Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Mike White on Why Pierre Bismuth’s Truly Unique Hybrid Where is Rocky II? Needs Your Support
The term ‘hybrid’ has become increasingly debatable when discussing the divide between fiction and nonfiction, though it’s a rather apt description of the French artist Pierre Bismuth’s cinematic inquiry, Where is Rocky II? Perhaps best known for his Oscar winning collaboration with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry on the script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Bismuth became obsessed with a fake rock, called Rocky II, that Ed Ruscha placed amongst its geological counterparts in the Mojave Desert around the release of the eponymous Stallone film in 1979. The pitch of Where is Rocky II?, Bismuth explained in an email, “is that a […]
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Watch: Tony Zhou on Drive and “The Quadrant System”
This quick Tony Zhou video starts by breaking down a shot from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in which Carey Milligan and Ryan Gosling walk to their respective doors in a hallway, pointing out how the left and right sides give us two separate stories in one composition. Then Zhou moves on, repeatedly slicing the film’s frames in half vertically and horizontally. A model of textbook visual analysis, Zhou gets to the essence of what thoughtful shot composition looks like. Heed Zhou’s wise parting words: “You don’t need Steadicams or cranes or drones, or the latest 4K whatever. You need top, […]
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Watch: Sundance Doc Winner Crystal Moselle Directs Urban Ballet in “Shapeshifting”
Just a few months before she won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for her documentary, The Wolf Pack, Crystal Moselle gained attention for this hypnotic video for the band Color War. Three teenage dancers (Cassiel Eatock, Isabel Ball and Elizabeth Van Genderen) turn the parks, streets and underground parking garages of New York into their own ballet stage while Moselle’s camera lurks behind. Check it out above.
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Short Film: Hot Beach Babe Aims to Please, by Jillian Mayer
Filmmaker and Borscht co-honcho Jillian Mayer literalizes herself into a piece of internet clickbait in Hot Beach Babe Aims to Please, a witty short that screened in December as part of Miami’s Borscht Film Festival. Check it out above, and read more about Mayer in our 25 New Faces profile of her and partner Lucas Leyva.
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Watch: :: kogonada on Wes Anderson’s Symmetrical Compositions
We’re big :: kogonada fans here at Filmmaker Magazine and are still catching up with his past work. This video focuses on Wes Anderson’s penchant for symmetrical compositions, dropping a line down the middle of the screen to better see on what is and isn’t exactly symmetrically balanced in his frames.
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Watch: Kurosawa and The Geometry of a Scene
In his latest “Every Frame a Painting” series, Tony Zhou takes generic, ensemble coverage to task. Pitting rigid Hollywood biopic fare against the geometric blocking of Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, Zhou considers why dynamism comes through movement and not necessarily edits. As the characters shift about the room, tracing lines of triangles and squares, Kurosawa uses full-bodied actors — not close-ups — to draw your attention to a given object.
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Watch: The Cinema of Michael Mann
Released this past Friday, Michael Mann’s Blackhat has already proven a colossal flop, which is a shame: following up on Collateral, Miami Vice and Public Enemies, it’s another never-less-than-visually-intriguing investigation of the kinds of truly new images digital cameras can produce in the guise of a cyber-hacking thriller. Go check it out while you still can. Beforehand, you may want to prep with this above-average supercut credited to one “balistik94,” which ties together Mann’s filmography in a number of different ways: dialogue that persists from one film to another (“Time is luck” as recited by both Gong Li in Miami […]
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Michael Ballhaus on Framing and Arguing with Fassbinder on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
In this fascinating short interview released by The Criterion Collection, legendary D.P. Michael Ballhaus discusses working with Rainer Werner Fassbinder on one of the director’s best films, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. After talking about how Fassbinder didn’t like to shotlist, Ballhaus describes one particularly difficult move and the director’s reaction when it wasn’t done just the way he wanted it. And even if Ballhaus weren’t an erudite interview, the clips alone here would be worth watching. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is now out in standard def and Blu Ray from Criterion.
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The Look of Defeat: Force Majeure‘s Director and Producer React to their Oscar Snub
Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure is one of my top films of the year, so I share — albeit not to the same degree — the disappointment of Ostlund and producer Erik Hemmendorff over the film’s failure to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. But it is their reaction, not mine, that is liveblogged, as they video’d their watching the nominations and then their post-announcement reaction. The joke — if it is indeed one — is contingent on you having seen Force Majeure. However, even if you haven’t, the relative banality of the video, which documents the paltry […]
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Sundance Trailer Watch: Michael Madsen’s The Visit
Michael Madsen’s “documentary from outer space” is at the top of our viewing list at Sundance this year. As it is described by production company NGF: THE VISIT is a documentary with comedy elements, and a philosophical exploration of our fear of strangers through the ultimate threat to our self-image: The discovery of Alien Intelligent Life. In Vienna lies the UN-city, with its late 1970’s architecture and its extra-territorial status not unlike a giant spacecraft that has landed in the middle of the civilized world. Inside this impressive institution representing our belief in humanity, resides the UN Office of Outer […]
