Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
Highpoint, The Lodger and Zaza: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
One of the most flat-out entertaining action-comedies of the 1980s — and one of the most inexplicably obscure — is now available on Blu-ray thanks to the good people at indie label Code Red. Highpoint (1982) stars Richard Harris as an unemployed accountant who finds himself at the center of a wild adventure involving the CIA, organized crime and a wealthy family whose members include a brother who has faked his own death (Christopher Plummer) and a sister with whom Harris falls in love (Beverly D’Angelo). The increasingly elaborate plot is gleefully silly and spectacularly amusing, anchored by Harris’ witty […]
-
Credit Risk: Student Debt’s Impact on Post-University Film Careers
“My credit isn’t what it used to be,” admits Fabian Euresti, who graduated from the film directing program at California Institute of the Arts in 2010. A child of farm laborers in the San Joaquin Valley, Euresti made shorts, including 2010’s Everybody’s Nuts, that have played at prestigious film festivals in Europe (Vienna, Oberhausen, Tampere) and the U.S. (Los Angeles, Full Frame), but he’s currently got more than $100,000 in student debt and remains without a steady job to pay it down. “Knowing what I know now,” says Euresti, “I would have been more diligent in procuring grants and scholarships […]
-
Beyond the Boundaries of Language
In recent memory, there’s been a never-ending deluge of bad news for the arts and humanities in the U.S.: government support, which is already low, may be cut entirely; universities, facing budget crises, have axed language and arts programs; prominent professors spend their time writing books defending the basic value of humanistic inquiry, while their pecuniary graduate students fight for poverty wages as adjuncts, and earn a little money on the side writing articles about their plight. In the midst of all this, I was struggling to put together a dissertation proposal — it was something on the history of […]
-
Commercials: Acting School for the Rest of Us
I didn’t work in the ad world for a long time. I remember always being a bit jealous of my DP friends who somehow found their way on that path early on, usually through music videos. I dabbled in music videos but kept coming back to to narrative shorts and crewing on features instead. Years later I was shooting features of my own. Meanwhile those DPs had really gained ground in commercials, shooting for Mercedes, Nike, Adidas. Anytime we’d catch up, the grass was always greener: “I want to shoot ads!” I’d say. “I want to shoot movies!” they’d say. […]
-
Twin Peaks, Episodes 5 & 6: Five Notes (The Number Means Nothing)
Having watched episodes 1-4 in one marathon session, what I expected is true: the new Twin Peaks is considerably less satisfying taken in one distanced hour at a time. This needs sustained duration to really breathe. I’m not fool enough to try to parse What It All Means at this time, but five stray notes: I seriously doubt David Lynch has spent more than, at most, five seconds in his life wondering if he’s doing something too “difficult” or inaccessible for a hypothetical viewer. It’s been both unsurprising and mildly annoying to read umpteen TV recappers who — unable to go about their […]
-
The American Film Theatre, Another Woman, Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie and More: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
In the early 1970s, producers Edie and Ely Landau launched the American Film Theatre, a project designed to bring filmed adaptations of great stage plays to the masses. It was a fairly bold idea at the time given the business and technology of distribution: each filmed play would play simultaneously on around 500 screens, for one showing only — something similar to what Fathom Events does today, only without the benefit of digital exhibition. The productions were financed by a combination of corporate sponsorship and subscription ticketing in which audiences bought advance tickets for an entire season of films, like […]
-
Night School Director: “Why I (Only) Make Films in the Midwest”
With Oscilloscope releasing his latest documentary, Night School, this Friday in New York at the IFC Center and June 23 at the Laemmle Theater in Los Angeles (with nationwide roll-out to follow), filmmaker Andrew Cohn posts this guest essay about his choice to make films largely in America’s heartland. Here he recounts his experience making his previous film, Medora, and how it made him question the motives and strategies many non-fiction filmmakers bring to their depiction of Midwestern subjects. Oscilloscope will donate a portion of all proceeds from ticket sales to educational initiatives at Goodwill Industries’ McClelland Scholars, the organization […]
-
Even Fire Walk With Me‘s Deleted Scenes Are Important to the New Twin Peaks
Warning: If you haven’t seen both seasons of Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me and the first five episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return – turn around. David Lynch warned us. Weeks before the revival of his surrealist soap opera, Variety reported that Fire Walk With Me would be “very important” to understanding Twin Peaks: The Return. Five episodes in, it’s clear Lynch wasn’t kidding. Even fans of the original series who plowed through the maligned second season – overcoming Confederate flags and pine weasels – have found themselves baffled by references to Phillip Jeffries, the Blue Rose, or the Owl Cave Ring. Fire Walk With Me, we’ve […]
-
Panasonic Announces a Sub $10,000 Large Sensor, Inter-Changeable Lens Camera – the AU-EVA1
At NAB Panasonic hinted at a camera that would fit between the GH5 and their Varicam models, and now they’ve announced the AU-EVA1, which will ship in the fall. Back in 2010 Panasonic was one of the first companies to release a sub-$10,000 “large-sensor” video camera with interchangeable lenses. Remember that Canon had only released the 5D Mark II in late 2008 and had — much to their surprise — unleashed HD video with large-sensor cameras. Above I put the large-sensor in quotes because Panasonic’s AG-AF100 used the micro 4/3 lens mount. This gave you a larger sensor than you […]
-
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, Ghost World and The Last Word: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Martin Scorsese famously considered becoming a priest before taking another path, and he clearly never lost the evangelical impulse. In the 38 years since Scorsese used his influence and finances to restore and rerelease Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, he has done more to spread the gospel of cinema than any other director in film history, devoting countless hours to film preservation and education while simultaneously amassing a body of work that in its breadth, depth, and quality rivals that of any of the masters his scholarly efforts aspire to honor. In 2007 Scorsese embarked on one of his most important […]
