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Bastards — A Hammer To Nail Review
(Bastards is being released theatrically on Wednesday, October 23, 2013 and on iTunes and VOD two days later, through Sundance Selects. It world premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.) Arguably the most muscular of contemporary cineastes, Claire Denis engineers some of the richest filmic experiences that viewers can treat themselves to — or punish themselves with. Denis’ work contains soothing and unsettling multitudes, but for the sake of making heads or tails of her latest feature, Bastards, let’s posit that throughout her career she has generally alternated between two modes: one is mellow, sensual, drift-like and attuned to the […]
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21st Century Writer’s Room
The last few years have seen a rise in filmmakers who are extending the stories they tell beyond a single medium. At the same time, festivals, schools and organizations are starting to nurture work that mixes story and code. Tribeca has a program called Storyscapes, which highlights new trends in digital media and recognizes cross-platform approaches to story creation. While Sundance’s New Frontier section has highlighted experiments in storytelling since 2007, they recently added a Story Lab to help incubate forward-thinking, platform-agnostic projects. At Columbia University, where I teach, we are in the process of developing a digital storytelling lab […]
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Primal Direction
Meaning. The craving for meaning. Art and its ability to create experiences of meaning. Whether they seem all too prosaic or winsomely sincere, these words nevertheless constitute the unabashed core of an intensive, 17-session filmmaking lab series housed in a large, high-ceilinged studio in Hollywood and led by an impassioned woman named Joan Scheckel. In practical terms, the lab sessions are dedicated to helping filmmakers clarify their vision, hone their craft and develop a functional set of tools for the production process, which is all well and good. But what makes the lab sessions extraordinary is Scheckel herself. Over the […]
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Space Invaders
In September, LA Game Space finally loosed Experimental Game Pack 01 upon the world. Fifteen bucks to Kickstarter, and you’ll find yourself in possession of 23 strange, disturbing, funny, moving, sad and psychedelic games from some of the world’s best and most promising indie designers. Back-story: It’s 2008. Two guys meet at a conference. The guys are Daniel Rehn and Adam Robezzoli. They’re thinking, you know what the indie game world could use? A space. A real-world physical location for exhibits and events, a speaker series, a research lab and an artist residency. Institutions such as the Museum of the […]
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iOS 7 at the One-Month Mark: 18 Picks and Pans
Apple’s “polarizing” mobile operating system iOS 7, an update which stripped away the skeuomorphism (i.e., the fake leather and other real-world metaphors found in apps like Calendar and Game Center) of previous versions in favor of a “flat” design style, was unveiled by the company on June 10 at its WWDC keynote and pushed to users on September 18. And for the most of this year, the Apple media universe — the parade of blogs and podcasts that have made a mini-industry of commenting upon the Cupertino company — have spoken of little else. But now that the OS is […]
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On Watching Half of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby
In the Fall issue of Filmmaker that went to the printer last week is my coverage of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. But there’s one film — or, rather, half a film — I didn’t write about. I’ll explain, but that involves a detour into a discussion of ’90s experimental theater. The Sarajevo-based Open Stage Obala’s Tattoo Theatre is a lovely work that follows a couple from courtship to old age, tracing their loves, infidelities and reunions with evocative, unexpected imagery. (Old age, for example, is represented by the actors standing face to audience and covering themselves with flour.) […]
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How Much Would You Pay for a Banksy?
How much would you pay for a Banksy? A shot of a Banksy, that is, not the actual work itself. As RobertoofParkSlope’s Instagram documents, the British artist’s New York tour seems to be providing income opportunities for enterprising folks over here.
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The Censors: Short-Haired Women and Long-Haired Men (and a Note on Hegemony)
This third installment of Time Frames draws on The Media History Digital Library, a reservoir of information about early cinema that includes the sorts of magazines, journals, and trade publications that, in the pre-digital era, had only been available to those able to travel to research libraries. At over 800,000 scanned pages and growing, the collection is daunting. In Time Frames I’ll cull through and select a series of images and text from the collection to highlight key transformative moments in the film culture and industry, as well as other oddities and obscure artifacts. Note: click on images to enlarge. Prior to the publication of the […]
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Digital Bolex Report: An Interview with Creative Director Elle Schneider
Elle Schneider, Creative Director at Digital Bolex, spoke about the project at this weekend’s Hacking Arts conference held at MIT’s Media Lab. The Digital Bolex project, the creation of a digital camera that is operated and styled like a 16mm camera, was funded through a Kickstarter Project. Held in March of 2012, the campaign raised twice the $100,000 goal and pre-sold 93 cameras. Schneider announced that they expect the camera will be available to order in six weeks, and they will ship the original orders even sooner. Schneider, who had an early beta version of the camera with her, talked […]
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Meta-Vamping
This second installment of Time Frames draws on The Media History Digital Library, a reservoir of information about early cinema that includes the sorts of magazines, journals, and trade publications that, in the pre-digital era, had only been available to those able to travel to research libraries. At over 800,000 scanned pages and growing, the collection is daunting. In Time Frames I’ll cull through and select a series of images and text from the collection to highlight key transformative moments in the film culture and industry, as well as other oddities and obscure artifacts. In the pre-Code, chaotic world of […]
