Columns
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25 Sentences
1. Inspired by a small pantheon of icons — Chantal Akerman, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger — I sought rage and radiance together. 2. In the 19th century, the light on the far edges of the magnetic spectrum was dubbed “invisible light.” 3. But then I returned to her films —those of Chantal Akerman — hunched over the computer, watching frame-by-frame, excerpting image after image to create grids, comparisons, my own small compositions. 4. By rearranging the coordinates of space and time, he — media artist Daniel Crooks — creates a city in perpetual evolution, its times and spaces offering up new […]
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No New Waves
I love movements, manifestos, new waves and artistic revolutions. While studying film in New York City in the early 1990s, I was inspired by the French New Wave, enamored by Italian Neorealism and provoked by the New German Cinema. But something exciting was also happening in the United States at that time: There was the Black New Wave, the New Queer Cinema. Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs was about to open in theaters, ushering in, for better or for worse, a flurry of low-budget, testosterone-fueled crime dramas. A few years later, my mind was blown by Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, […]
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Revolutionary Memories and Defiant Promises
Late Fame In 1895, Arthur Schnitzler wrote Late Fame, a satirical novella about an obscure civil servant who arrives home one day to find an earnest young visitor informing him that Wanderings, a slim volume he published 30 years ago, is now a cult hit among the youth. In an ironic twist, the book itself disappeared for 100 years, only to be now rediscovered. Late Fame was written for the literary magazine Die Zeit, which wanted the manuscript cut down; after being laid aside for over a century, it was first published in Germany in 2014. The NYRB Classics original […]
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Credit Risk: Student Debt’s Impact on Post-University Film Careers
“My credit isn’t what it used to be,” admits Fabian Euresti, who graduated from the film directing program at California Institute of the Arts in 2010. A child of farm laborers in the San Joaquin Valley, Euresti made shorts, including 2010’s Everybody’s Nuts, that have played at prestigious film festivals in Europe (Vienna, Oberhausen, Tampere) and the U.S. (Los Angeles, Full Frame), but he’s currently got more than $100,000 in student debt and remains without a steady job to pay it down. “Knowing what I know now,” says Euresti, “I would have been more diligent in procuring grants and scholarships […]
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Currents and Currencies
Ophélia Claude Chabrol was the first member of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd to direct a feature film with Le Beau Serge in 1958, and he scored the first box-office hit of the French New Wave with his second movie, Les Cousins (1959). Yet it took almost another 10 years for him to hit his commercial and critical stride with a series of thrillers (most notably La Femme Infidele, La Rupture and Le Boucher) that would firmly establish Chabrol as the most reliable genre stylist of his generation. In between were a series of flops and for-hire assignments, all of […]
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Editor’s Letter
As a number of our filmmaker readers wrap up classes and prepare to head into their senior year, whether high school or college, the question of film school arises. What’s the utility of film school in a time in which the very notion of film — or, perhaps, work within the film industry — is changing so much? This issue, Filmmaker brings you a suite of articles looking at a number of issues facing film schools — and, by extension, their students — today. Calum Marsh considers a number of broad trends affecting schools in this time of disruption, from […]
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Reactionary Wokeness
Near the beginning of Peter Watkins’s still-astounding 1971 fictional dystopian documentary Punishment Park, one of the African-American defendants, Lee Robert Brown, is hauled in handcuffs before a makeshift, extra-legal tribunal in the sweltering California desert, where he is instructed to defend his counter-cultural militancy. He says, in part: “You talk as if this is some great, civilized, nonviolent place. It ain’t. America is as psychotic as it is powerful and violence is the only goddamned thing that will command your attention.” These lines floated to the top of my head while sitting though James Mangold’s Logan, widely praised for its […]
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Commercials: Acting School for the Rest of Us
I didn’t work in the ad world for a long time. I remember always being a bit jealous of my DP friends who somehow found their way on that path early on, usually through music videos. I dabbled in music videos but kept coming back to to narrative shorts and crewing on features instead. Years later I was shooting features of my own. Meanwhile those DPs had really gained ground in commercials, shooting for Mercedes, Nike, Adidas. Anytime we’d catch up, the grass was always greener: “I want to shoot ads!” I’d say. “I want to shoot movies!” they’d say. […]
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Incoherent Cinema
In his 1986 book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, film theorist Robin Wood explored, in a chapter entitled “The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the ’70s,” just how and why so many seminal films of that era were — ideologically — incoherent, unable to maintain a sustained and coherent vision of their protagonists as well as their fictive worlds. Wood did not mean incoherent in a pejorative sense; he wasn’t referring to movies that “failed” or that were poorly made. And he wasn’t talking about films that were deliberately chaotic or incoherent, but rather films that subconsciously reflected and distorted larger […]
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The Trump Effect
When Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, writer-director Barry Jenkins and his team weren’t the only ones celebrating. For many filmmakers, the Moonlight triumph was both a victory for indies but also a rebuke against the racism, sexism and prejudice of Trump’s America. It was, perhaps, the entertainment industry’s biggest embrace of “the Resistance” yet. But the Trump regime isn’t just affecting awards shows and celebrity Twitter accounts. Financiers and producers speak about an uncertain marketplace, fueled by the wild vacillations of the Trump presidency, which has the ability to both hinder and bolster independent films. Yellow Bear […]
