Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Love and Death: James White
Bereavement brackets James White. At the beginning of producer Josh Mond’s impressive directorial debut, we encounter the nearly catatonic eponymous character to the accompaniment of a drug-enhanced, inside-the-mind sound mix: Bursts of blasting synthesized music vie for dominance with smoother, softer fragments from Ray Charles and Billie Holiday. Sweaty, stinky, loaded, and dressed down in his signature raggedy sweatshirt and hoodie after a full night of clubbing, drinking, and pill popping, twentysomething James (Christopher Abbott, no longer the pretty, slender androgyne hooked on Allison Williams in Girls, but hefty and hirsute, hopefully for role construction) barrels past dressed-up adults in the hallway […]
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“To Make an Independent Movie is Delusional in a Way”: Alaska is a Drag‘s Shaz Bennett and Melanie Miller at US in Progress
US in Progress is a biannual event held in June during the Champs-Elysées Film Festival in Paris and in October during the American Film Festival in Wroclaw. It’s a five-year-old industry event that aims to strengthen transatlantic film collaborations and partnerships between European industry and emerging American filmmakers. The fifth US in Progress recently held in Wroclaw featured six films in various editing and post-production stages. The participants included: Mike Ott and Nathan Silver, Actor Martinez Shaz Bennett and Melanie Miller, Alaska is a Drag Zachary Shedd and Daniel Patrick Carbone, Americana Benjamin Kruger, It Had to Be You Joel […]
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The Plane and the Film: On Fears of Flying and Filmmaking
I believe there is a correlation between flying and filmmaking. Walter Murch makes reference to it in the documentary The Cutting Edge, but his coloration is different. He says that flight and cinema were invented in the same year, and then later he states that editing gave flight to cinema. While I agree with these correlations I think there is more, and it didn’t totally hit me until recently, as I shared with my students a documentary on Sally Mann and then a few days later boarded a plane to Copenhagen to attend CHP:DOX. In the documentary, Mann discusses a […]
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“I Feel Purple Today”: Director Andrea Sisson on She Does Podcast
Andrea Sisson is a multidisciplinary visual artist who creates films, photos and performance art pieces for the design, art and fashion industries. Her work has been shown online and offline, in places like the São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound and on NOWNESS, where she featured Sia’s choreographer Ryan Heffington. She’s the co-director of Everything Beautiful is Far Away, a pop art sci-fi feature currently in post-production, and a feature documentary I Send You This Place, which Andrea made as a 2010 Fulbright Design Fellow. In 2013, Andrea and her husband Pete Ohs were selected as a duo for […]
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It’s an Ice Age-Flavored Dilution of Your Legacy, Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie
The two opening logos for The Peanuts Movie say pretty much everything about the two differing sensibilities birthing Charles Schulz’s characters into the 3D CGI 21st century. First there’s the 20th Century Fox logo, its familiar fanfare rearranged to accommodate Schroeder’s extra piano flourishes in front of the spotlight beams. Then emerges Skrat the squirrel, mascot of Blue Sky Studios, the animation studio whose signature product is the Ice Age franchise. In line with its competitors at DreamWorks and Universal Animation, Blue Sky specializes in a very particular kind of animated family product, one in which heavy-handed lessons are blended with admirably caricatured […]
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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 […]
