Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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All in the Family: Jonathan Caouette on Walk Away Renee
I’ve been struggling to find a metaphor for the very special, not to mention most unusual, connection between director Jonathan Caouette and Renee Leblanc, his mentally ill and frequently institutionalized mother and the subject of his most recent film, Walk Away Renee. The closest I could come is really a parallel, and it lies within Caouette’s body of work. In his 2010 surreal short All Flowers in Time, a beautiful young woman, played by Chloe Sevigny, has an indefinable relationship with an adolescent boy. In a bizarre world where young people’s eyes can turn glowing red, the two seem to […]
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MARIELLE HELLER AT THE SUNDANCE DIRECTORS LAB, PART 2: “LESSONS EVERYWHERE”
Marielle Heller, a New York-based screenwriter, actor and playwright, is attending the June Sundance Directors Lab with her project, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. “In the haze of 1970’s San Francisco, a teenage artist with a brutally honest perspective tries to navigate her way through an affair with her mother’s boyfriend,” is its description, and the film is being adapted from the graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner. Here is Heller’s second post from the Sundance Resort in Utah. Read the first here. The way the Sundance Lab is set up, you don’t always know how or when you’re going […]
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CARSON MELL AT THE SUNDANCE DIRECTORS LAB, PART TWO
The Sundance June Directors Lab is underway, and blogging here at Filmmaker from the Sundance Resort in Utah will be two of the Lab’s filmmakers. Here is Carson Mell, attending with his dark comedy, Ajax, about “a band of alcoholic astronauts and a young woman adrift in outer space [who] become at odds with one another after discovering the purpose of their mysterious mission.” Read part one of his series here. The Sundance Directors Lab is over now, and I’m starting the Screenwriters Lab again in a couple of days. Out of the last 17 days, we’ve only had two […]
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Five Questions with Radio Unnameable Directors Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson
For decades, Bob Fass has been a unique voice on the airwaves of New York City’s freeform radio station WBAI with his show “Radio Unnameable.” From hosting a young Bob Dylan to organizing spontaneous youth gatherings with the Yippies, Fass has come to define an era of radio that had a profound influence on our culture. In their new documentary film Radio Unnameable, Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson tell Fass’ story by utilizing a treasure trove of archival material, interviews and audio (which is constantly updated and can be sampled here). After premiering at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, […]
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WHY IS WILLIAM FRIEDKIN TURNING INTO ALI G?
William Friedkin’s first major movie in a long time, Killer Joe — a Texas noir based on the Tracy Letts play of the same name — is being released in just over a month, and as a result the legendary director has been a lot more visible. In addition to popping up at a string of festivals with the film, Friedkin is now an active presence on Twitter. A week or two ago, Friedkin posted the above (completely mind-blowing) Instagram picture of himself as Ali G on his Twitter feed, and then at the currently running Edinburgh International Film Festival […]
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EXCLUSIVE: PREMIERE OF TRAILER FOR PAUL LOVELACE AND JESSICA WOLFSON’S “RADIO UNNAMEABLE”
We’re very happy to exclusively premiere the trailer to Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson’s buzz doc Radio Unnameable, a portrait of the legendary late-night radio DJ Bob Fass. The film, which premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival earlier this year, won a Special Jury Prize at the Sarasota Film Festival and has its first NYC screening at BAMcinemaFest tonight. You can check out Filmmaker‘s interview with Lovelace and Wolfson here. Radio Unnameable Documentary Trailer from Jessica Wolfson on Vimeo.
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The Blue Velvet Project, #130
Second #6110, 101:50 1. Jeffrey has his hands full. There is Mike (who, in one of Blue Velvet’s weird tonal shifts, has suddenly become apologetic and even Jeffrey’s ally), and there is Sandy helping the naked Dorothy into the backseat of Jeffrey’s car which will take them to Sandy’s house, where, stark naked in the living room, Dorothy will call Jeffrey “my secret lover” in front of Sandy and her mother, and where she will tell Sandy that Jeffrey “put his disease in me.” 2. The shot is so heavily coded with cinema’s past that it’s as if fragments of […]
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WRAPPING SILVERDOCS 2012
Brutus McCracker, a Chihuahua with a camera mounted on his collar, wandered through the Silver Spring Civic Building capturing low-angle moments of the AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Film Festival. The camera is featured in Seth Keal’s short CatCam, one of 114 films from 44 countries programmed in the 10th edition of Silverdocs that concluded yesterday. The canine mascot provided a cheery reminder of the relaxed nature and intimate setting of the festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, a multicultural suburb abutting Washington, D.C. With its proximity to our nation’s capital, the festival specializes in social issue docs and attracts activists and political […]
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NOW ONLINE: FARIHAH ZAMAN AND JEFF REICHERT’S “REMOTE AREA MEDICAL”
Last week at the the Los Angeles Film Festival, our very own Lady Vengeance, Farihah Zaman, premiered her documentary short Remote Area Medical, co-directed with her husband Jeff Reichert, himself a filmmaker (Gerrymandering) and film journalist. The film — which is embedded below — was made as part of the Focus Forward series, for which 30 filmmakers have been commissioned to make three-minute documentaries. There is, however, a feature-length version of Zaman and Reichert’s film in the works, to be released in 2013; to stay updated on its progress, “like” its Facebook page and follow @RAMmovie on Twitter. In a […]
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ARTFUL DODGERS
On June 21st, the Supreme Court blinked. It used a legal technicality to sidestep determining the status of two long-simmering “indecency” cases and, thus, the legal status of broadcast television and radio, the traditional mass communications media. One case involves the spoken word and was against Fox over what are known as “fleeting expletives,” words like “fuck” and “shit” uttered by Cher, Nicole Richie and Bono at the Billboard Music Awards in 2002 and 2003. The second was against ABC for showing what can be called “fleeting nudity,” the brief display of a female actress’ nude buttocks during an episode […]
