Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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92YTRIBECA’S POST-MUMBLECORE LA DI DA FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCED
I’ve had wind of this for a while, via both filmmaker Kentucker Audley and programmer Miriam Bale (who has a feature on Beasts of the Southern Wild in our current issue), but now the news is public. On September 14 and 15, the 92Y Tribeca will host the first La Di Da film festival, which takes a look at the recent work of a group of post-Mumblecore figures, including Amy Seimetz, the Safdies, Sean Price Williams, Dustin Guy Defa, Alex Karpovsky, Kate Lyn Sheil, Eléonore Hendricks and Audley. In the press release explaining the genesis of the event, Bale says, […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #142
Second #6674, 111:14 The seemingly insignificant, glimpsed, unremembered moments of a film revealed in the details of a random frame. In this case, Jeffrey’s watch, fleetingly illuminated as he retraces his steps back up to Dorothy’s apartment, in flight from the Well-Dressed Man. The importance of the watch may be the very fact of its unimportance—it has no significance in terms of the plot. And yet, it is a part of the film; it constitutes an element of Blue Velvet’s image-archive. The frames come from a compressed sequence made up of 17 shots that, in less than a minute of […]
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DP Brandon Vincent: Shooting with the NEX-FS100
Brandon Vincent is a Massachusetts-based freelance videographer and editor and a Sony NEX-FS100 owner. He’s had the camera for almost a year, and I recently talked to him about his experience using it. Filmmaker: What kind of work are you shooting? Vincent: I do pretty much whatever comes to me really, but I do a lot of interviews, highlight videos of events, and I do a lot of my own personal stuff. I shot some comedy things. I don’t shoot a lot of documentary work, but it’s something I would like to get into. Filmmaker: When did you get the […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #141
Second #6627, 110:27 In one of Blue Velvet’s most unsettling moments, Jeffrey, on his way out of Dorothy’s carnaged apartment, sees the Well-Dressed Man coming towards the building in the night. Like some figure from a dream, he approaches, his police radio crackling. At this point, neither Jeffrey nor the audience knows, at least with any certainty, that the Well-Dressed Man is in fact Frank. In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919) Freud wrote that it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere what would otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea […]
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Soul Surfing Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
Up now on Filmmaker’s curated Kickstarter page is Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, the second feature from Sam Fleischner. The production is in the final days of its campaign and could use your help. What follows is a guest blog post from producer Veronica Nickel. What do we want?! When do we want it?! The next question in that cheer should be: how in the hell do we get what we want right now? Sam Fleischner’s answer must be to assemble the best incognito team that you can find and get out and make your movie. Undeterred by a […]
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TRAILER WATCH: “THE MASTER”
The Master is Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to There Will be Blood, my favorite film of that year. After this trailer I’m even more psyched.
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TRAILER WATCH: HEIDI EWING AND RACHEL GRADY’S “DETROPIA”
Detropia, the latest documentary from Jesus Camp and 12th & Delaware directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, premiered at Sundance earlier this year and is being self-distributed by the filmmakers through their company, Loki Films. (To do this, they raised $70,000 on Kickstarter.) The film, a poignant portrait of the decline of Detroit, will be released on September 7, and you can check out the newly launched trailer below.
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The Queen of Versailles — A Hammer to Nail Review
As I left the screening of the documentary The Queen of Versailles, my immediate thought was, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” Director Lauren Greenfield has created a complicated, fascinating, and humbling film, perfectly calibrated to the zeitgeist. Election-year rhetoric aside, we remain in the ever-widening wake of the Great Recession, and Greenfield’s riches-to-rags story releases waves of conflicting emotion: pity, schadenfreude, guilt, empathy, disgust. With fortuitous—and perhaps shrewd—timing, her film captures an America in flux. The Queen of Versailles tells the story of David and Jackie Siegel, a billionaire couple who were building the largest house in America, a […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #140
“I’m gonna let them find you on their own,” Jeffrey quietly says to himself, invoking Frank, who will appear again in a few minutes. Turning away from the camera, his ear might actually hear the song on the soundtrack, Ketty Lester’s version of “Love Letters,” released as a single in 1961: [jwplayer mediaid=”48654″] The song was written in 1945 by Victor Young and Edward Heyman, and appeared in the film Love Letters, which starred Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten. Adapted by none other than Ayn Rand (“People should be able to build what they want to build, when they want […]
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Five Questions with Shut Up And Play the Hits Directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace
Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s LCD Soundsystem movie Shut Up and Play the Hits has a one-day-only release today through Oscilloscope Pictures (in partnership with TUGG). The following interview was conducted just prior to the film’s premiere earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Over LCD Soundsystem’s ten-year career, the band grew from early blog darlings to lauded indie stalwarts. After telegraphing the group’s demise years in advance, band-leader James Murphy officially disbanded LCD last April with a star-studded, marathon-length performance at Madison Square Garden. Now, less than a year later, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace present Shut Up […]
