Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“We Think the Audience is Smarter Than Us”: Kirsten Johnson On Making Another Personal and Original Film With “Dick Johnson is Dead”
There are few directorial debuts as sui generis as Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson. A kind of experimental documentary, its premise was simple: it collected unused fragments from her long and storied career as a cinematographer, mostly for non-fiction works, among them Citizen Four, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Oath, and more. There was no story, there was no clear mission statement or theme, and the viewer was left to intuit meaning between the fragments arranged seemingly at random. And it was a success, quickly ushered into the Criterion Collection and taking her from a name among non-fiction auteurs to a name auteur herself. […]
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Shivers, The Elephant Man and Clara’s Heart: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
David Cronenberg was an unknown filmmaker with just two experimental features (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) under his belt when he wrote and directed Shivers (1975), a groundbreaking thriller that launched not only Cronenberg’s career but an entire Canadian horror film industry. Prior to Shivers (also known as They Came From Within, The Parasite Murders, and many other titles), Canadian horror movies were so rare that Cronenberg had to fly in an American makeup effects artist because he couldn’t find anyone in Canada who could do that kind of work; following Shivers’ commercial success, however, there was a boom […]
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NYFF 2020: Lovers Rock
Steve McQueen: now with handheld camera! Lovers Rock is, per its official publicity copy, one of “A Collection of Five Films” about British West Indian life in the ’70s and ’80s drawn from the backgrounds and personal stories of McQueen’s friends and family. This party film is the only one not directly based on a true story but is instead based on collective experience; judging by synopses of the other four, it’s also the lightest thematically. That makes it a good fit for NYFF’s opening night selection (even if no actual opening night party will be following; two of the other films […]
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“We Are Forcing You to Experience Things You Might Not Want To…”: Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli on Their Boldly Confronting TIFF Premiere, Violation
An act of sexual violence leads to an awful retribution in Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s Violation, which premiered this past week at the Toronto International Film Festival. But were the film’s execution as simple, as blunt, as this brief synopsis might suggest, there’d be little to distinguish Violation from so many other works in the rape-revenge genre. Instead, in their debut feature Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli have radically scrambled the dramatization of cause and effect, sliding backwards and forwards in their storytelling to place a sexual assault that happens on a couple’s weekend getaway within the broader psychology of the survivor’s […]
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IFP Announces Inaugural Audio Programming Slate for the 42nd Edition of IFP Week
IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the inaugural audio programming for the upcoming 42nd edition of IFP Week, which will take place virtually September 20 – 25. Unfolding over the last two days of the conference, September 24th and 25th will be, says IFP, “robust conversations and events that will explore audio storytelling, real-time decision making, and what goes on behind the scenes in the world of audio.” The programming complements the maiden edition of IFP Week’s Audible Audio Hub, which features 36 audio-only projects connecting with some of the industry’s leading producers and financiers. Industry guest speakers will include: Sean […]
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“A Young Woman in a Very Harsh, Muscular Environment”: Nicole Riegel on Her Powerful and Flinty Debut, Holler
When I last spoke to Nicole Reigel for Filmmaker, it was in 2014 to profile the Jackson, Ohio native for our 25 New Faces list. After a stint in the military and then time producing her own plays for theater, Riegel had arrived in Los Angeles and quickly made a name for herself as a screenwriter, with directors such as Cary Fukunaga and Justin Lin on board for her scripts. But her ultimate goal, she revealed in the piece, was to direct — an ambition realized this year with her flinty, tremendously assured and compellingly acted debut, Holler. Selected for […]
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Christ Stopped at Eboli, Lucio Fulci in 4K and Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
When Francesco Rosi adapted artist and activist Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli for Italian television in 1979, contemporary observers of the director probably saw it as a strange choice. Rosi had made his name with searing, forcefully immediate studies of Italian society and politics like Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Over the City; Levi’s book about his banishment to an isolated rural town during the reign of Mussolini was as modest and personal as Rosi’s earlier films were sweeping and elaborate. Yet the memoir had in fact been a dream project of Rosi’s for decades, and the four-part, […]
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I’m Thinking of Ending Things: Charlie Kaufman in High Fidelity
Adapted from Iain Reid’s 2016 novel, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things returns to familiar preoccupations—solipsistic men and idealized girlfriends, already subjective memory’s decay, aging and death, ambitious futility. From the book Kaufman retains the text of page one (an interior monologue from the unnamed female narrator), some dialogue from the subsequent first chapter and the course of events up to about page 150 (out of 210). Otherwise, the dialogue’s almost entirely been junked before a final act of Kaufman’s own conception, which are both excellent substitutions: the novel has a manifestly underwhelming twist ending and isn’t exactly packed with scintillating exchanges […]
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Ventilation, the 10-Hour Day, and No Day Players: 14 Takeaways from the PGA’s New COVID Safety Protocols
The Producers Guild of America (PGA) issued this week “COVID Safety Protocols for Producing Independent Productions,” a 57-page set of mandates, recommendations and guidelines for shooting during the coronavirus pandemic. Following similar documents — like the more studio-oriented “Safe Way Forward,” issued by IATSE, SAG-AFTRA and the DGA — the PGA paper, drafted by its Production Safety Task Force, both further codifies new industry safety practices while addressing issues specific to independent (i.e., non-studio or streamer-backed) productions. Additionally, like this summer’s documentary guidelines from Doc Society, Field of Vision and Sundance Institute, the PGA’s “COVID Safety Protocols” broadens its mandate […]
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Detective Agencies, Film Noir and Society’s Relationship to the Elderly: Maite Alberdi on Her Doc, The Mole Agent
Responding to a help-wanted ad, 85-year-old Sergio Chamy agrees to infiltrate a Santiago nursing home as a “mole agent” to find out if a client’s mother is being abused. As a “spy” he uncovers a hidden world of frustration and loneliness. Maite Alberdi’s documentary borrows from film noir before evolving into an unsettling look at the lives of the elderly. It was developed with the help of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and the Tribeca Film Institute. The Mole Agent screened at Sundance, and is available on demand starting September 1. Filmmaker spoke with Alberdi from her office in […]
