Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Graphic Textuality: Manoel de Oliveira’s Tetralogy of Frustrated Love
Regardless of what I’m about to say (which is basically that I loved Benilde but the other films in this series not so much), Lincoln Center’s four-day mini-series on Manoel de Oliveira is a major and welcome event. de Oliveira has long been feted by arthouse fiends as one of cinema’s untouchable masters and most rigorous thinkers, but seeing his work is not easy. The prints Lincoln Center is showing are impeccable and gorgeous; if you’re going to dive in, this is the way to do it. I don’t know who coined the phrase “tetralogy of frustrated love,” but the movies — 1972’s Past […]
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“Treat Me Like a Man”: K8 Hardy on Outfitumentary
“I wanna be where the boys are…” sings K8 Hardy as she makes her way to the final TigerPro discussion at the 2016 Rotterdam International Film Festival. She’s a panelist in a 90-minute panel discussion, “Commodifying the Queer,” and her attitude walking in is guarded. “Lately, my perspective is just, you know, treat me like a man,” she sighs before the panel begins. Gender, feminism, queerness, and identity are all subjects in Hardy’s work as an artist and filmmaker, but being “called upon as the radical feminist lesbian,” as she says once the panel begins, is stifling. “It’s so minimizing […]
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~64 Films Released in 2015 Shot on 35mm
When rounding up all the 2014 movies (as defined by the US release calendar) that I could confirm had been at least partially shot on 35mm, the tally was 39; after posting, I caught a few titles that I’d overlooked, but the number basically stayed the same. In researching this year’s follow-up edition, I was shocked to see that figure increase significantly to somewhere around 64 (I’ll get into the qualifiers in a bit). Was I really sloppy in doing my homework last year, or is the number of productions shot on 35mm increasing? It’s hard to tell, and there’s all kinds of asterisks attached. […]
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“I Never Show the Script to the Actors”: Kazik Radwanski on How Heavy This Hammer
With his second feature, How Heavy This Hammer, Toronto-based filmmaker Kazik Radwanski tackles the trope of the seemingly soulless main-child with a formal intensity that is at once casual and rigorous, and all the more unnerving as a result. Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem) is unable to find anything of value in his life beyond the mental and emotional respite of fantasy computer games and the brutish diversions of rugby matches. His wife and two sons are nothing more than grating obligations, whose needs nearly drive him to the brink of an all out crisis. Radwanski renders these quotidian frustrations – […]
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Cracking Eggs: Looking for Financial Stability Outside of Independent Film
Though Elijah Wood beat us in the Moon Pie eating contest (five pies in two minutes), we took home the prize for best feature. We’d just premiered our second film, Tex Montana Will Survive!, at the Chattanooga Film Festival, where we stood in the hallway — too nervous to sit within the crowd — waiting to hear if anyone would actually laugh. The first joke lands with an uproar they could probably hear over the bombast of Furious 7 in the theater adjacent. Our fears were thankfully unfounded. Tex Montana was as funny as we thought it was… and we […]
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Can She Pull It Off? (Or, How to Hire Women Directors)
When I started working in film in 1995, there weren’t many women in the business overall, and women directors were almost unheard of. Twenty years later, I’m still here, but, despite gains in a variety of other fields from pharmacy to law, women directors are not getting any more work than they did when I was starting out. During the last several months we have enjoyed what you might call a consciousness-raising moment in show business, with a variety of folks sounding the alarm all over social media about Hollywood’s sustained resistance to bringing in new faces. (For example, check […]
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The Data Says, “We Have a Problem”: Finding Solutions for Film’s Problems with Diversity
Since the publication of “The Data Says, ‘We Have a Problem’” in our Winter print edition, the conversation around diversity and the movie business has become louder and even more urgent. As more and more studies are published detailing Hollywood’s biased hiring practices and hashtags like #oscarssowhite explode across social media, now, during the lead-up to the Academy Awards, is an apt time to unlock from our paywall this article by Esther Robinson. It cogently articulates the reasons why all of us must care about these issues before it then goes on to offer actual and practical solutions that we […]
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“Let Me Work it Out”: Four Takeaways from Veep Writer Alexis Wilkinson on She Does Podcast
Alexis Wilkinson went from being the first black woman President of Harvard’s acclaimed humor publication, The Lampoon, to writing for HBO’s hit comedy series, Veep. She’s become an outspoken public figure and writer–with work featured in Slate, Opening Ceremony and TIME–but as we know, big victories such as these don’t come without a lot of work, a few disruptions and some twists and turns in the road. In this episode of She Does podcast, Alexis recalls her experiences of “comping” or trying out for The Lampoon multiple times, finding her place in the middle of an elitist institution, losing her […]
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Time Travel via Production Design: Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart
Mountains May Depart begins as a love triangle, whose three connecting lines separate and recross across three segments in 1999 (two years after Jia Zhangke’s debut feature), 2014 and 2025. The 1999 opening brings us back to Jia’s native Shanxi, whose streets by now look very, very familiar to anyone who’s kept up with his work. As Tao, the woman at the center of the love triangle, Jia’s professional/personal partner Zhao Tao is introduced in period peasant style: strategically layered brightly lined sweaters, nothing too form-fitting or fashion-forward, hair straight and uncomplicatedly pulled-back. In 2014 — following marriage and divorce to wealthy Zhang Jinsheng (Yi Zhang) — she’s […]
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Creating a Promotional Video for the Kindle Best-Selling Sci-Fi Series Post-Human
David Simpson is the author of the bestselling sci-fi novel series Post-Human. There are currently five books in the series, with two more planned. Born in Ireland, he has lived in Vancouver since 2000 and believed he would end up a teacher of English until he discovered self-publishing on the Kindle. Having had success self-publishing, he hoped to create a promotional video for the series that might lead to the production of an actual movie. The resulting video represents what Simpson thinks the opening sequence of a Post-Human film might look like. The truly fascinating part of the story is […]
