Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: A Video Essay on Robert Altman’s TV Work
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.
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“I Never Had Any Interest in Becoming a Cinematographer Until 1965, When I Met Stanley Kubrick”: A Rare Profile of d.p. John Alcott
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 […]
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Shooting Romance in NYC with the iPhone 6
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.
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Watch: Two Scenes from Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, the Iranian Director’s Third Feature Made During a 20-Year Ban
“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 […]
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Watch: Melancholy and Loss in The Grand Budapest Hotel
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 […]
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Trailer Watch: Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak
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 […]
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Trailer Watch: Wild Canaries Directed by Lawrence Levine
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 […]
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Watch: “Mirrors of Bergman” by :: kogonada
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.
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Watch: Rio de Janeiro in 10K Timelapse
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 […]
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Trailer Watch: Michael Tyburski & Ben Nabors’ Actor Seeks Role, Starring Alex Karpovsky
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.
