There’s a case to be made for viewing any old film in the theater, but few seem to demand the widescreen format like the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. Every frame of L’Avventura, the first entry in his monumental early 60s trilogy, is unusual and breathtaking in its construction. In the above video, fellow filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad) discusses how Antonioni’s rejection of meaning and a closed-circuit narrative defined the Modernist aesthetic. Positioning him against the plot heavy Hitchcock, Robbe-Grillet notes the elusiveness of Antonioni’s intentions: “What you see is very clear, but the meaning of the images in constantly […]
For our Winter issue, experimental documentarian Godfrey Reggio, along with his producer Jon Kane and d.p. Trish Govani, explored the significance of selected stills from his latest film Visitors. A revealing exercise for any filmmaker, Reggio’s excerpts carry far more weight than they would for most: the eight shots account for more than 10% of the film. Comprised of only 74, 4K black and white shots, the Philip Glass-scored Visitors is a meditation on the act of spectatorship, as the viewer unflinchingly gazes at 70+ second takes of faces, swamplands, disembodied hands and the moon. In the above video for The Creators Project, Reggio extols […]
For a second time, Google is attempting to pitch a compression format as the replacement for an H.26X compressor. They tried to do it three years ago for HD video when they pitched VP8 as a replacement for H.264 and had little success. Now they’re back with a new angle: VP9 is the format for 4K, and they are putting it up against H.265, the new 4K compressor that is also referred to as HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding). Should you care? Compression codecs can be fascinating, frustrating and their naming confusing. For example, everyone’s heard of H.264 and AVCHD, […]
Ever wonder what a data visualization of every file transfer bouncing around the internet airwaves might look like? The Pirate Cinema, from artist Nicolas Maigret, has rendered something close to it. Described as a “cinematic collage generated by peer-to-peer network activity,” the project is comprised of arbitrary clips from real time BitTorrent file sharing. Users IP addresses and countries are displayed in the upper corners, turning purportedly private transactions public. For Maigret, “this horizontal network architecture…recalls the utopian vision of openness and free appropriation that arose in the early days of the Internet.”
This is kinda brilliant: a mashup by Steven Soderbergh of Hitchcock’s original Psycho and (now rendered in black and white) Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake from 1998. Soderbergh is retired from feature filmmaking, but his Cinemax miniseries The Knick is coming soon and, well, this is presumably something he just threw together in his spare time to stave off boredom!
Playwright, actor, director and screenwriter Tom Noonan is currently debuting his latest play, The Shape of Something Squashed, at New York’s Paradise Factory, but it might never have been written if it weren’t for an invitation to meet with Jennifer Lawrence one day. I’ll let Noonan tell the story below, but suffice to say that the bent emotions and darkly comic introspection that near-encounter produced are the stuff Noonan has memorably mined in his writing and directing work for years. Noonan’s film roles include singular turns in Heat, Mystery Train, Manhunter, Synecdoche, New York, and House of the Devil, to […]
Responding to recent articles in the New York Times and Salon, filmmaker Kentucker Audley has launched a Change.org petition asking “mediocre” independent filmmakers to stop making films. The articles blame overproduction and too many films achieving theatrical release for the economic and artistic issues facing independent film. For the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis — who herself asked distributors to “stop buying so many films” at Sundance — too many films in theaters produces a noise drowning out the virtues of the fewer good movies that deserve critical and public support. For Beanie Barnes at Salon, overproduction has led to […]
In today’s treacherous distribution environment, should filmmakers seize control of their destinies by controlling the copyright of their films? That’s the question posed — and answered in the affirmative — by Chris Dorr in a recent blog post, “We Own Our Own Copyrights.” But this argument isn’t one that’s just arisen in the digital era, and, I’d argue, Dorr’s conclusion isn’t one that filmmakers should automatically reach. Owning copyright and tending to a film’s needs over the course of a lifetime is a choice some filmmakers will benefit by making. Others will be better off taking a fee for their […]
Legendary film editor, sound designer, writer, translator, amateur astronomer and director Walter Murch needs no introduction. (Oh, what the hell, his credits include The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tetro and more.) In addition to being a great filmmaker, he’s also a great teacher and talker about film. Here, at the 2013 Sheffield Doc Fest, where he accompanied the doc, Particle Fever, he gives an inspiring speech on film editing, technology, audience expectation, how film grammar is changing with digital technologies, and physics. Don’t miss this.
Want horror-movie makeup tips from an Oscar-winning legend? Here, Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London, Videodrome, Men in Black) offers DIY tips while demonstrating how to make “Miss Shock,” a gruesome character created by Bob Burns in 1959 for a live event with The Tingler director William Castle. In this fast-paced 15-minute clip, Baker starts off by making a mold of his daughter’s face and then moves on to the artistic detail work he’s revered for. (Hat tip: Mutiny Co.)