Columns
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Trumpian Images
“Baby, there’s no storm outside.” —from Take Shelter In his now classic book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Siegfried Kracauer looked for cinematic hints, clues and warnings about the rise of Naziism and Hitler in pre-War Germany. Published by Princeton University Press in 1947 — just two years after the end of the war — his book was among the first to interrogate the deep architecture of film as a psychological state, one that does not directly mirror but rather reflects in a distorted way the “secret history” of mass psychology that, in his […]
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Paradigms of Change
“Let us use our cameras to build our communities, strong, healthy and with joy.” This seemingly low-key imperative serves as a radical foundation for the Black Feminist Film School, an evolving assemblage of tools, traditions and teaching that supports the telling of stories about the Black experience founded and led by scholar/practitioners Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace. Both Gumbs and Wallace can boast a long list of academic credentials. Gumbs holds a doctorate degree in English, African and African-American studies and women and gender studies from Duke University, and she was the first scholar to research the Audre […]
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Dispatches from the Frontlines of a Studio Picture, Part 2
This is my second and final installment detailing a few of the experiences I’ve had and lessons I’ve learned while working on my first studio picture. We wrapped principal photography back in October, so I’ve had a couple months to digest the massive meal that was. Luckily, everyone seems happy with our efforts — which is a big deal, because it’s not just about you and the director feeling good about yourselves at the end of each day. On a studio film as a DP, I have been employed by a pretty major corporation to perform a job in an effort to […]
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Future Vision
Not long ago, I was lucky enough to be seated at lunch alongside Garrett Brown, the 74-year-old Oscar-winning inventor of the Steadicam. We were at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival, where Brown was being honored with the Vision Award. I’m not sure exactly how I ended up at the table, but also seated there was Fabrice Aragno, the young cinematographer responsible for the optical assault of Jean-Luc Godard’s 3-D punk masterpiece Goodbye to Language. It seemed appropriate to have the two side by side. Having operated the camera for Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Sidney Pollock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and […]
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Super 8
The Verso Book of Dissent Some readers may find useful — for contemplation, inspiration and action — this anthology just out from Verso. Edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim, it’s a collection of manifestoes, poems, songs and screeds from the history of opposition to authority. (Verso Books, $14.95, out now). 50 Song Memoir Writing songs for The Magnetic Fields, Stephin Merritt has generally had some kind of thematic guideline for each album: 69 Love Songs (self-explanatory), Distortion (ditto), et al. 50 Song Memoir, his first Fields album since 2012, may seem to be well in keeping with his previous […]
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The Music Fades
With a name like Fortissimo Films, that could have been the company’s unofficial motto in its early years — fortissimo, of course, defined in music terms as an instruction to play notes with force. The 25-year-old international sales company boldly took on challenging arthouse cinema, from the likes of Wong Kar-wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jim Jarmusch, and championed them in global markets with a deafening level of commitment. But earlier this year, the sales company went silent, declaring bankruptcy and signaling not just the end of the respected arthouse giant, but as former Focus Features CEO James Schamus says, “the […]
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Embodied Teaching
The notorious 1964 film Scorpio Rising opens on a tangle of metal, pieces from a disassembled motorcycle, and a young man tinkering with the detritus in a garage. Ricky Nelson sings “Fools Rush In” on the soundtrack as the camera pans lovingly over rugged boots, bulky links of chain, and then down over the back of a leather jacket with the film’s title and director’s name — Kenneth Anger — written in shiny studs. The man wearing the jacket spins around, and we’re suddenly up close both to his crotch and the soft naked skin of his belly. I was […]
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Dispatches from the Frontlines of a Studio Picture, Part 1
Not that long ago, and certainly on my last feature, I would often find myself joking with the gaffer or the key grip: “So if this was a $20 million film, what would we do differently?” Most of the time the answer involved big lighting cranes, custom lightboxes, technocranes and time. Lots and lots of time. On an indie, we are constantly pushed to produce more with less. Thirty-five-day schedules are becoming 28-day schedules. Eight million dollar films are being produced for five. The bar miraculously remains the same — you simply need to squeeze more juice from a smaller fruit. If you […]
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Against the Reality Industrial Complex
In August 2016 Bret Easton Ellis posted this on Twitter: It happened: HBO’s brilliant The Night Of effectively eradicates the notion of the two-hour American theatrical movie. By now this is a familiar refrain: that in the era of long-form television, the quaint notion of trying to tell a complex story in just a couple of hours is all but dead. It’s hard to write a “defense” of movies without coming across as reactionary, nostalgic, elitist, purposefully difficult or just cranky. (Under certain conditions, none of these are bad attributes.) So this isn’t so much a defense of movies as it […]
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Super 8: Randomly Accessed Memories
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry Running from Oct. 25 to Jan. 29 at the Met Breuer — the Metropolitan’s new space for contemporary art, in the building formerly occupied by the Whitney — this is the largest museum exhibition to date of Kerry James Marshall. Marshall, whose work since the early ’80s has encompassed painting and sculpture, has returned repeatedly to questions of African-American representation and identity. This exhibition will predominantly focus on his paintings (72 in all) and is complemented by a sidebar exhibition curated by Marshall from the Met’s holdings rounding up his many and varied influences. Belle Époque in Upper Volta […]
