Columns
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Editor’s Letter
Many years ago I was invited to be the co-editor of The Off-Hollywood Report, the precursor magazine to Filmmaker, by its new editor, James Schamus. To start me off, James handed me a long-form assignment. He told me about several UCLA film school students who were skipping their thesis shorts and going straight ahead to making no-budget features while in school. I talked to a number of them, including Caveh Zahedi, whose first feature (directed with Greg Watkins), was just one of these films — A Little Stiff — and that feature appeared in our first issue. So, I’m finding […]
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Into the Cut: Is Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups the Perfect Movie for our Instagram Era?
We are approaching the 50th anniversary of the publication of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage (was it a printing error, or a pun?), the book that put the phrase on the map, and whose ideas McLuhan had first advanced in his 1964 book Understanding Media. There he argued that “the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” And, later: “Nobody is interested in TV until there are TV […]
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Investing in Change: The Ghetto Film School
Just after the Oscar nominations in 2015, Derrick Cameron wrote a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter titled “How to Fix the Oscars: Take a Cue from the Sports World and Fix the Talent Pool” in which he argued that “we have not invested in developing new voices in American cinema, particularly from communities that reflect our various cultures.” In contrast, Cameron and a team of other passionate educators have worked for more than a decade to make precisely that investment. They are the team responsible for Ghetto Film School. Founded in 2000 by Joe Hall in the South Bronx, […]
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Pregnant Pauses: Connecting the Dots Between Giving Birth and Film Production
You probably hear stuff like this all the time: “Focus on the journey, not the destination.” Or, “It’s not where you go but how you get there.” And better yet: “Don’t get attached to outcome.” Many philosophical and motivational figures throughout the ages have identified the way or how as being arguably more significant than the what or where. These ideas are immensely applicable to filmmaking, and they have guided my philosophies about life more broadly for a long time, leading to some challenging and surprising points along the way. But is it always that simple? Does outcome not matter, at least as […]
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Super 8: Barth, Black and Birzeit
Black Editions Since the ’80s, Japan’s P.S.F. Records has attained cultish status for the wide variety of avant-garde-leaning jazz, psychedelic and sheerly unclassifiable music it’s released. Acid Mothers Temple and Ghost are among the eclectic array of musicians championed by label founder Hideo Ikeezumi, who’s never shied away from following his philosophy: “I only release what I like.” Now, the new label Black Editions will be bringing that catalogue to the states, in the process releasing many of P.S.F.’s records to vinyl for the first time. Bruce Sterling’s SXSW Interactive Closing Remarks “Most of the joy in your life is […]
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Hits & Misses: How Seven Films from Sundance 2015 Performed
The health and identity of American independent cinema has always been difficult to gauge and define, but Sundance is our default arbiter and explainer. Of course, indie film exists far beyond the limits of Park City in January, but the festival gives the nebulous American indie sector a test sample — and as any scientist will tell you, that’s the first step in making an accurate hypothesis. So what can the films of Sundance 2015 clarify about the state of American indies, now and in the future? Some trends can be attributed to random cycles and one-time events, but there […]
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To Protect and Preserve
How’s this for the elements of an amazing education: an internship at the studio of David Byrne, independent study with experimental filmmaker Jem Cohen and a thesis project dedicated to assessing and organizing all of the videos documenting the live shows of the band Fugazi? The education then results in a freelance gig organizing Sonic Youth’s archive, which eventually leads to a position as a media conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, where, on any given day, you might be reviewing the museum’s video collection or prepping for an expansive survey of the incredible work of Bruce Conner. This […]
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“Sorry” isn’t a Solution: On Mistakes and Film Sets
Mistakes don’t really have a place on a film set. Sets are engineered for performance under pressure, engaging dozens and dozens of professionals, from producers to PAs, to do their best work in order to get the shot, make the day and finish the film on time — all while maintaining a good attitude and supporting the creative process. A good set is a well-oiled machine, with a cinematographer at, or near, the center. As a DP, you are interacting with just about every on-set department. Your job is to make everyone look good, and not just with your lighting! […]
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Underground Desires
Probably like a lot of people, I loved underground cinema before I knew there was a name for it. My first encounter with the term was in a book that only used the word once, and not in relation to a certain category of films but a specific film: Underground U.S.A. (1980) directed by Eric Mitchell, who had acted in several Amos Poe films, most notably The Foreigner (1978). The book was Midnight Movies (1983) by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose sharp, knife-like prose and generous, half- and full-page black-and-white frame enlargements worked to construct — if this is […]
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Reality, Boxed and “The New China”
Dropkick.sh Our lives are becoming a game of measures and countermeasures, our daily journeys an assortment of micro-decisions as we alternately dispense and protect our most private information. But while some of us may consent to Internet tracking in order to improve our “advertising experience,” none of us wants to be recorded taking a shower or having sex in an Airbnb. Linux and Mac users can download Dropkick.sh, a script that disables the webcams some hosts have installed to keep tabs on their apartment renters. (https://julianoliver.com/output/log_2015-12-18_14-39) Google Cardboard With Oculus Rift slower to take hold in the consumer world and […]
