Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Night Vision: Some Questions Posed by Lois Patiño’s Negative Image Night Without Distance
One of the best films I saw during this year’s NYFF cost nothing to access. Paired with Calum Walter’s (very strong) Terrestrial as part of a free program running on a loop for a day during the Projections weekend, Lois Patiño’s Night Without Distance is a hypnotic 21-minute experiment that immediately gets your attention for a very simple reason: all the images have been negative reversed, creating a whole new patina for what could otherwise be an overfamiliar landscape. The festival film world has seen a surplus of post-Apichatpong forest reveries, to which Night Without Distance restores a sense of mystery: the grass is purple, […]
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More Women, Less Men, and a Possible Future of Cinema
[Editor’s note: this is a guest post from director Gina Telaroli. Enough said.] Over the past few months I’ve been spending more time than normal at the gym, getting up at 5:30 AM and arriving there by 7:00 for yoga or a cardio/weights/TCM combo before heading to my job for the day. When I made the decision to kick it up a notch from my usual two days a week, my reasons were probably a New York City cocktail of anxiety, sublimation, and restlessness from having a day job that keeps me at a desk. What I realized after a […]
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On Not Seeing The Martian, 3D Lens Misprojection and the Wretchedness of the Multiplex
In 2011, Ty Burr wrote an article on the most common scourge of multiplex projection: seeing a film projected that is obviously far darker than it should be because a 2D film is being projected through a 3D lens. This is still happening, and I want to use this website to yell about it a little bit: this is a common problem that simply should not exist at this late date. The rise of digital projection is a cost-friendly win for both studios who can save money on printing and shipping prints and movie theaters, which theoretically no longer have to […]
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Look Into the Cut: Jessica Brillhart on Editing VR
From classical Hollywood continuity editing to Eisensteinian montage, from the quick jump cuts of the French New Wave to the even more accelerated and spatially destabilized editing of the Hollywood blockbuster, filmmakers from the dawn of cinema have had to embrace, even if only on a subconscious level, some theory of editing. What, then, of today’s nascent medium of Virtual Reality (VR)? Some are calling VR the next phase of cinema, but many VR works are more akin to video games, where cuts are hidden within approaching horizon lines. Or where, inelegantly, an edit is simply a transition from one […]
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Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Wes Anderson
The Rome Film Festival had a striking fresh look this year under the direction of its new artistic director Antonio Monda. The redesigned fest had a slew of hot films and top-tier tributes. But at the core of the new “festa,” or celebration of cinema, was a series of high-profile conversations with leaders in the arts. One of the main highlights of the fest was a conversation with Wes Anderson and novelist Donna Tartt in which they discussed their love of Italian films. While Tartt went in depth on her love of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, Max Ophuls’ Everybody’s Woman, and Paolo Sorrentino’s […]
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A Real-World Look at Magic Leap’s Augmented Reality
With backing from Google, Andreessen Horowitz, Qualcom and movie studio Legendary Entertainment — and an on-staff Chief Futurist in the form of science-fiction author Neal Stephenson — the somewhat mysterious Magic Leap is one of the most fascinating tech start-ups around. For the vision — not virtual reality but augmented reality — the company is going for, check out their startling home-page. For the current reality, check out the video above, which is a real-world demo of some galaxy clusters hovering over an ordinary workspace. For an explanation of why this simple video is more impressive than the rigged concept […]
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The Rasmussen Brothers on Shooting Their Microbudget Horror Film, The Inhabitants, Part Two
In this second part of the interview with brothers Michael and Shawn, they talk about directing their microbudget movie The Inhabitants, the music and sound mixing, and distribution for the movie. Filmmaker: With one of you running the camera and the other doing sound, how did you manage to handle directing at the same time? Michael: I think we’ve learned to multi-task, but it is hard. You are trying to make sure that everything is in focus and you’re pulling focus yourself, you’re doing all that stuff. The good thing is that Shawn is standing there with the boom, he can […]
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Diary of a Teenage Girl, Carol, Spotlight Top 25th Annual IFP Gotham Award Nominations
For its 25th anniversary year, the IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards served up an eclectic mix of nominees from films all over the budgetary and aesthetic map. The best picture nominees include two films budgeted well under $1 million — with one of them shot on an iPhone — and are split between titles consisting of star-driven casts and casts comprised of total newcomers. The Best Feature nominees announced today are Todd Haynes’s Carol; Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl; Josh and Benny Safdie’s Heaven Knows What; Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight; and Sean Baker’s Tangerine. Heller’s film, in addition, […]
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John Sayles’ New Project To Save the Man Set to Shoot Next Summer
Two pillars of the independent film movement are set to collaborate for the first time on To Save the Man, a boarding school movie set in 1890 at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The film tells the story of an Ojibwe boy named Antoine LaMere who is sent to Carlisle, where native boys and girls from all over the country have been brought to learn how to be white — and to reject their own cultures. Antoine uses his wits to survive, falls in love, and when the spiritual movement known as the Ghost Dance spreads on the western reservations, culminating […]
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“What Drives Me is an Interest… in Conveying to Other Women That We’re Not Crazy”: Ann Friedman on Journalism and Podcasting
Ann Friedman is a freelance journalist who lives in Los Angeles. She writes a weekly column about politics, culture and gender for New York Magazine. She also contributes to the Columbia Journalism Review, ELLE, The Guardian, Los Angeles Magazine, The Gentlewoman, among other publications. She’s the co-host of popular podcast Call Your Girlfriend and reviews books for The New Republic and Bookforum. Ann understands the importance of developing your own voice. She understands how our shifting landscape has changed the way people consume media, and how having a personal connection and point of view as an author, allows readers an […]
