Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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More than Social Media High-Fives: Execs and Creators Talk the New Audiovisual Magazine, Topic
“Making movies is really me feeling like I shouldn’t be writing something on Facebook,” Jim Cummings says. “It’s taking that energy and making a short film that can be a timeless thing.” When Topic commissioned the writer, producer, director, actor to make a short film series for the website’s inaugural launch in July, Cummings knew exactly the ideas he wanted to pitch — all subjects dealing with epidemics happening in America that were “going kind of unnoticed.” Within five weeks after meeting Topic Studio’s Nick Borenstein at his SXSW screening of The Robbery, Cummings had not only sculpted his ideas […]
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Orson Welles’s The Stranger and John Farrow’s The Sea Chase: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video
I’ve always been mystified by the relative lack of attention and acclaim Orson Welles’ 1946 thriller The Stranger has received compared with the director’s better known efforts, since on just about every level it’s top-tier Welles. Perhaps Welles’ own denigration of the picture, which he saw as an impersonal assignment designed to restore his box-office credibility after The Magnificent Ambersons, is to blame. It’s a genre film, sure, but then so is Touch of Evil, which many Welles enthusiasts (myself included) consider to be every bit as important in the director’s oeuvre as Citizen Kane. The Stranger is actually a […]
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When Life Becomes a Movie
The man in the white fedora is photographing his fettuccine. Later, he’ll put a filter on it and post it to Instagram while he’s on the toilet. Girls from Tokyo line up against a mural of Malcom X, then turn around, asses out, Kardashian style. A young man on the corner is videoing himself and addresses his followers with a “Hi guys.” He points his phone at a chihuahua on the corner and says, “This is everything!” He reaches down, the chihuahua bares its teeth. That last part will be edited out. Mark Zuckerberg is in his lab again, this […]
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David Lynch and the Nightmarish Meanings of his Hollywood Star Casting
In episode four of Twin Peaks: The Return, an older gentleman has an obscure conversation with Gordon Cole (David Lynch) as he escorts him to the office of FBI Chief of Staff, Denise Bryson (David Duchovny). Their scene together is short but just by his brief appearance Richard Chamberlain evokes a mass of associations in the viewers who recognizes him, maybe as Cannon Films’ Allen Quartermain, maybe as the ambitious priest with impure thoughts of Rachel Ward in The Thornbirds, or maybe as Julie Christie’s husband in Petulia. An icon of classic television thanks to his performance in the prime-time […]
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First Reformed: Paul Schrader vs. Slow Cinema
In an interview in March, Paul Schrader questioned the ongoing usefulness of Slow Cinema. “It had a real interesting moment in the last 10 years, but now the novelty has worn off, and people are not as mesmerized as they were when the slowness was really being used as a new concept of film time,” he said. “It’s a dead end. […] There are still bits of transcendental style. It was a precursor to slow cinema, but it’s not really that slow. A terrific film like Silent Light is closer to transcendental style than slow cinema, but they lump it in […]
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SFFILM Announces Major New Suite of Artist Development Programs
SFFILM, the presenter of the San Francisco International Film Festival, has announced two new artist development programs as well other grants and partnerships. Supporting producers will be the New American Producer Fellowship, a program for a producer who has recently immigrated to the United States. Supported by the Flora Family Foundation and intended to “provide a stage for the perspectives of underrepresented filmmakers and to enrich the understanding, empathy, and curiosity of the general public,” the Fellowship will provide a $25,000 cash grant as well as an artist residency at SFFILM’s FilmHouse. The new Women, Peace and Security Fellowship, supported […]
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Trailer Watch: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Yance Ford, a 2011 Filmmaker 25 New Face, premiered his feature documentary debut Strong Island at Sundance this year, and the film’s new trailer has just dropped from Netflix. One of this year’s essential docs, Strong Island is a formally assured, highly thoughtful examination of racial injustice, family tragedy and the complexities of memory and grief. Filmmaker Contributing Editor Brandon Harris wrote about the film earlier this year at The New Yorker: In the annals of cinematic memoir, there are very few films like Yance Ford’s Strong Island, a stylish and wrenching rumination on familial grief that had its première […]
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Bull, Season One, Duel in the Sun and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
The best new television series of the 2016-2017 season arrived on DVD last week in the form of CBS/Paramount’s Bull: Season One package. A smart, stylish and very funny drama with a killer pedigree – Donnie Brasco and Quiz Show writer Paul Attanasio is one of the show’s creators, Steven Spielberg is an executive producer, and indie auteur Rodrigo Garcia directed the pilot – Bull reinvents and reinvigorates both the procedural and the courtroom drama with consistent verbal wit, visual elegance and one of the most compelling protagonists in the history of television. The show focuses on Jason Bull (Michael […]
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So You Can’t Afford a Wardrobe Designer: Costume Design for Independent Film on a $500 Budget
“Microbudget filmmaking” is a bit of a misnomer considering the broad spectrum “microbudget” entails — one producer’s $5,000 line item is another’s entire operating budget. In a perfect world, we’d all have sufficient funds to hire the best and brightest among us and no project would be too scrappy. Unfortunately, when it comes to independent productions, sometimes that old chestnut still applies: if you want something done, you have to do it yourself. I learned this lesson the (somewhat hard) way when I directed my first feature, A Feast of Man. With an operating budget of $15,000 – a combination of […]
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Twin Peaks: The Return: Last Looks Before the End
I took a break from writing about Twin Peaks: The Return to let things shake down a bit, but now seems like a good time to make a few more notes before the end. The first 2.25 of 18 parts were almost total abstraction, and it seemed a matter of necessity to largely abandon that mode for extended stretches before increasingly reintegrating it. We seemed, for a long time, very far from where we started, but The Return has allowed for increasing interventions of the abstract and fantastical alongside its rising dramatic arcs, which have finally run long enough to allow nearly […]
