Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Like Sand Through the Hourglass: Twin Peaks: The Return
In the 1970s, the experimental filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos wrote a piece called “Towards a Complete Order of the Temenos.” In the years that followed, he began to take all of his previously made films and tear them apart frame by frame, taking the pieces and parts — along with newly shot footage and black and white leader — to create what would be his final project, ENIAIOS. The career-spanning contents of the film were combined and alternated to form an epic flicker film encompassing a lifetime of materials and ideas. The project, an 80-hour cycle of films, was completed but not […]
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Five Ideas Regarding Twin Peaks: The Return (Parts 7-9)
1. The Return of the Dead: Everybody is understandably enjoying the new Twin Peaks’ end credit sequences. In an utterly unexpected twist, David Lynch has decided to take us once a week to either The Road House or the Bang Bang Club to play us out with a musical guest. This is a strange enough maneuver all on its own. How many non-variety shows feature a different musical act each week, enfolding them however lightly into the story-world? (Honestly, The Young Ones is the last comparison I can think of. Any others?) And Lynch and partner Mark Frost have proven […]
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Twin Peaks: A Language More Powerful Than Words
Of all the remarkable aspects of Twin Peaks: The Return, perhaps the strangest is not something that is present, but something that’s absent: the utter lack of any recognizable psychology. Characters simply aren’t motivated by the familiar psychological archetypes and cliches that underpin almost all narrative entertainment, especially series-based television. It’s not so much that the plot is inscrutable or resistant to interpretation, but that characters react to what’s happening around them in ways that look and feel familiar, but which betray little if anything of what’s going on in their heads. As opposed to shows like House of Cards […]
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The First Rule of Twin Peaks Recapping? Write Down the Facts
For the past several months I’ve been privileged to write the weekly reviews of Showtime’s Twin Peaks revival for The New York Times. It’s been rewarding, week after week, to plug into the mind of director David Lynch, explore the skewed universe he’s built with writer Mark Frost and understand how the show’s version of modern life offers its own interpretation of humanity’s majesty and misery. Critics often get asked if scrutinizing art makes it harder to enjoy, but I’ve always found the opposite to be true, especially when it comes to writing regularly about a TV series. When you’re […]
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Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther Series: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
In 1963, Blake Edwards was set to direct The Pink Panther with a cast that consisted of David Niven, Ava Gardner and Peter Ustinov — all big stars at the time. The movie was a comedy about a French detective obsessed with catching a jewel thief — not realizing that the thief was sleeping and collaborating with the detective’s wife the whole time. What looked like a debacle — Gardner and Ustinov backing out of the film just days before production — ended up changing film history and Edwards’ career, not to mention the career of Ustinov’s replacement, Peter Sellers. […]
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From the Ashes: Seeing Coal Clearly
The Tribeca Film Festival selection From the Ashes, a documentary on the U.S. coal industry and the “war on coal,” directed by Michael Bonfiglio, is available for viewing free online this week through July 3. Katherine Oliver, who executive produced along with Jon Kamen, Joe Berlinger, Justin Wilkes and Dave Marcus, pens the following guest essay on the film, its issues, and the reasons why Bloomberg Philanthropies got behind the production. (Oliver is also a board member of IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization.) From the Ashes can be viewed at multiple sites now. If a picture is worth a thousand words, […]
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LumaFusion Ups the iPad Video Editing Game
The iPad is my favorite device of all time, yet, after a brief stab at writing and editing for this site on it when the first iPad came out, I pretty much gave up on it as a productivity device. I’m waiting for iOS 11 to see if that changes — I suspect for me it won’t, actually; I’m too committed to my multi-window writing workflow. But one app I may try to play around with is the new Luma Fusion, which looks like an impressive leap over iMovie and other iPad video editors. Here’s 9 to 5 Mac’s Jeff […]
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Twin Peaks, Parts 7-8: Re VFX and Almost Nothing More
I’ve got zip (that I want) to say (at this time) about Twin Peaks parts seven and eight in terms of The Bigger Picture, but I do want to delve into episode eight’s widely-presumed anomalous status — that it marked an unprecedented event not just in TV (true, I’m pretty sure) but in larger visual culture. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many recappers, while clearly over their heads, are baseline sympathetic to finding themselves routinely unmoored, even if that means repeating over and over that this is closer to “avant-garde art” than normal TV to meet the word count. My feed […]
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Reflections from a First-Time Director After Shooting All These Small Moments
Melissa Miller-Costanzo recently wrote for Filmmaker about how she moved from below-the-line production work as an art department coordinator to the writer/director of an independent feature, All These Small Moments. Here, she follows up that article with this reflective piece about all the things she learned on her 18-day first-time shoot. “Okay, here’s some dialogue, we won’t hear it, it’s just something so your mouths will be moving. You’re coming home from a parent-teacher conference and discussing your son’s issues; that’s why you’re together.”Alright, and ACTION! “Um, Melissa,” a PA walkie’d me from outside while I watched the monitor inside. […]
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The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs and Eight Million Ways to Die: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
It’s been a good few months for Sam Peckinpah fans, as several films that were previously only available on standard-def DVDs with serviceable transfers have started appearing on Blu-ray. In an earlier column I recommended Warner Archive’s exquisite pressing of Ride the High Country, and now the label has released an upgrade of another essential Peckinpah film, The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Released in 1970 on the heels of The Wild Bunch, it’s a softer, more humanist movie than audiences were expecting from “Bloody Sam” — a sweet, reflective tale of the rise and fall of an American dreamer (beautifully […]
