Columns
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Studio 54: The New York Film Festival, Part I
On the evidence of the finest films in the first third of this 54th edition of the New York Film Festival, those familiar with the exhibitionistic, amped-up social set that frolicked in, gawked at, or read about the notorious, dear-departed Manhattan night spot might find it ironic, or a misnomer, that its moniker is my appropriated title for this initial NYFF feature. Sure, Lincoln Center ranks far lower on the cool scale than the legendary club, but, a testament to tenacity, merit, and resilience — how it has managed to survive continuous power struggles and administrative shuffles of parent organization […]
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“Storytelling in VR is Changing What We’re Used to in Traditional Film”: Yelena Rachitsky on Virtual Reality
Is virtual reality beginning to be embraced by the mainstream? The question was raised last weekend at IFP Film Week’s Cinema in the Age of VR panel. Roughly 50 people had gathered at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP in Dumbo to hear from four pioneers working at the forefront of VR. Every year at Film Week, IFP programs The Screen Forward Conference, a six-day event that dissects the current state of independent film. Located this year in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood for the first time, the event features panels that serve as micro think tanks for the film […]
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We Tell Ourselves Franchises in Order to Live
Last weekend I took a trip to the Regal Union Square Stadium 14 and paid seventeen bucks to see Blair Witch. Based on the reviews, I was pretty certain that I wasn’t going to like it very much (spoiler alert: I was right). But still I felt compelled to hop the Q train and head into Manhattan to meet my friend at the multiplex. What brought me out there? Maybe it was the changing weather and its subliminal indication of Halloween’s approach. Maybe it was the faint hope that director Adam Wingard — whose previous work I’ve really dug — would elevate what […]
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GoPro’s Drone and New Cameras
GoPro has announced the newest versions of their action cameras; the Hero5 Black and the Hero5 Session, as well as their own drone, called Karma. Hero5 Black The new Hero5 cameras have the same basic form and shape as the previous Hero4 models — and will fit existing mounts — but amongst other things they add waterproofing (good to 33 feet), so you don’t have to use them inside a plastic shell if you’re worried that they are going to get wet. The Hero5 Black has the same resolution and frame rate of the Hero4, but adds a touchscreen on the back, […]
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“You Don’t Light with Your Meter, You Light with Your Heart”: Gotham DP Crescenzo Notarile
Fitting an interview into a cinematographer’s schedule can be daunting, especially a DP working on a television show that shoots nine months out of the year. You often end up chatting after a long shoot day or during a mid-day tech scout break. Orm in the case of Gotham cinematographer Crescenzo Notarile, you talk a few hours before their name is read at the 68th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. Notarile earned his Emmy nomination for his work on Gotham, Fox’s origin story tracing the early days of cop Jim Gordon and the various heroes and villains that reside in […]
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What Does Netflix’s Algorithm Want?
Back in June, Netflix’s VP of Product Innovation Carlos A. Gomez-Uribe and Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt co-published a paper entitled, “The Netflix Recommender System: Algorithms, Business Value, and Innovation.” It’s a fascinating read, and if you care at all about the future of film as an artform, a fairly troubling one. With their 19-page paper, Gomez-Uribe and Hunt provide a rare peek under the hood of Netflix’s inner-workings and technological developments, and go on to discuss the company’s business priorities and philosophy. The basic takeaway? Netflix has built an insanely complex and powerful recommendation system. This sucker has algorithms […]
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Darker Shades of Grey: The Night Of DP Igor Martinovic
The term “TV coverage” used to be a pejorative, a reference to the mechanical nature of the medium’s visual language. It was shorthand for artlessly cranking out master, two shot, and close-up in order to churn through the high page counts necessary to produce a new episode of television each week. To behold the degree to which the medium’s aesthetics have evolved, look no further than HBO’s The Night Of. Every set-up has purpose. Every composition is storytelling. The details of each frame – where the people are placed, the amount of negative space, the portion in shadow, the plane […]
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Canon Surprises With Two Camera Announcements
Canon has announced two new cameras, one expected, the other a bit of a surprise: the Canon 5D Mark IV and the Canon C700 Cinema Camera. Ever since the amazing success of the Canon 5D Mark II, the announcement of new cameras from Canon has tended to provoke a fairly standard response from bloggers and social media; in their still cameras, the video functions are always considered hobbled in some way, and their video cameras are always too expensive and don’t have the features found in some of the latest cameras. And then Canon sells a boatload of the cameras, […]
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Disbelief: Federico Veiroj’s The Apostate
Barring lapse or conversion, how do you spurn religion? For centuries, Catholics have had a formal means to renounce the Church: apostasy. The tedious process, sometimes ritualized with a walk backwards from the altar to the front entrance, aims to remove all official documents pertaining to one’s baptism. Upon entering adulthood, some practicing laypeople begin to see it as involuntary. They want to own it by revising the past, in spite of the fact that, according to Revelations, a stigma accompanies disavowal: an indelible stain of apostasy, aka the mark of the beast. A de-baptism movement has been under way […]
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Should Documentary Films Have Footnotes?
Part I: Notes on the Footnote “Woe to details! Posterity neglects them all; they are a kind of vermin that undermines large works.” –Voltaire About a year or so ago I began to think about footnotes. First I wondered if I should write footnotes for the film (NUTS!) I was in the final stages of completing. Then I wondered if footnotes might be useful to the field of nonfiction cinema more generally. What purposes might such a practice serve? This question excited me tremendously. It felt unmistakably like an idea whose time had come. I started blabbing ignorantly about footnotes […]
