Columns
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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 […]
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“For One of the Head Explosions We Only Had Four Heads”: Joe Begos on The Mind’s Eye
Made for just $50,000, Joe Begos’ feature debut Almost Human (2013) landed a slot at the Toronto International Film Festival, secured distribution, and earned a bit of critical praise for its Carpenter-influenced chills. For his follow-up The Mind’s Eye, the multi-hyphenate (Begos wrote, directed, produced, and photographed) had six times the budget at his disposal. That money brought a few changes – such as paying the crew and expanding the shooting schedule to a robust 37 days. Other things stayed the same, like shooting in Begos’ home state of Rhode Island. Like using practical effects. Like leaving enough blood stains […]
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A History of the Fan Mutation, YouTube’s Strangest Art Movement
There’s something comforting about TV show opening credit sequences. In the era of the binge watch, we don’t necessarily need them every single episode. (I mean, we all know what we’re about to watch, don’t we?) But a great credit sequence can serve as a palette cleanser. The cue that we’re about to see something familiar, something we trust. It’s almost Pavlovian. And few opening credit sequences are as comforting as The Simpsons. Sure, that show, which is about to enter its 28th season, is about two decades past its prime. But when we hear Danny Elfman’s theme music, when […]
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Shooting While Skating: DP Steve Holleran on The Land
In the opening scene of The Land, an unseen guidance counselor lays out possible futures for the film’s four high school protagonists. It’s lives as mechanics and welders, blue-collar jobs that once promised entrance into a thriving middle class that no longer exists. With dreams of escaping the urban decay of Cleveland as sponsored skateboarders, the boys instead chose a less legal path. And anyone familiar with the “at-risk youth” movies of the 1990s – from Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society to Kids, Hurricane Streets, Juice, and Straight Out of Brooklyn – knows that path doesn’t end […]
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Freeze Frame: In Order of Disappearance
A blond, fair-skinned Swedish actor playing a petit-bourgeois Swede of the old school who resurfaces in the Norway of the overnight economic miracle, the ubiquitous Stellan Skarsgard looks as blank in Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland’s determinedly revisionist In Order of Disappearance as the snow-covered swaths atop the rural roadwork his Nils Dickman rips through at the helm of his commanding danger-signal-yellow snow plough. The 2014 masterwork is only now making its long-awaited U.S. debut. The color matches the baggy waterproof overalls that keep Nils’s sizable frame dry, and is just about the only hue outside of white visible during […]
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“I Think Filmmaking Can Also Be as Simple as Being a Good Person to Those Around You”: Paola Mottura on Film Markets and Support Programs
In 1996, Chris Kraus traveled to Germany to attend the Berlin Film Festival. Even though the Berlinale rejected her experimental film, she was invited to screen it at the European Film Market, the business epicenter of the festival. “A profitable trade show in which product deemed unsuitable for the Festival is bought and sold,” is how Kraus later described the EFM in her 2000 book, Aliens & Anorexia. Arriving in Berlin with neither pre-arranged business meetings, networking contacts, nor party invites, the EFM was “like Room 101 in Orwell’s 1984, a cavalcade of horrors where you confront your deepest fears,” […]
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The Filmmaker’s Guide to Emotional Validation
Last week I released collective:unconscious, a feature film I’ve been working on for the past two years onto the internet. The project is a collaboration with five of my favorite American filmmakers, and it’s a pretty strange and unique thing. We decided early on in the process to give the film away for free because we wanted as many people as possible to see it. Shortly after we let the film loose, the views started to pile up. And with it, the “Social” tab on my Gmail was flooded with alerts that people were “liking” my video. And then that […]
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“Style is the Culmination of Your Mistakes”: Cinematographer Sean Porter on Green Room
Early in Green Room – before the carnage ramps its way toward a violent, chaotic crescendo – there’s a close-up of a record player spinning haplessly in the foreground while the out-of-focus shape of Anton Yelchin’s punk bassist stirs in the background’s dawn light. The opening act of Green Room is replete with these moments of lyricism, the culmination of which amplify the tragedy when the machetes are unsheathed and the dogs unleashed. When the lives of Yelchin’s bandmates are extinguished, we feel the weight of it because we’ve glimpsed the poetry, the slivers of grace, within them. Set largely […]
