With a background in comedy shorts, you’d be forgiven if you thought Josh Greenbaum’s first feature, a documentary that follows the 7 and 8-year old competitors in the World Championships of Junior Golf, would be a dark look at another group of driven parents. But that’s not what Greenbaum was interested in doing. Instead, he focuses on the children, these pre-teens who can, at turns, appear tremendously adult, or just like any other 7-year old. The Short Game follows eight competitors through last year’s championships, though production actually started a year before at the previous championships. That was where they […]
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. […]
12 Years a Slave — the title of Steve McQueen’s latest, taken from its source material, the Solomon Northup memoir — is one of the most direct and descriptive of recent cinema history. But consider further the subtitle of Northup’s 1853 book: “Narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana.” It’s one of the film’s extraordinary achievements that, as it lands in theaters nationwide with the headwinds of an Oscar frontrunner, it tells, on its most basic level, that story. […]
Gordon Willis, the legendary cinematographer who shot The Godfather and Annie Hall, reveals in this clip from Craft Truck‘s cinematographer series how to be a valuable crew member and the norm of the relationship between the director and d.p. Watch the full interview here.
Zach Zamboni, a cinematographer on Anthony Bourdain’s series Parts Unknown, recently spoke about his philosophy of shooting and being creative at an event in Boston. Particularly intriguing was his description of shooting an episode using just two prime lenses and his interest in shooting with Super 16 lenses on the Sony F55. About cameras, Zamboni said that he doesn’t believe one camera is “right or wrong” for a job. “The choice of camera will inform the lenses I’m going to put on that camera,” he remarked. “Those lenses will inform my behavior with that camera, and that will start to […]
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 […]