Columns
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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 […]
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The Invention of Paramount Pictures
The Media History Digital Library is a goldmine of information about early cinema, 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, and what I plan to do in Time Frames, a five-part series, is 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. It’s perhaps impossible for us not […]
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Day 10 of 16: Chad Hartigan and This is Martin Bonner
In This is Martin Bonner, Chad Hartigan’s second fiction feature, Martin (the wonderful Australian-born, Seattle-based actor Paul Eenhoorn), is heading into life’s third act and attempting to make something of it. Post-divorce, he moves West to Reno, Nevada, where he takes a job as an outreach counselor, offering spiritual guidance to recently paroled ex-cons. Enter Travis (Richmond Arquette), who, rejoining civilian life after doing time for a hit and run, finds himself adrift, unable to fully assimilate and to connect with his now-grown daughter. In Martin he finds an awkward but needed companionship. This is Martin Bonner‘s narrative is a […]
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Filmmaker John Greyson Remains Jailed Inside Cairo Prison
Acclaimed Canadian director John Greyson and Dr. Tarek Loubani remain in a Cairo, Egypt prison following yesterday’s no-show by a prosecutor scheduled to meet with lawyers for the two men. Greyson and Loubani were arrested on August 16 on their way to Gaza City, where Loubani runs a program training doctors at a local hospital. Greyson was reportedly planning a documentary project. Due to strife in the region, the two extended their stay in Cairo an extra day when they were arrested and held for a 15-day detention period, a stay which ended yesterday. Now, they are being held indefinitely […]
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Shooting With John: Adam Schartoff
I was very nervous about the experience. The idea was to go upstate, about 80 or 90 miles or so north up the Hudson Valley region, to some bucolic spot and shoot guns. Originally we were supposed to shoot skeet but that equipment wasn’t available so we ended up doing target practice. A longtime gun control advocate, I was a bit at the end of my rope. It was November of 2012 and there had been close to 16 mass shootings in the U.S. up to that point including the Batman shooting and the Texas A&M shooting that summer. The […]
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What New Film Has the Most 25 New Faces of All Time?
There are many good reasons to see David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, opening today. Many of those are articulated in David Barker’s interview with Lowery and Anthony Kaufman’s interview with its D.P., Bradford Young, but here’s another: this single film displays the work of more of our 25 New Faces than any other picture. Here’s that list: Jay Van Hoy & Lars Knudson. Now mainstays of the independent scene, New York-based Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen were, in 2006, the first producers to appear on the “25 New Faces” list. At the time the Parts and Labor team […]
