Filmmaking

FAMILY PROGRAMMING

Dennis Cooper writes about artist Ryan Trecartin in the pages of Artforum this month, situating the 24-year-old’s work somewhere alongside that of “Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and early John Waters.” From the piece: “…everything aesthetic about his videos — from the baroque screenplays that polish flippant teen slang into cascading soliloquies to the dueling fascinations with profound loneliness and extremely affected behavior to the swarming, jumbled, yet precisely composed shots that pack each frame to the rafters with visual stimuli — displays a near obliviousness to what’s going on in his field, whether it be the cliches of current video […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 3, 2006 Filmmaking
CATS AND DOGS WITH LEOS CARAX

In the last Filmmaker I wrote about New Order’s recent video compilation and the various “artist-directed” videos that producer and filmmaker Michael Shamberg commissioned for the band over the years. In the piece, Shamberg announced that a website would be up detailing the project, but, due to health issues — Shamberg took ill in London this summer and was hospitalized for three months — the site was delayed. Now, Shamberg has emailed to say that he’s better and that Kinoteca is online. Over the next few months he will be gradually putting up info on all the New Order video […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 29, 2005 Filmmaking
STRAIGHT TALK FROM SUB POP

Filmmakers looking to score quick tunes from up-and-coming bands for their indie flick often don’t understand the realities of licensing pre-recorded music and wonder why their producers can’t clear a song on the fly. Here, then, is some straight talk from Sub Pop Records, the label that spawned Nirvana and which has a handy $500 festival rights quote but also plenty of provisos that filmmakers need to follow: “A sync license for a Sub Pop artist will run you $500, half of which goes to Publishing, the other half of which goes to Sub Pop. If you do not want […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 29, 2005 Filmmaking
MOVIE POSTER WORD BALLOONS, PART TWO

Below I posted about the empty word balloons I spotted affixed to various movie posters in the subway and said they were obviously the work of some renegade artist. Apparently, Gothamist posted about this back in September. They’re the work of artist Ji Lee, whose The Bubble Project is intended as a “counterattack” on corporate advertising’s invasion of the public space. Click on the link to see samples of of the “bubbles” filled in by random citizens.

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 28, 2005 Filmmaking
THE LISTS KEEP COMING

I haven’t been too focused on all of the end-of-year “ten best” hoopla, but there are some lists up today worth checking out. Indiewire has their “insider” ten best, with lists from people like Bingham Ray, Christine Vachon and Ryan Werner. And then there’s our former Filmmaker West Coast Editor Chuck Stephens, whose list is provocatively subtitled “The top 10 fresh wounds to the body politic of global filmmaking.” I only know about half the films on Stephens’ list, so there are a lot of discoveries here. And, as usual, his write-ups are a treat. Here’s what he has to […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 28, 2005 Filmmaking
JULY ENDS IN DECEMBER

Miranda July says adios with a final post on her Me and You and Everyone We Know blog, offering to us as her going-away present an artful Google image tree that unspools her life for the past year.

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 28, 2005 Filmmaking
SUGAR HIGH

If you’re strolling through New York’s Chelsea neighborhood this weekend, you can stop for a bit and check out one of the more interesting films from last year’s Sundance Film Festival — in a gallery, not a theater. Running through January 7 at Roebling Hall in Chelsea is Sugar, a film installation by Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley with Samara Golden. When the feature version of this work played in Sundance’s Frontier section, I remember appreciating its visual-art feel, and now, for their gallery show, the artists have expanded on Sugar by creating “two life-size hyper-real sculptures” to accompany the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 28, 2005 Filmmaking
DEREK BAILEY, 1930 – 2005

According to various postings on the web, free-music guitarist Derek Bailey died on Christmas Day. I’ve seen Bailey a few times, all of them a long time ago when he’d periodically put together in New York one of his “Company Weeks” of group improvisation. I saw him play with folks like Bill Laswell, John Zorn and George Lewis, and to several musician friends of mine, like Donald Miller from Borbetomagus, he was a god. Certainly the most radical guitarist of his generation due to the simple fact that much of what he played didn’t sound like guitar, he was a […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 28, 2005 Filmmaking
MISE-EN MESS

As 2005 winds to a close, so too the boring parade of “Ten Best” lists. And now, with the last Sunday of the year gone, the newspaper columnists will move on to their “New in 2006!” pieces while the internet stragglers take up the rear with a more interesting bunch of kudos. GreenCine has been diligently covering the whole year-end shebang, and today the site has a bunch of interesting links to everything from DVDTalk and others ranging from Best Schlock of 2005 to Top 20 Adult DVDs, which feature lists from both male and female reviewers, to the most […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 27, 2005 Filmmaking
POOR CHOICES

A while back I linked to D.C.-based filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake, whose blog, Filmmaking for the Poor, covers a range of no-budget film topics. Today GreenCine draws my attention to his site again with this link to a good post for the New Year: Ekanayake’s picks for “10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2006.” There are a few obvious choices here, talented filmmakers who he’s eager to see what they do next. Miranda July, Andrew Bujalski and Caveh Zahedi fit into this category. But then there are people I don’t know as well, like Amir Motiagh, Andrew Dickson, and Elizabeth Nord. And […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 26, 2005 Filmmaking

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