Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“This Film was Just 11 Days”: DP Maz Makhani on The Guilty
When cinematographer Maz Makhani met director Antoine Fuqua on a Lil Wayne/Bruno Mars video a decade ago, the rapport was instant. “It was really clear to both of us that we had a very similar aesthetic,” said Makhani. “We both liked the same compositions, the same type of lighting. Antoine juxtaposes the real and raw and gritty with style and beauty, and that’s also my aesthetic.” That simpatico relationship went from a luxury to a necessity on the new film The Guilty, when COVID forced the pair to shoot the Netflix thriller without ever being on set together. Days before the […]
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Drugstore Cowboy, Straight Time and Misery: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Gus Van Sant’s 1989 masterpiece Drugstore Cowboy is one of the seminal films of its era, a movie both timeless and completely of its time; like the 1940s noir pictures it echoes and expands upon, it’s a weary reaction to its moment (in this case the age of Reagan and the first Bush) that taps into enduring truths about marginalized and desperate people yet does so with surprising humor and vitality. Matt Dillon gives one of the best performances of his career as the title character, an addict who feeds his habit not by buying or stealing drugs on the […]
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Replay Again: On Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand’s NYFF Short, 38
She’s just like a sexy girl. You know the type… goth, horror, self-cutting. She’s like J Lo/Nosferatu. Typical. The whole trend. She’s pinup-y but poseur, like wannabe, like big ass. She probably doesn’t really have a big ass but looks like it in the photos — That’s how the protagonist in Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand’s new film 38 drags the woman who slept with her husband. The film’s action takes place post-affair, centering around the scorned wife (played by Curie Choi) online stalking the “other woman” (played by Alicia Novella Vasquez), an obsessive screen-based fixation uncomfortably relatable to probably […]
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Wanda: Film from the Future
Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) Anna Backman Rogers 154 pages Punctum Books, 2021 One of the complaints made about feminist films of the 1970s and ’80s was that they were too experimental, too avant-garde, too elitist. They refused the pleasures of pop cinema. They skipped the well-told story and refused the escapism of character identification. And beauty? Forget it! Take Barbara Loden’s Wanda, from 1970: it’s a desolate portrait of what New Yorker critic Paulene Kael dubbed an “ignorant slut” in a film described by Jump Cut’s Chuck Kleinhans as “flat and opaque.” Indeed, Wanda, who is […]
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“We Set Out To Make a Documentary in Six Months, Get the Music Out There, Play at Sundance and It Ends Up Taking Us Six Years”: Directors Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz on Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
Filmmakers Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz were deep in Missouri, working in the prop department for Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, when they both became consumed with the legendary 1960s-era folk singer Karen Dalton. The artist, who died of AIDS in 1993, only 55 years old, was famously described by admirer and peer Bob Dylan as someone who “sang like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed.” Her hallowed status on the Greenwich Village scene that launched Dylan and many others never elevated her to mainstream success. Drug addiction and emotional turmoil took a heavy toll, yet Dalton left behind […]
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Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations: “Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films,” Love and Basketball and Masquerade
When screenwriter, director, producer, actor, novelist, stock options trader, playwright, musician, newspaper columnist and gallery artist Melvin Van Peebles died last week at the age of 89, he left behind one of the most varied and entertaining bodies of work in all of American (and French, thanks to his Parisian detour in the 1960s) arts and letters. He’s best known for his revolutionary 1971 feature Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but that classic—important as it is as a point of reference and inspiration for generations of independent filmmakers—only scratches the surface of Van Peebles’s genius and audacity. Thankfully, the Criterion Collection […]
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Sentient.Art.Film Announces Inaugural Line of Sight Fellows
Sentient.Art.Film, which describes itself as a “creative distribution initiative,” is in the middle of its second online repertory series, “My Sight is Lined with Visions” (online through January 22 of next year). Now, Sentient.Art.Film has announced the five artists and filmmakers chosen for its inaugural Line of Sight fellowship. From the press release: Unlike the project-based artist development programs that dominate the indie film landscape, the Line of Sight Fellowship provides intergenerational mentorship and community-building discussion space for participants to develop a collective understanding of historical radical filmmaking (particularly the practices of marginalized communities) and shared future imaginaries outside of […]
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Overwhelming the Circuit: How I Scored First-Class Distribution for My Microbudget Film
My film was never going to be an easy sell. It’s black and white, nearly three hours long and stars no recognizable name actors. That’s all without mentioning that it was shot on the rattiest of shoestrings and, as a story, it’s a rather strange ride. Yet it wound up with dozens of positive (and sometimes rave) reviews from established critics, and a distribution deal with Kino Lorber, one of the best—if not the best—arthouse distributors in the country, and all without a publicist or sales agent. To invoke the Talking Heads: “Well, how did I get here?” I have […]
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Watch: Short Films from the 2021 Filmfort Film Festival
Filmmaker is very happy to partner with the Filmfort Film Festival for its 2021 Filmfort Online Showcase. These films are available to watch here, free, on the site through Sunday, September 27. Check out the rest of the lineup at Filmfort and keep up via social @filmfortfest and #filmfort2021 #filmfortweekend. Enjoy! Changing Landscapes: Isle of Eigg dir. Aaron Farley, John Schlue, Alexander Falk USA 29 mins Do you see what I see? from Brad Abrahams on Vimeo. Do You See What I See? dir. Brad Abrahams USA, 12 mins Here you go: Halpate dir. Adam Khalil & Adam Piron USA, […]
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Remembering Melvin Van Peebles, 1932 – 2021
Melvin Van Peebles, revolutionary independent filmmaker whose credits include Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Watermelon Man and La Permission, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89. On this sad occasion we’re reprinting Brandon Harris’s profile of Van Peebles from Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2008 issue. It isn’t the first thing you notice when you walk into Melvin Van Peebles’s Columbus Circle South digs, but very few items within his intimate, eclectically appointed apartment — one that sports the back end of a VW bus jutting out of one parlor wall and a giant sculpture of a hot dog near the window — speak […]
