The latest in his series of video essays for the Criterion Collection brings :: kogonada face to face with Ingmar Bergman — more precisely, to the Swedish auteur’s use of mirrors in relation to women. Set to a reading of Sylvia Plath’s Mirror (“I am important to her/she comes and goes” nicely encapsulates Persona, at the very least), this short montage considers the meditative reflections — and interior revelations — across several of Bergman’s films. Watch above, and stay tuned for a longer :: kogonada/Bergman essay, set to accompany the Cries and Whispers release.
Shot by Joe Capra, this five-minute test video shows off the super-hi-res capabilities of the PhaseOne IQ180 camera (more information on that here). This timelapse footage of Rio de Janeiro from a variety of vantage points is meant to serve several purposes. As Capra writes: Each shot sequence starts off with the full resolution footage scaled down to fit within a 1920×1080 resolution (14% scale). The next shot in each shot sequence is the full resolution shot scaled to 50%, so basically zooming in quite a bit. From there we go into the full resolution shot scaled to 100%, which […]
Writer/director/producer duo Michael Tyburski and Ben Nabors — 25 New Faces alums from 2013 — have a trailer for their new short film. Actor Seeks Role stars another alum — director/Girls regular Alex Karpovsky — as a struggling thespian who takes on a job as a medical actor, exhibiting symptoms he doesn’t possess for student doctors to test their diagnostic skills on. (Shades of Leslie Jamison’s essay on the topic.) The film hopes to launch online later this spring.
In this fairly typical Hitchcock interview from 1960, the director adjusts his tie and sits down for a brisk promotional session for Psycho, describing the plot with typical drollery and running through some of his greatest soundbite hits: the oft-told story about how he was imprisoned briefly as a child at his father’s request, qualifying his statement that actors should be treated like cattle (“You mean you want to make them larger cattle than they are?”), and whether he’s ever wanted to be an actor himself (“Nothing so low as that”).
Lincoln Center’s vital series “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986” kicks off today, including a week-long debut theatrical run of Kathleen Collins’ 1982 Losing Ground. Believed to be the first African-American woman to direct a feature film (1980’s The Cruz Brothers and Mrs. Molloy), Collins’ 1982 second and final feature has never received a regular theatrical run until now. The story of a philosophy professor (Sereh Scott) and her landscape painter husband (Ganja and Hess director Bill Gunn) in the middle of a transformative vacation in upstate New York, the film is described as a […]
Red Giant has released a new short from Seth Worley called Old/New. Over the past few years Worley has produced a number of imaginative short films on a limited budget that tell a great story and also – somehow – manage to demonstrate the use of Red Giant’s software. Cue the announcement of new software from Red Giant. Red Giant has also released Magic Bullet Suite 12, their collection of color correction and finishing tools. This release brings new features to the applications that make up the suite, as well as a new product: Magic Bullet Film. One of the focuses of this […]
Kevin B. Lee has been churning out a series of visual supplements to oscar punditry over at Fandor that weigh politics against actual evidence, even if it is still subjective. His latest video, Who Should Win the Oscar for Best Director?, considers which of the filmmakers behind The Imitation Game, Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Boyhood and Birdman, displays the most sensitive, contextually sound technique. He’s spot on in his assessments of three of the five, but I’d argue that The Grand Budapest Hotel finds a renewed cause for Anderson’s seemingly premeditated aesthetic, while Iñárritu ultimately limits himself to the very air of spectacle he […]
“I argue that cinema is either dying or dead — it’s certainly changing very rapidly — so maybe now is the time to make a film about the greatest cinematic practitioner.” Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein In Guanajuato — focusing on 10 days out of the 14 months Sergei Eisenstein spent in Mexico shooting what would eventually be edited into ¡Que viva México! — is one of the more keenly anticipated titles premiering at this year’s Berlinale. Above is the first of a three-part documentary on the film’s production from Mexico’s IMCINE (the national film financing/production agency). There are two brief bits in Spanish; the […]
Magic Mike XXL is not directed by Steven Soderbergh, who has retired from feature filmmaking. But what’s in a name? Magic Mike XXL is directed by Gregory Jacobs, Soderbergh’s regular 1st AD since 1993’s King of the Hill, is crewed by Soderbergh regulars (production designer Howard Cummings and set director Eric R. Johnson have been onhand since Contagion), and was shot and edited by the man himself. The trailer’s color palette — muted and dark, with strong golds and shadows — is accordingly exactly what you’d get from a Soderbergh film, and it even opens with the same ’70s WB Saul Bass-designed logo that […]
Google Cardboard was a hot piece of Sundance sort-of-swag at Sundance this year. (“Can you get me Google Cardboard,” several friends emailed me during the fest.) I happened to check out one of the pieces designed for Cardboard, Chris Milk’s Evolution of Verse, a beautifully disorienting lakeside mountain-scape with an enveloping, 2001-ish finale. But, if you’re like Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish, and “the whole virtual reality thing gives you an aneurysm,” you can hack Google Cardboard into a rather arty-in-a-low-fi way 35mm lens. Check it out above.