Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Moebius Unravelled: Magic Words (Breaking a Spell)
Inside out … Upside down … And round and round “Upside Down” (1980), Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards The wildly suggestive lyrics are sexy all right, but they also suit the vertiginous push and pull (sorry) of Mercedes Moncada’s intense cinematic duel between a) the history and legacy of the Sandinista movement in her native Nicaragua; and b) her recollection of the heavy emotional baggage she has carried since its inception. The description of a political event or a collective mood may trigger remembrance; inversely, affective recall might precipitate concrete reconstruction. The logic of memory rules, so that the order […]
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The One-Cam: Under the Skin’s Customized CCD Camera
Eventually we’ll stop posting about Under The Skin but today is not that day. Last month, I ran a featurette from A24 about the film’s guerrilla style execution. The production rigged Johansson’s vehicle with eight hidden cameras, recording her improvised interactions with any given passerby in real time and with maximum coverage. Now, we have yet another featurette that gets into the specifications of said cameras, called “One-Cams,” which were developed especially for the occasion. For the van sequences, the VFX studio One of Us rigged a CCD camera (about the size of a GoPro) with anamorphic super 16 lenses. Though the rest of the […]
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IFFBoston: Five Questions for Fight Church Director and Editor Bryan Storkel
The documentary Fight Church looks at the intersection of Christianity and mixed martial arts, and how pastors training fighters can reconcile their faith with a violent sport. The film premiered at IFFBoston. Co-director and editor Bryan Storkel previously directed and edited Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians, which examined a devout blackjack team. Filmmaker: How did you get into filmmaking? Storkel: I went to school for media, but I never made my own stuff until after I really became a fan of documentaries. I started watching documentaries and going to film festivals. I think I went to […]
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4 Observations from a First Time NAB Experience
This was my first year at the gear-head mecca of NAB. It definitely did not disappoint, and I had a blast attending, checking out new gear (which you can see a list of here) and finally meeting some people I’ve only had contact with in the online world. Here are some of my overall impressions about what I saw (or didn’t see) on the showroom floor and the conference itself. Very Few Surprises and Not a Whole Lot of New 4K The #1 question I keep getting asked is, “What was the best thing you saw?” And I really don’t […]
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DJ /Rupture Releases a Mixtape Tied to Harvard Friend Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing
Yesterday Pitchfork Media posted a downloadable mixtape created as a “musical response” to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing by the rightly well-regarded DJ /Rupture. Stage Boundary Songs is a terrific 53 minutes and 50 seconds of (largely) Indonesian music old and new interspersed with poetry by Wiji Thukul, a poet believed to have been “disappeared” by the Suharto regime in 1998. Last December, Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) wrote a brief blog post cheering on Killing, noting that acclaim for the film was “particularly delightful” because “Josh and I went to college together, and for a year or two we […]
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“It’s Never All In The Script:” Dennis Hopper on Nicholas Ray and Rebel Without a Cause
“I’m the best damn filmmaker in the world who has never made one entirely good, entirely satisfactory film,” so said Nicholas Ray, according to his friend Dennis Hopper. In a bit for Turner Classic Movies in 1997, Hopper reflected on Ray’s work and their relationship, which began during his debut role as Goon in the filmmaker’s iconic Rebel Without a Cause. At the time, Hopper remembers thinking “that James Dean was directing [the] film, he had so much input in his character and lines, even deciding how a scene would be shot,” later to realize that Ray “gave Dean the freedom he needed…[he] […]
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Under The Skin and the Problem with the Adjective “Kubrickian”
As unclassifiable and startlingly original as promised, Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin has an obvious experiential agenda. Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed alien rides around Glasgow, picking up men, bringing them back to her pad for sex, then harvesting them for meat. As sound designer Johnnie Burn told Ashley Clark in an interview Filmmaker published earlier this month, the intensely fussed-over sound mix literally took years. In the mall, at the club or on the street, different snatches of ambient sound compete for attention, with normally unexamined noises briefly coming to the fore. The movie is totally successful at defamiliarizing ordinary actions […]
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Has Twitter Displaced the DVD Commentary Track?
At Medium, tech pundit and DVD commentary track lover M.G. Siegler has a good idea for Twitter: make Twitter live chats and comment streams replayable. Citing the fact that the great DVD commentary tracks of yore have gone by the wayside in today’s downloadable and streamed world (really, Apple, would it be so hard to provide a Criterion commentary track as an extra download?), Siegler suggests that director chats and even fan talkback be stored and then able to be replayed by new viewers watching films on their own schedules. Inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s live tweeting during his CNN Parts […]
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In Sorrow and Anger
Zack Parker’s immaculately twisty and disturbing Proxy is set in the filmmaker’s hometown of Richmond, Ind., where Parker has lived, worked and cultivated a base of crew, performers and investors for most of his adult life. It’s a film that stays with you even as it feels both familiar and remote. At once homespun and remarkably deft, it demonstrates an ambitious director who, in a place without obvious networks of filmmaking support, has figured out how to make remarkably accomplished work for peanuts in that now much sought-after “elevated genre” space. A scene of shocking brutality opens Parker’s fourth feature. […]
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“You’re Really Just Talking to Yourself:” Beau Willimon, David Simon, Nate Silver and Anne Thompson on Audiences and Data
“There are two asteroids corrupting media,” bellowed radio host John Hockenberry at the start of the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Stories By Numbers” panel last week. The first, viewing patterns; the second, data streams. “Narratives,” he opined, pacing before Beau Willimon, David Simon, Nate Silver and Anne Thompson, “are becoming indistinguishable from vices.” It’s no secret that Netflix’s limitless entree into consumer preferences has informed much of its success in the realm of original content. Hockenberry noted that big brother Sarandos can scrutinize viewing behavior down to its utter minutiae: “what people skip over, what sex scenes they replay, is all fed back into […]
