Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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MEDIA CURRENT: AT YOUR OWN PERIL
If there is one industry report that you absolutely must read this year it is Digital Dilemma 2: Perspectives from Independent Filmmakers, Documentarians and Nonprofit Audiovisual Archives, from the Motion Picture Academy’s Science and Technology Council. The study was conducted with the assistance of Filmmaker as well as the IFP, Film Independent, and many other organizations and individual makers. Its message is short and simple: “Most of the filmmakers surveyed for this report have given little thought to what happens to their work once it is completed. … [F]ew store their film masters in proper environmental conditions or manage their digital […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #75
Second #3525, #58:45 A classic two-shot, Jeffrey and Dorothy looking at each other across the open space of the screen. Dorothy is framed within the frame by the impossible closet (a sort of black screen) in the background. No longer dressed in black, Jeffrey’s character begins to separate itself from the hinted-at idea that he is somehow another, younger version of Frank. Although Blue Velvet is not alone in taking viewers into a sealed-off fictive world, it does so, strangely, by referring to the outside, “real” world (our world) not directly, but indirectly, through archetypes. There is a detective, a […]
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IFP INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER LABS OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS
The IFP’s unique Independent Filmmaker Labs are now accepting applications for the 2012 programs. The Labs, which consist of year-round mentorship for first-time filmmakers along with focused seminar and instruction weeks, have recently seen alumni success at Sundance (Terrence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty), Slamdance (Keith Miller’s Grand Prize winner Welcome to Pine Hill), in theaters (Dee Rees’s Pariah) and, upcoming, at Berlin (Lucy Mulloy’s Una Noche), SXSW (Matt Ruskin’s Competition title, Booster), and on TV (the POV screening of Michael Collins’ Give Up Tomorrow). From IFP: IFP’s unique year-long mentorship program supports first-time feature directors when they need […]
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John Bailey A.S.C., on Shooting The Big Chill
John Bailey was a graduate film student at USC studying film criticism when he discovered a passion for cinematography while working on a school production. His first feature-length credit was for a 1972 horror movie Premonition, and since then he has accumulated a long and impressive list of credits, including such classics as: Groundhog Day, The Accidental Tourist, Swimming to Cambodia, Silverado, The Big Chill, and American Gigolo. More recently, he’s worked on projects as diverse as Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Must Love Dogs, The Producers, and Country Strong. I first heard John speak at an event organized […]
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An Interview With The Invader Director Nicholas Provost
A sort of Taxi Driver set within the world of European immigrant culture, Nicolas Provost’s The Invader is one of the most intriguing and seductive films currently on the festival circuit. It premiered in Venice before screening in Toronto (where the below interview was conducted) and now Rotterdam, and it marks the feature debut of Provost (pictured above), a Belgian video and installation artist whose work has always taken as its subject the way cinema orders images into narrative. The story opens with the camera fixed on the vagina of a beautiful blonde woman, sunbathing nude on a Southern European […]
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Bad Fever — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Bad Fever opens in New York City at the reRun Gastropub beginning Friday, January 3, 2011. It world premiered at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival and is being distributed by Factory 25. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) For those viewers with a deep-seated fondness for the character-based New Hollywood dramas that were churned out in the 1970s, Dustin Guy Defa’s Bad Fever will feel like a welcome return to that glorious past (I should know, as I am guilty of said deep-seated fondness). From the spare opening title card—complete with a copyright tag at the bottom!—to its […]
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LARS KNUDSEN AND JAY VAN HOY SIGN DEVELOPMENT DEAL WITH K5
Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy, the producing duo behind Gotham Award Best Picture winner and Oscar nominee Beginners, have signed an output and development deal with sales, finance, and production company K5 Media Group. The deal marks an alliance between two rising indie powerhouses. Knudsen and Van Hoy have been building their reputation for the past ten years. In 2004, they founded production company Parts & Labor and steadily accumulated a body of festival circuit sleeper hits including Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Cam Archer’s Wild Tigers I Have Known, and Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still. More recently, the duo produced […]
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SXSW REVEALS FULL 2012 FEATURE FILM LINEUP
SXSW has announced their complete 2012 feature film slate. Over 90 films will screen across the festival’s ten categories, including the already announced opening night premiere of Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods and a special preview screening of Lena Dunham’s new HBO series Girls. New additions include the sixteen films premiering in narrative and documentary competition. The eight films competing on the narrative side include Booster, directed by Matt Ruskin, Eden, directed by Megan Griffiths, Gayby, directed by Jonathan Lisecki, Gimme the Loot, directed by Adam Leon, Los Chidos, directed by Omar Rodriguez Lopez, Pilgrim Song, directed by Martha […]
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FEBRUARY 2012 VOD TITLES
Filmmaker has launched the February edition of its curated monthly list of notable VOD titles. Highlights include many of 2011’s end of year standouts, including Sean Durkin’s cult thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene, Bruce Robinson’s foray into the twisted mind of Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary, and Jeff Nichol’s apocalyptic Americana Take Shelter, a film that Michael Tully called a “modern American masterpiece” in his Hammer to Nail review. Also available are some very promising first-quarter 2012 titles, including Liza Johnson’s war vet character portrait Return and Tony Kaye’s Adrien Brody-starring classroom drama Detachment. For titles from previous months […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #74
Second #3478, 57:58 Jeffrey’s return to Dorothy’s apartment is framed in a shot radically segmented by top-to-bottom of screen vertical lines, such as the door itself, the doorway, the protruding wall, the closet doors. This lends a certain crazy dimensionality to the scene, with Dorothy occupying the foreground, Jeffrey the middle ground, and the hallway wall behind him the background. And yet all this appears on a flat screen. Gerald Mast, in Film/Cinema/Movie (1977) asked whether we perceive the projected image as two-dimensional at all? The very fact that we call one object in the projected image apparently close to […]
