Like everyone, on Wednesday I read Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian report, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.” I was outraged, but I can’t say I was shocked. I’ve known for some time —- since I was a teenager — that the NSA routinely scoops up all international communications. More to the point, I’d already written this info myself, on this site. In covering filmmaker Laura Poitras’s event at the Whitney Biennial last year, I described the presentation of her guest speaker, Bill Binney, the NSA whistleblower whose warnings have alarmed privacy advocates for years. I wrote: “Slides […]
The new horror anthology film V/H/S/2–once you’ve shaken the blood from your hair–leaves behind some striking images and moments. Oh the lowly horror genre: the place where there is more cinematic risk-taking and experimentation happening than in the likes of “serious” films such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master or Terrence Malick’s pulseless To the Wonder. There is, in particular, one short sequence in V/H/S/2 where the experiments with camera narration are revealing not only in terms of the potential uses of narrative point of view but also in terms of how we process visual information. It’s easier to think […]
Among the discoveries at the 2012 edition of CPH:DOX was Brooklyn-based Brent Chesanek’s City World, which is part magic realist children’s adventure tale and part austere landscape documentary. Over precisely framed tableaux shot in his hometown of Orlando, FL — nearly all of them completely absent of people — Chesanek drapes the narration of a young boy mulling the breakup of his family and subsequent move, with his father, to this Southern city. As in another recent film, General Orders No. 9, contemporary landscape photography is presented as historical residue meant to be both meditated on and explicated. Drained of […]
Ten features shot by the late cinematographer Harris Savides are included in “Harris Savides: Visual Poet,” a series opening at MoMA today. Writes curator Anne Morra: A Savides shot is often characterized by a sensitivity to design and the striking mutability of light, and a special attention to the actor’s place in the composition. The films in this special tribute represent the wide range of his work, and the many directors who chose his camera to reflect their most personal stories. The series opens with Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, which was the film concentrated on by Zach Wigon in Filmmaker‘s remembrance […]
In the debut piece in this column, Letters from Blocked Filmmakers, Drew Whitmire described a relentless perfectionism that led to him continually begin and begin again what was meant to be his debut feature — a 14-year process that resulted in only 15 minutes of footage. In today’s installment, Gregory Austin McConnell describes a related behavior: a continual re-envisioning of his feature as he ages and his own life circumstances change. Characters, storylines and tone all mutate as McConnell’s teenage dreams give way to adult realities — realities that bring not only creative change but also family responsibilities that make […]
Ben Pender-Cudlip is a Boston-based documentary filmmaker who recently switched from shooting with a DSLR to the Canon C100. His first project shot on the C100 was a short that included a segment on ice climbing. In this second part of our interview with him about switching to the C100, Pender-Cudlip talks about the project and what it was like to use the camera in these conditions. Filmmaker: How did this project come about? Pender-Cudlip: It’s a film for a woman named Lauren Schaad. She approached me about shooting a TV pilot. She was looking to get into reality TV […]
While editing The Unbearable Lightness of Being in France, Academy Award-winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch came across a reference to Italian writer Curzio Malaparte’s description of horses being suddenly flash frozen in Lake Ladoga during the siege of Leningrad. He became intrigued by the startling image, and tracked down Malaparte’s 1944 novel Kaputt, the book the image came from. Over time Murch, best known for his work on films such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, read all of the obscure Italian writer’s translated writings, then brushed up on his Italian to read untranslated work. He eventually […]
Few directors out of Japan are as controversial as Takashi Miike, a man who has been surprising audiences for years with anything from stomach-wrenching horror films to slick yakuza films to happy-go-lucky children’s films, with no less than 70 directing credits to his name. This year at Cannes he surprised fans perhaps more than ever before by premiering his most mainstream film yet, a smart thriller that seems to be begging for a Hollywood remake. Shield of Straw follows a team of security police who must transport a psychopathic killer across Japan to Tokyo for trial. The criminal in question […]
Ben Pender-Cudlip is a Boston based filmmaker who specializes in nonfiction work. His short film Sanjiban, which chronicles the passing of filmmaker Sanjiban Sellew, premiered at Hot Docs last year. Ben recently switched from shooting on a DSLR to the Canon C100. In part one of this interview he talks about his experience switching to the C100, and in part two he talks about the first major project shot with the camera: documenting an ice-climbing expedition. Filmmaker: What were you using prior to getting the C100? Pender-Cudlip: Before the C100 I was using a Canon 60D, which is sort of […]
As of January 2013, comScore reports that 129.4 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, accounting for more than half (55%) of mobile devices. A recent study by Harris Interactive for Telly, a social networking video service, conducted with 2,000 smartphone users projects that 78 million mobile device owners watch videos on their smartphones. One of the study’s surprise findings is that Apple’s iOS devices do not dominate the mobile video viewing market. Rather, Android devices are viewed by nearly one-half (46%), while Apple captured only a little more then a third (36%) while a little more than a tenth […]