Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations: Jakob’s Wife, Visions of Eight, The 5th Man, Who Will Start Another Fire and Alias Jesse James
Barbara Crampton has been acting in horror movies for almost 40 years now and has classics like Body Double and Re-animator on her resume (alongside more recent cult favorites such as Lords of Salem and You’re Next), but she’s never had a part that utilizes her talents as thrillingly as the title role in Jakob’s Wife. An insightful meditation on the precarious difficulties of maintaining a marriage that also manages to deliver the horror movie goods with terrifying and often hilarious gusto (imagine Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage crossed with early Sam Raimi), Jakob’s Wife tells the story of […]
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Take Two: A Movie About Heartbreak, Helping and Vulnerability
After the spiritual teacher Ram Dass suffered a stroke in 1997, he said, “Up until now my life has been dedicated to helping people. I even wrote a book called How Can I Help?, but now I’m confined to a wheelchair and my life is filled with people taking care of me. If I wrote it now it would have to be called, How Can You Help Me?” I love Ram Dass for his brilliance and vulnerability. His teachings on acceptance and loving awareness have been a lifesaver for me and so many. But in the wake of his stroke, it […]
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Parody Pilgrimmage: Five Notes on Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity Hallway
1. After 15 months in pandemic NYC, with no trip out of town longer than six hours during that time, it was imperative to leave and go elsewhere—anywhere—as soon as possible. The easiest way to do this was to pay a visit to James Hansen, a friend who teaches experimental film at Alfred University, logically located in the previously-unknown-to-me town of Alfred, NY. Getting to Alfred, however, is not super simple, so I needed a ride to get from the halfway point of Binghamton to my final destination. Because I try to maximize the value of every visit I take, it […]
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Digital Fragments: Using NFTs and the Blockchain to Aid in the Creation of New Media Work
Origin Story The pilot announces that we’ll soon be pushing back on the tarmac, and I start to spread out. Just then, bursts of laughter cut through the air, and the expectation of a spacious flight to Los Angeles rapidly disappears. It’s 2018, and I watch as a pair of 20-somethings, who look as if they’ve just stepped out of a panel at Comic-Con, come bounding down the aisle. Both are wearing cat ears attached to a plastic arch that rests on their heads. Settling into the two empty seats by my side, they are animated, their chatter is infectious. […]
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Getting Started with NFTs on Hic Et Nunc
Hic Et Nunc (HEN) launched in March. The site and interface have been growing rapidly and are still evolving. Here is how to get started on the platform. Setting up a wallet Your wallet will hold your cryptocurrency and enable you to buy and sell. It’s also how you connect, or log in, to HEN. We’ll focus on the Temple and Kukai wallets, which at different points have been recommended by HEN. These options store your data locally on your computer. When setting up a wallet, you’ll be presented with an automatically generated 8- to 12-word seed phrase. You’ll need […]
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A Musuem of One’s Own: Jessica Oreck on Her Office of Collecting and Design
Drawers of marbles and buttons, a wall of picture frames with nothing in them, empty matchboxes, broken dice and a tray of antique doll eyes, irises fixed in hopeful stares beneath the swoop of their curled eyelashes. These are just a few of the uncanny items you’ll find in the Office of Collecting and Design, a museum full of, in the words of its creator, filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, One Man Dies a Million Times), “lost and forgotten objects, things that people don’t think are valuable but have too much charm to throw away. These are things […]
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Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Presents “The Creative Power of BIPOC Editors”
“If I could log in right now I would,” Dawn Porter raved in one of the many enthusiastic testimonials sprinkled throughout Full Frame’s engaging “The Creative Power of BIPOC Editors,” an online launch/celebration of the BIPOC Documentary Editors Database. Expertly edited (surprise surprise), the swift-moving event (approximately an hour long) took place on June 3rd but is still well worth checking out. Whether you’re a veteran producer looking to hire beyond the usual (white) suspects or a student just beginning to build your reel, this database instruction manual/guide to best BIPOC hiring practices/panel discussion/showcase of the diversity of BIPOC work […]
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New Paths Forward: The Immersive and Interactive Works at Tribeca 2021
As the first major festival to return in person as the pandemic recedes, Tribeca gave us one more sign that New York is coming back. In the Heights, which opened the festival at the United Palace on June 9, was a joyful celebration of community (even for those of us who watched at home), and even in a reduced capacity the festival was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the movies. It also seemed that after shuttering the 2020 festival, this year’s event was fairly bursting at the seams with new types of content—of course the short and feature films […]
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“Narrating Our Struggle”: Cherien Dabis on Palestinian Stories and Rejecting Censorship
“Dad, I want to be a filmmaker,” I pronounced at 12 years old, from our home in rural Ohio. “You can’t be a filmmaker,” my father responded. You’re Palestinian. No one will care what you have to say.” I was shocked. You’re wrong, I said to myself, rejecting his statement outright. Yet his words have continued to haunt me. My first memory of traveling to Palestine to visit our native village was when I was eight years old. Armed Israeli soldiers held my family at the border for 12 hours. They picked through the contents of our suitcases. My father […]
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Marlon Riggs: Signifying and Seeing
I realized that I was bisexual immediately before being dropped into a Long Island diocesan Catholic high school with a standardly devout administration where I didn’t know anyone. I stayed in the closet for about a year before I started to tell my new school friends. That said, the teachers and students were fairly liberal, if not particularly outspoken. I found a small sense of community in the school’s impressive theater department, although all the other guys were straight. It wasn’t until I took dance classes that I would interact with the only other queer male students I could find, […]
