Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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She Said, She Said: The Galapagos Affair, Satan Came to Eden
Suffering is something to endure and learn from, the compact, muscular German expat physician Friedrich Ritter tells his MS-afflicted mistress and fellow exile Dore Strauch in Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller’s painstakingly executed, strangely fascinating documentary The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden. The silent scene is taken from old footage left by a handful of German and Germanic settlers who attempted to eke out an existence far outside their comfort zones on the tiny, inhospitable Galapagos island of Floreana during the period of 1929-34. Strauch had dared to complain that the DIY lifestyle was too tough for her to […]
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Born Out Of Necessity: Monica Peña on Ectotherms and its Immediate Post-Fest Streaming Launch
For most filmmakers, having a feature on the festival circuit is bookended by anticipation. There’s the nervous feeling that no one will ever agree to show the film, then the nervous feeling that the screening will go over terribly, followed by the anxiety-addled wait to hear from a distributor that your film will make it out of the enclave and into the public. For her debut feature, Ectotherms, a no-budget take on four Miami teenagers ambling across their sun-blasted landscape on the way to a black metal concert, Monica Peña decided not to make waiting an option. After the film’s […]
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R.I.P., Richard Brick, 1945 – 2014
Richard Brick — producer, Columbia University film professor and the first ever Commissioner of New York City’s Office of Film, Television and Broadcasting — died yesterday at his New York home of cancer. A longtime member of the independent film community, Brick began his career in the early 1970s, when he worked in various capacities, including as director and sound recordist, on documentary shorts. He production managed a number of documentaries, television productions and feature films, including Silkwood, Places in the Heart and Sweet and Lowdown. In the ’80s and ’90s he became an active producer, with such producing and […]
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The Limits of Supernatural Subversions: Under The Skin and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
The following essay contains spoilers. As far as premises go, Under The Skin’s most alluring intimation of Scarlett Johansson rolling around the slick Glasgow streets, seducing men left and right, is actually not as titillating as it sounds – unless you’re one for inverted gender plays (not for nothing is she perched behind the wheel of a predatorial white van). Each would-be sex scene instead succumbs to alien interpretation. As smoothly as she rolls down the car window, inquiring after irrelevant directions, Johansson’s Laura takes the man in question not to bed, but to another dimension. She moves backward on […]
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“Groundbreaking Work Often Sits at the Boundaries of Technology”: Sound Designer Johnnie Burn on Under The Skin
It’s unlikely many films released this year will lean as heavily on sound design for their overall impact as Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name. The director’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s Birth is a warped, haunting melange of sci-fi and cinema vérité which reinvents Hollywood siren Scarlett Johansson as a blank-eyed, cold-hearted alien with a cut-glass English accent. The alien shores up in the Scottish highlands and embarks on an implacable quest which involves cruising around in a white van, looking for hapless local men to “seduce.” Under The […]
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The Lost Children Experience at FilmGateMiami 2014
This is a brief post-mortem on my last interactive live event at a small interactive festival in Miami called FilmGate 2014. Over the past year, I have been focusing on a few core principles in my work. These are not rules, but questions I return to when making a piece of immersive/interactive work. Rules/audience agency. When we go to a movie, we know the rules. Sit in the dark, eat our popcorn, watch. When designing a new experience, it’s important to communicate the rules to your audience so they can let go of their minds and get immersed. Along with this, […]
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Watch: Cinematography In The 21st Century
Emmanuel Lubezki, Christopher Doyle, Bruno Delbonnel, Roger Deakins, Robert Richardson, Janusz Kaminski all in one place? This video, strewn together by editor Erick Lee, features clips from the work of internationally illustrious cinematographers over the past decade. Interestingly, there is very little handheld to be had, with most of the stylized shots achieved on a dolly.
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FCC Closed Captioning Rules Threaten to Remove Movie Titles from Digital Storefronts
Beginning today, scores of movies are threatened with removal from digital download and streaming sites, including iTunes, due to new FCC closed captioning regulations. The rules, mandated in a January, 2012 revision of 2010’s Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, require newly acquired movie and other content shown on the internet to be closed captioned if this content was shown on television with closed captioning after September 30, 2012. The rule also affects library titles that are currently or will be shown on television with captions as well as new acquisitions that will be captioned on television in the […]
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Not Finding Vivian Maier
So you say you’re an artist, but you’re not publishing your stuff? You’re a photographer, but you’re not on Instagram? You’re a writer, but you’re not on Twitter? Well look out buddy, because that just won’t stand. There’s gonna be a documentary about you. I mean what kind of person doesn’t throw themselves at the feet of fame? What kinda weirdo does art for the sake of art and not public adoration? This is too baffling, too inscrutable, too foreign a concept. Not only are we gonna make a movie about you, but we’re also going to dredge up every […]
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Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Doron Weber on Science on Screen and Live Distribution
Last month, I wrote an article about the rise in live supplements to theatrical screenings. Turns out, this is hardly a novel idea. Coolidge Corner, an arthouse theater smack dab in the Boston suburb of Brookline, has been merging the two formats for nine years running. With the help of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Coolidge spearheaded the Science on Screen series, in which selected films are programmed alongside specialists who contextualize the narrative within science and technology, which is not necessarily as straightforward as it sounds. Take, for instance, a recent screening of 8 Mile, which was followed by professors […]
