Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“ONE HUNDRED MORNINGS” AND GENRE
Here’s the last of our guest blog posts by the makers of One Hundred Mornings, currently running at Los Angeles’s Downtown Independent Theater. This one is by writer/director Conor Horgan on the genre possibilities of his movie. When I finished writing the script for One Hundred Mornings, I wasn’t overly concerned about which genre the film would be — I just wanted to get it made. But most filmmakers have to specify their project’s genre at an early stage — it makes everything nice and neat, and life is a little easier for all involved, except maybe for the writer/director […]
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ZACHARY WIGON EXPLORES THE WORLDS OF “CATFISH”
As I wrote about on our newsletter a few weeks ago (and if you don’t get the weekly newsletter, why not? It’s free), we’ll be adding more new columns and original web content in the days ahead. On Friday we launched “Into the Splice,” Nicholas Rombes’s column on the pleasures of moviegoing. Every two weeks he’ll be going to a movie and writing an essay about the experiences and thoughts it triggers. And today we have the first of a three-part essay by Zachary Wigon on the multiple meanings of Catfish (pictured), examining it within the context of other movies […]
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Things That Seem Real, Part One: A 3-Part Esaay on Catfish and other movies
Editor’s Note: The following essay contains major spoilers about the film Catfish. Part One: Catfish and Reality In the movie, the 14-year-old boy tells the school therapist that he likes to watch “little clips” on the computer, little videos. He describes them as “little clips of things that seem real.” Earlier in the film, we saw a montage of YouTube clips, from a cat playing piano to Saddam Hussein being hung to a baby laughing. Later in the film, the boy sees two girls die from a drug overdose right in front of him. How real that event does — […]
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CHECKING IN
Hi again, Marc here with a report from opening day and the first day of meetings in the Emerging Narrative section for my character driven crime drama “Inside the Machine.” Yesterday started with an orientation with IFP folks, in a room full of other writer/directors looking for producers. Before they got started we all introduced ourselves, and afterwards started trading cards and contact information right away. I know how I felt, and informal chats revealed that I was not alone: having written a script, been selected to Project Forum, and maybe practiced pitching a bit, we didn’t really know what […]
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INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER CONFERENCE EMBRACES THE FUTURE (AND THE PAST)
Along with Labor Day, IFP’s Independent Film Week marks the end of Summer for me. It is a time to get back into the work groove and make plans for the year ahead. In this vein, the Independent Filmmaker Conference started yesterday with a day of panels dedicated to the future of film. Joana Vincente, Executive Director of IFP, opened the conference by noting a flurry of acquisitions at the recently completed Toronto International Film Festival and suggesting that things may be starting to look a little rosier for the independent film business. There were certainly some notes of optimism […]
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On Festivals, Festival Programmers and Independent Film Week
It’s September, and after a long, scorching summer, the festival season has finally gotten under way; Telluride, Venice, Toronto are in the books, the New York Film Festival is just on the horizon and my job as a film programmer and artistic director has kicked off in earnest. The screenings begin, the landscape starts to take shape; acquisitions are tracked, release schedules scrutinized, and submissions and new films begin to make their way to us. So often, I read articles about film festivals as if they were these mysterious, unknowable institutions that make random, arbitrary decisions about which films they […]
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TORONTO: TRAVELING WITHOUT MOVING AT ‘WAVELENGTHS’
Wavelengths, the Toronto International Film Festival program that ferries viewers deep into the world of contemporary experimental film, celebrated its tenth birthday in 2010 and received a sweet birthday gift: A completely sold out first show. Even enthusiasts who had lined up more than thirty minutes early were turned away from the 200-seat theatre at the Art Gallery of Ontario (along with your loyal scribe and similarly surprised colleagues from The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Pacific Film Archive and the Walker Art Center). It was an auspicious start to curator Andréa Picard’s extensive program of more than thirty individual […]
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TRAILER FOR TODD HAYNES’S “MILDRED PIERCE” RELEASED
Here’s the trailer for Todd Haynes’s five-part HBO miniseries, “Mildred Pierce,” that played tonight in front of the premiere of Boardwalk Empire. (Click on the headline if the trailer does not appear.)
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INDEPENDENT FILM WEEK AND RADIOHEAD
It’s Independent Film Week and the IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Conference, so I thought I’d bring up Radiohead before some panelist does. A couple of years ago I remember sitting at a panel (not at the IFP, actually) at which a young filmmaker was asking how to jumpstart his own business model. A guy onstage in a suit who probably billed at $600 an hour looked at him and said, “The answer is Radiohead,” referring to the band’s strategy of releasing their In Rainbows digitally over the internet for whatever price fans were willing to pay. (The band subsequently released a […]
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TORONTO: NATHANIEL DORSKY AND WAVELENGTHS 4
“If my life coincides with the life of film, I’ll be very happy,” said Nathaniel Dorsky at the Q&A following the screening of his three short experimental films in the Wavelengths 4 program at the Toronto Film Festival. That Dorsky’s work is bound to the materiality of its medium, to the poetry of light processed by the photographic process, was something I needed reminding of the night I saw his work. It’s easy to forget about things like film at a film festival. Most of the films at Toronto were projected digitally, their origins increasingly inscrutable in this age of […]
