Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Quarantine Reading: W. K.-L. Dickson’s The Biograph in Battle
As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we’ve reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. Today: hello, it’s me. — Vadim Rizov Last January, I went to MoMA to see British silent film […]
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DAFilms, DocAlliance’s Streaming Service for Seven European Nonfiction Festivals, Launches in the US
DAFilms is a VOD platform run by the DocAlliance, which (per their press release) is “a creative partnership between seven of the major European documentary festivals.” Those seven are CPH:DOX, Doclisboa, Millennium Docs Against Gravity FF, DOK Leipzig, FIDMarseille, Ji.hlava IDFF and Visions du Réel. As of March 30, America-based streamers can start streaming for the site for $6.99/month (or $4.99/month with an annual subscription, with individual rental fees for certain titles). While the exact catalogue has yet to be determined, the plan is to showcase some of the best titles from these festivals, both old and new, with future […]
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Quarantine Reading: I Am My Own Woman and Never, Ever Ever, Coming Down
As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we’ve reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. Today: Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on two trans autobiographical books turned into doc films. — Vadim Rizov Every book-to-film […]
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Canon Reformation (1): Yi Yi, Ghost World
I’ll keep the establishing premise brief: all articles on every platform are coronavirus-predicated for the unforeseeable future, so no need to belabor that prompt. I almost never watch movies at home: with a tiny attention span, I need the screen to be bigger than me and erase peripheral vision—and in NYC, until very recently, I had the unbelievable luxury of a plethora of big-screen rep viewing to choose from. Now I’m bunkered in a roommate-emptied apartment, pursuing my chosen viewing path for maximal self-soothing distraction: rewatching a personal canon of (mostly) obvious titles I haven’t seen in ten to 20 […]
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Quarantine Reading: Michel Faber’s The Book Of Strange New Things and Undying: A Love Story
As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we’ve reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. First up: filmmaker Audrey Ewell (Until the Light Takes Us, 99% — The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, […]
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Kaleidoscope and the Museum of Other Realities Step In to Help the VR Industry During the Pandemic
One thing that’s been uplifting to observe throughout all the recent closures of movie theaters, festivals, and other cultural institutions has been how individuals and companies have stepped in to provide relief, support, and camaraderie during an unprecedented crisis. This is true in the virtual and augmented reality community as much as in the broader film industry, as content creators and distributors have come together to support each other as their work has come to an essential standstill. Of course, some companies and services have seen an uptick in their business, as consumers explore using VR products to hold meetings, […]
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Bamboozled, Showboat and Vitalina Varela: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations, March 27, 2020
Although it borrows liberally from earlier films like A Face in the Crowd, The Producers, and Network, there’s nothing else quite like Spike Lee’s 2000 satire Bamboozled, the most ferociously funny movie of the writer-director’s career as well as one of his most formally adventurous. It’s a movie of extremes, raucous in its gleeful willingness to offend (as Mel Brooks said of The Producers, it “rises below vulgarity”) and relentless in the psychological trauma it inflicts on both its characters and its audience, with Lee’s mission being nothing less than a history of racist representation in American pop culture and […]
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Sheltering in Place: The Independent Film Community Faces the Coronavirus Shutdown
It was February, 2020. At New York’s Steiner studios, the largest studio lot outside of LA, people were busily prepping Lin Manuel Miranda’s highly anticipated directorial debut, Tik, Tik…Boom! The movie was set to begin shooting in two weeks, and Jessie Pellegrino, a seasoned assistant prop master, paused her work to sit through a mandatory Netflix HR meeting. Near the end of the session, one of her colleagues raised his hand. “What’s Netflix’s plan for us if coronavirus forces our shoot to shut down?” The HR rep responded the best she could at the time. They were working on it; […]
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Lessons To Be Learned From Ida
One unexpected silver lining of this global pandemic has been the sudden gift of extra time – hours that otherwise would have been spent on school pickups and commutes – and when I’m not engaged in trying to entertain a restless three-year-old, I’m happy to squander some of it on watching old movies. One of my favorite films of the past decade is Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida. Pawlikowski gained more widespread attention for his 2018 film, Cold War, but it’s Ida, a comparatively small film about a nun novitiate, that feels like a perfect one for this very strange moment in […]
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A Little Romance, The Stalking Moon, and Things Behind the Sun: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations – March 20, 2020
Director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting) has no shortage of mass appeal crowd pleasers on his resume, but I don’t think he ever made a more purely delightful or deeply moving film that 1979’s A Little Romance. A sort of prepubescent Before Sunrise, the movie follows two 13-year olds – French movie fanatic Daniel (Thelonious Bernard) and American bookworm Lauren (Diane Lane in her film debut) – who fall in love in Paris and try to make the most of their summer romance before Lauren is dragged back to the states. Perfectly calibrated on […]
