Filmmaker Videos
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How to Borrow from Yourself: This Smart Video Reveals Martin Scorsese’s Enduring Style
If you’re going to borrow, borrow from yourself… For an example, check out this well-done video by Milad Tangshir that finds visual, editing and storytelling parallels between Martin Scorsese’s 1964 student short, It’s Not You, Murray and his most recent film, The Wolf of Wall Street.
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Watch: Why Are Christmas Films So Bleak?
Five days behind schedule, here’s a great Criterion essay from Michael Koresky on the bleak sentiments behind some of cinema’s classic and overlooked Christmastide tales. Suggesting the holiday’s proximity to winter solstice, and thus, the death of light, Koresky explores the backwards tendency to characterize a time of joy and harmony with mortality, existential crises, and dysfunction in Mon Oncle Antoine, My Night at Maud’s and A Christmas Tale. I’d scarcely be the first to suggest how peculiar it is that the quintessential all-ages Christmas film, It’s A Wonderful Life, is centrally preoccupied with suicide.
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Watch: Honesty, Directed by Mark Pellington
Feature and music video director Mark Pellington has released via Nowness a short film, Honesty, that adapts the words of poet David Whyte. Here’s Pellington: “The words written by David blew me away. They don’t preach but they speak their own beliefs in a very strong and challenging way. Each person was cast randomly having no knowledge of the essay. They were only asked if they had experienced loss. They entered the room four at a time and were asked to simply walk forward, stand in front of the camera and listen to the soundtrack–the poem read by David accompanied […]
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Watch: What Makes a Video Essay Great?
As our attention spans grow increasingly shorter in the age of information, there appears to be a growing audience for a form of film criticism beyond the written word. More precisely, for the video essay. Kevin B. Lee, the video essayist at Fandor, provides a nice inquiry into the state of the video essay today in his year-end recap, spotlighting the efforts of Tony Zhou and ::kogonada, while musing on what viewers respond to in their works: decisive analysis, politics, or the occasional cinephile fetishism. Further, Lee considers how even a narration-less supercut can adhere to its maker’s perspective based […]
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Guinevere Turner and Rose Troche Interview Jenni Olson about Writing, Archival and the Sundance-bound The Royal Road
At this past summer’s Frameline festival, where their Go Fish received its 20th Anniversary Screening, actress and writer Guinevere Turner and director Rose Troche interview filmmaker Jenni Olson about her Sundance-bound documentary, The Royal Road. Topics include Olson’s influences (including Chantal Akerman, James and Sadie Benning), archival documentary practice, urban landscapes and shooting on 16mm film. Check it out above.
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A Best Cinematography of 2014 Supercut
Here’s an elegant and understated supercut from Jacob T. Swinney, scored with a meditative cue by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Alongside some of the big Hollywood titles — Interstellar, Godzilla — are a number of indies and foreign films like Blue Ruin, Ida and White Bird in a Blizzard. Check it out.
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Watch: Sean Price Williams’ Frantic Fran’s Jewish Stuff
Last week, Robert Greene posted a “virtually unseen” mid-length documentary, shot and edited by Sean Price Williams in 1998, entitled Frantic Fran’s Jewish Stuff. Three years before the cinematographer’s first official credit, and nine years before his quasi-breakthrough with Frownland, the 16mm film presages the close-ups and striking compositions that earned Williams some of the best notices of his career with this year’s Listen Up Philip. And it’s pretty entertaining, as well.
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Short Film: Bernardo Britto’s Yearbook
Last week, Scott posted Dustin Guy Defa’s Person to Person, one of the first short films to be featured on The New Yorker‘s new shorts catalogue. Another 25 New Face, Bernardo Britto, has now joined the site with his Sundance Jury Prize-winning Yearbook. The animated film imagines a man who has been tasked with cataloguing the world’s history before an alien-sent missile destroys earth. It’s poignant, funny and quietly heartbreaking in equal measure.
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Watch: “Getting Stoned with Caveh,” with Guest Alex Karpovsky
You may recall that a decade ago, the ever-independent-minded Caveh Zahedi (A Little Stiff, I Am a Sex Addict) tried to launch a series, “Tripping with Caveh,” in which he and a guest would take hallucinogens and enjoy themselves. That didn’t pan out, for reasons Zahedi explains in this essay, so now he’s launched a lower-stakes version. You can get stoned with Caveh or not, and in this first installment Girls regular/Red Flag director Alex Karpovsky chooses to indulge. Not without a little prodding: “OK, so I’m gonna start getting stoned,” Zahedi says up top. “Maybe I’ll just wait a […]
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Borscht Short Film: Sea Devil, Directed by Dean C. Marcial and Brett Potter
As Borscht 9 — Miami’s delirious cinematic fete comprising afternoons spent in the middle of the ocean, machete fencing and bike rides to the multiverse — hits its midpoint, Borscht Corporation releases to Filmmaker one of its recent short films, Sea Devil. Sea Devil, directed by by Dean C. Marcial and Brett Potter of Calavera Films, was screened in work-in-progress form at Borscht 8 and now it’s having its online premiere here on the site. Winner of the Bronze Audience Award at Fantasia 2014, Sea Devil is the story of a fisherman smuggling Cuban immigrants into Miami, a mysterious stranger […]
