Before there was RuPaul’s Drag Race, hell, before there was RuPaul, there was the divinely dangerous Divine, actor, singer, drag queen, provocateur extraordinaire. Willing to do not almost anything but anything on screen (including eating dog feces for Pink Flamingos, one of the many films he made with the legendary shocksploitation director, John Waters), all in the name of art. Starting its theatrical run this week at the Cinema Village in NYC and the Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane in Austin, I Am Divine tells the behind-the-scenes story of this force of nature that left no taboo unturned. Filmmaker interviewed the doc’s director, Jeffrey Schwarz, over email. […]
Peaches – government name Merill Nisker – solemnly swears that her career is built upon natural progressions. Yes, the move from one-third of a folk lounge act to electronica’s most preeminent provocateur was not so much calculated as an aligning of experimentation and tastes. And so, when the Hebbel am Ufer theatre in Berlin approached Peaches about directing a show in 2010, the answer was not a “yes” or “no,” but simply, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Following the success of the performance, in which Peaches single-handedly played all of the roles to the piano accompaniment of her longtime collaborator Gonzales, the HAU […]
Over 25 years of directing films, Claire Denis has explored the silent rhythms of men and women as they move through spaces of romance and violence, attraction and solitude in stories that range from the love affairs of cannibals (Trouble Every Day), to the exercises of the French Foreign legion (Beau Travail), to the every day spaces of domesticity (35 Shots of Rum). A filmmaker who prefers monologue to dialogue, and silence to any speech at all, her intimate spaces, impressionistic photography, and oblique scenarios can divide audiences, but provide untold riches for those willing to forgo plot devices and […]
Usually the term “a cast of hundreds” isn’t applied to a film with just two characters. But that’s exactly how to describe Matt Herron’s new feature Audition, an innovative film in which 100 actors — 50 men, 50 women — portray one couple over the course of a torrid romance. The concept is for this narrative story to be told through the documentary process of different actors interpreting the fictional roles (or, conversely, it could be seen as a documentary about acting that conveys a narrative storyline): the original 100 actors are winnowed down as the film progresses until the […]
In the increasingly tony Fort Greene neighborhood just east of downtown Brooklyn, filmmakers Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster raised a son named Idris. Very early on in his youth, just as their son was about to become one of the few young black males to enroll in The Dalton School, a vaunted Upper East Side prep school that either trains young masters of the universe in the ways of maintaining their hegemony or educates a diverse set of the city’s best students in a humane and liberal environment (all depends on your outlook), the couple decided to make a documentary. […]
Just what the hell was the Jejune Institute? After watching Spencer McCall’s fascinating and intentionally puzzling documentary The Institute, I’m still not quite sure. An interactive, multimedia, experiential game, based in a nondescript building in San Francisco’s central business district that thrives of]n the memory of a woman who disappeared into the Bay Area night a quarter century ago and never returned? Perhaps, I guess. A scripted experience surely, an alternate-reality game involving participants in events both spooky and merely bizarre, including scavenger hunts to fairly ominous locales, mock public protests and sundry hijinks that would feel right at home […]
Tokyo Sally is the second narrative feature by director-cinematographer-editor Kal, after his 2010 debut Superhero in the Rain. He’s also a prolific producer of music videos, documentaries, and spots for companies like the Food Network. The Tokyo Sally project, which features Anna Adams, consists of one 60-minute film and a related app, Tokyo Sally: Lost Highway, both of which are nearing completion. Kal envisions the film as the first in a series of ten pictures that will explore different aspects of horror and suspense films; each will be self-contained but, when seen together, will relate to a larger story. The film […]
Mégaphone, an interactive project currently running in Montreal, is designed for a world that’s forgetting that the word social doesn’t necessarily have to precede media. The project seeks to remove the fiber optic interface that currently connects so many of us and move public discourse back into a public space–that is, somewhere outdoors with plenty of foot traffic. Thus it’s built around a pre-Industrial Era public speaking model like Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner in London: anyone can take to the mic to discuss any topic they like (though there is an MC and suggested time slots for certain subjects to […]
Jason Osder’s searing Let the Fire Burn is a look back at a damning chapter in American history, a moment so outrageous and shameful and multifaceted that all our culture could do was turn around and walk the other direction. A found-footage marvel with no narration and sparse title cards, it dives into the maelstrom that was the Philadelphia police’s tragic raid on the black separatist group MOVE’s West Philadelphia compound in 1985, during which the home, where 13 men, women and children lived, was fired upon 10,000 times, doused with enormous amounts of water and then finally firebombed, an event […]
“I really want to say that we are all connected,” Jia Zhangke said Monday night. “This is our issue.” If that makes his latest film, A Touch Of Sin, sound like some sort of Chinese Crash redux, it’s just a quirk of phrasing: the connection Zhangke’s thinking of is an epidemic of violence in China, which he describes as a response of the economically dispossessed trying to reclaim some form of dignity. Viewed as isolated actions, the four violent incidents dramatized in A Touch Of Sin might seem like singular occurrences; stitched together, they’re obviously connected symptoms of Chinese society […]