Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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HARUKI MURAKAMI ON PRE-WIRED FICTION
There’s an excerpt from Haruki Murakami’s upcoming novel, IQ84, in this week’s New Yorker. At the magazine’s website there’s an accompanying short interview, which contains this interesting exchange about fiction and our wired world. Several times recently I’ve read scripts and had to comment that they’ve failed to acknowledge the ways in which we communicate and gather information these days. Throw a cell phone or internet connection into these tales and their plots collapse. Murakami dealt with this challenge by dispensing with it; his new book is set in 1984. In this excerpt from the interview, he discusses the effect […]
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THE MEXICAN WAVE ROLLS IN
Mexico remains a heavily stratified society, despite the strides made over the past 50 years in bridging an enormous socio-economic gap. A non-centralized wave of films has been building there over the past decade, and cinema, the most accessible of art forms, reflects the divide. One could argue that the directors make a choice: poverty or the bourgeoisie. You can observe the schism for yourself in the excellent 10-film series GenMex: Recent Films from Mexico, running September 9-22 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives. The exhibition begins with a one-week run of Eugenio Polgovsky’s The Inheritors, September 9-15. The other titles each […]
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VIDEO BLOGGING, THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND THE POLICE
In an important ruling today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston ruled in favor of a man suing the police for arresting him when he used his cell phone to record their actions in a drug arrest. The police claimed the arrest was proper due to a state law barring audio recordings without the consent of both parties. The court, however, disagreed… and video blogging played a part. Although some have argued that First Amendment protections in cases like this one should be restricted to professional journalists, the court felt differently. Here’s an excerpt from […]
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AN ANGRY SEA
WPIX Channel 11 had a reporter out during the early hours of Hurricane Irene and caught these familiar-seeming people checking out the Hudson. Here’s Josef from the Ukraine (or, in a Bloombergian nod to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, “Zone A”).
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MARK ROMANEK’S ANIMATED DANCE-OFF
Mark Romanek’s KIA ad, which was debuted on last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, got a lot of online buzz today. Just caught up with it now, and it is somewhat… weird. From Entertainment Weekly: With the help of choreographers Rich & Tone, a group of “great dancers from the East and West coast” and computer animation, Romanek had the resources to bring the latest chapter of those jamming hamsters to the small screen. “The key was making the dance great,” said Romanek. Of course, they’d need a great song to dance to. Romanek explained that while there were a […]
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HARMONY KORINE WANTS YOU TO RISE
Harmony Korine directed and Anthony Dod Mantle shot this ad for Mahindra, the Indian multinational conglomerate. According to Ad Age, it was shot at 1,000 fps with a Phantom camera.
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KICKSTARTER: ZACH CLARK’S “WHITE REINDEER”
With his features Modern Love is Automatic and Vacation!, filmmaker Zach Clark has caught our eye at Filmmaker. In this interview with Lauren Wissot, he discusses his refreshing aesthetic, which looks towards the stylized melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ’60s beach party flicks, and ’80s new-wave porn like Cafe Flesh. And, he does this on a tiny budgets. In Wissot’s interview he explains: Luckily, I have talented friends who have been willing to work for no money. I also like making movies in places that aren’t big hubs of film production, which keeps costs down, so a […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #10
Second #470, 7:50 1. Detective Williams greets Jeffrey, who has come bearing an ear in a bag. He stands face to face with the archetypal detective, who wears his holster and gun in the office. He is either a man who has repressed a lot, or a man who is completely open and comfortable with the fact of evil in the world. His eyes are sad and knowing and also suspicious. Actually, Jeffrey is the detective, and he might as well be saying, “I found the ear. This is my case. Stay far away.” 2. Lynch has said that “clues […]
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MUSIC VIDEO: “TERRIBLE ANGELS,” CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG
Choreography and a carpark. Directed by Nathalie Canguilhem.
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GRAHAM LEGGAT, 1960 – 2011
Graham Leggat, the executive director of the San Francisco Film Society and a former Contributing Editor of Filmmaker, died yesterday at his Bay Area home from cancer. Always erudite and elegant, Leggat brought intelligence and real creativity to the worlds of film festivals, exhibition and journalism. From his obituary in Variety: For nearly six exciting and transformative years, Graham Leggat led the San Francisco Film Society with irrepressible determination, dash and design,” said Pat McBaine, president of the Film Society’s board of directors. “His vision, leadership, passion, work ethic, tenacity, imagination and daring along with his colorful language and wicked […]
