Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Blue Velvet Project, #88
Second #4136, 68:56 After Jeffrey strikes Dorothy, a roar of flames fills the frame. The barely repressed brute logic of the film finally explodes on the screen, as Jeffrey has, at last, become a surrogate Frank. What’s remarkable about the scene is how it’s fashioned from some pretty regressive clichés about abuse, especially in how Dorothy literally “asks for it.” On one level, Blue Velvet’s depiction of women is deformed in the worst possible ways, as it balances Sandy as the objectified virginal “good” girl, full of nurturing love, and Dorothy as the madwoman whore. There’s nothing in between, and […]
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TRUE/FALSE DISPATCH, PART 2
In its ninth year, the True/False Film Festival sold over 37,000 tickets. This is my third year attending, but no serious growing pains have been felt with the increasing numbers of first-time attendees: screenings start on time, it’s not overwhelmingly difficult to get into anything if you have an advance ticket, and the programming is unusually trustworthy. (If anything, True/False has a terrific track record of exhuming gems lost in the festival cycle; it’s a good doc fest-of-fests, but a great festival for discovery.) The festival encourages/lubricates sociability without distracting from daily film-watching. This year seemed special even by the […]
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20 FILMS (AND OTHER THINGS) I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT SXSW
SXSW starts tomorrow, hotels and airfares were sold out long ago, and Austin’s data networks are already trembling. I’ll be there, and here are 20 films and other things that I’m looking forward to catching. 1. Tchoupitoulas. Bill and Turner Ross won Best Documentary at SXSW in 2009 with their doc, 45365. Their new film, Tchoupitoulas (pictured), promises to be a similarly beguiling exploration of time and place. It is about, in the words of the filmmakers, “three kids, New Orleans at night, and MUSIC,” and it’s produced by the founding members of Court 13, whose Beasts of the Southern […]
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Canon 5D Mark III – Does More, Cost More
Last week Canon announced the 5D Mark III, and not surprisingly, it’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary. To recap, the 5D Mark II practically created the DSLR video revolution when it was announced in late 2008. Since then Canon has released a number of other DSLRs that rival the Mark II – several at lover prices – but none that set the bar higher or so captured the imagination of video and movie makers. Still, the video world has continued to evolve, and the past year has seen the arrival of several large-sensor cameras that more closely resemble traditional video cameras; […]
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Director Dominic Allan on Calvet
The titular tattooed protagonist of Dominic Allan’s Calvet is Jean Marc Calvet (pictured), who went from being a hustling, drug-addicted street kid in the south of France to an NYC art world darling. But the path he took to get there is equal parts winding, fascinating and downright insane. After being discovered in a shooting competition by a guy who ran a security firm, Calvet joined the “world of bodyguards,” taking care of the likes of Mel Gibson, Forest Whitaker and Tim Robbins at Cannes. But he was soon enticed to leave his young family and “disappear” to America with […]
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Attenberg — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Attenberg world premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival and is being distributed in America by Strand Releasing. It opens on Friday, March 9, 2012, at the IFC Center in NYC. Visit the film’s official page at the Strand website to learn more.) The world would be a much less grating place if certain cinematic sub-genres were to be banned from the table immediately. Reading a description of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, one might worry that she has committed the double-sin of embracing two of the more increasingly overused and deplorable ones: 1) the “stunted-to-the-point-of-retarded adult-child;” and 2) the “quirky […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #87
Second #4089, 68:09 1. Dorothy to Jeffrey: “Do you want to do bad things? / Anything . . . anything. / I want you to hurt me.” 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Experience (1844): It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. . . . Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have […]
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MEDIA CURRENT: AEREO AND THE NEW ONLINE TV WARS
A coalition of broadcasters including WNET, FOX, WPIX and Univision filed a preemptive injunction in Manhattan’s federal district court earlier this month to halt the launch of Aereo, a $12-a-month online subscription service scheduled to go live on March 14th. Aereo proposes to use an array of tiny TV antennas to capture over-the-air broadcast channels and then retransmit these signals via online streaming to web-enabled devices, be it a computer, smartphone or tablet. The broadcasters argue that Aereo’s action will violate their protections under the Copyright Act. “Aereo has not licensed this television programming from those who own it. Nor […]
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TED HOPE INAUGURATES FILMLINC SERIES WITH MARK JACKSON’S “WITHOUT”
Producer Ted Hope, who has been running a regular independent film screening series at Goldcrest for the last few years, is moving uptown — he’s the inaugural curator of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s monthly Indie Night showcase. And for the series opening film, he’s picked a favorite of ours here at Filmmaker: Mark Jackson’s Without. On the basis of this first feature, Jackson was selected as one of our 2011 25 New Faces. In his write-up, Brandon Harris wrote: Comprised of shots that make you feel as if you’re glimpsing the most private of moments, a fly on […]
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A UNIQUE ENDEAVOR: JOSEPH CEDAR’S “FOOTNOTE”
At Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a small but obsessed group of mostly competitive men dedicate themselves to the study, deconstruction, and interpretation of ancient Talmudic texts. For the most part, individual achievement is measured in output: the number of books and articles that one has published. There are exceptions to this model of success. Take the case of Professor Eliezer Shkolnik in Footnote. Something of an absent-minded professor, barely participating in the world around him save for the sifting through of relevant research material, the introverted, middle-aged scholar (the comic Shlomo Bar Aba, in an outstanding performance) looks and behaves like, well, a […]
