’80s profile of d.p. John Alcott (A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon) features a lot of on-set footage of the cinematographer plying his craft; if you’re a big Beastmaster fan, this is for you. If just interested in the Kubrick stories you may want to skip to the 8-minute mark (where the d.p. talks about his initial collaborations with the director) and then to 14:20 or so, where Alcott discusses waiting patiently to capture very particular wind and cloud changes on the set of Barry […]
Here’s a nifty behind-the-scenes featurette on the iPhone 6 shooting of Tristan Pope‘s short film, Romance in NYC. The film is shot entirely from the first-person perspective, like Lady in the Lake and Enter the Void, and the mobility of the iPhone enabled the director/camera operator to play the role of the first-person protagonist. As you’ll see in the video, Pope lets his own hands and arms enter and exit frame, aided by variety of gear — including a Gorillapod — as well as well-choreographed production assistants.
“Either you have to escape the country or start hoping to go back to jail,” a woman sitting in the passenger seat tells Jafar Panahi in the first clip shared from the Iranian director’s latest feature Taxi. Driving a cab through Tehran and conversing with passengers, Panahi is again the star in his third feature since a 20-year-ban on filmmaking imposed by the Iranian government. In another clip, a young girl reels off a checklist of guidelines necessary to make a distributable film in Iran (headscarves on women, no relations between the genders). The winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s […]
Wes Anderson’s detractors often delight in taking umbrage with the filmmaker’s “twee” aesthetic, claiming that his formal specificity undermines the emotion his films ought to inspire. This video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz, one in a series adapted from his book The Wes Anderson Collection, dismantles that claim through the lens of The Grand Budapest Hotel, and its myriad melancholic layers of loss and thwarted re-invention. With respect to Zero, Seitz notes that “The most important parts of a story are the parts people omit, the abysses they sidestep,” and how Agatha becomes a vague, distant cypher — both narratively and through Yeoman’s […]
Referring to an unreleased film as an “ultimate masterpiece” in its first trailer is an interesting marketing tactic, to be sure — especially when its maker’s resume is chockfull of blockbusters. But Guillermo del Toro and Co. have more or less thrown down the gauntlet in this bumper for Crimson Peak, which sees him returning to the fantastical horror of his 2006 breakout, Pan’s Labyrinth. Starring the appealing trio of Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain, the film unfolds in an intricate and gothic mansion, that appears to be home to more than a few types of skeletons. Crimson Peak will be released by Universal Pictures on […]
Lawrence Levine’s comedy thriller Wild Canaries is opening February 25 at the IFC Center and on online platforms. Below, from our print magazine, are my comments after the film’s premiere at SXSW. And, check out the trailer above. Most independent films don’t have enough plot. That criticism can’t be leveled at Wild Canaries, Lawrence Michael Levine’s loose-limbed caper comedy. Levine and his wife, the actress and director Sophia Takal, star as a Brooklyn couple who become convinced their upstairs neighbor was murdered to gain control of her rent controlled apartment. Influenced by the “Thin Man” movies as well as Woody Allen’s […]