Columns
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The Union Between DPs and Operators
“And that’s when he started yelling into the phone. No, no, no!” My agent laughed a little bit as he retold the story. The union rep was on the other end of the line, and he wasn’t very happy. “Apparently I was the third person to call him about it,” he said. It was three days before principal photography was slated to begin on my current project, and IA600 had made it painfully clear that there was no way they were letting me touch the camera. For many of us indie DPs, there has never been a delineation between shooting […]
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Super 8: Class Action
Fox 100th By the time you read this, Fox will be well underway with its “Fox 100th” initiative. To commemorate its 100 years, 20th Century Fox is making 100 of its films available for digital rental (and, in many cases, purchase) in HD. Taking a deep approach to its catalogue rather than focusing on the most obvious titles, the Fox 100 body of titles is overwhelmingly slanted to films made before 1950. Some of these have never been available on home video before, like Raoul Walsh’s vibrantly racist, rowdy and essential 1933 pre-Code drama The Bowery; classic film buffs will […]
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Teaching Virtual Reality
Last year’s New Frontier section of the Sundance Film Festival included 11 virtual reality projects, helping sanction a technology that, like 3-D, has come and gone several times in the past but suddenly seems to be everywhere. Filmmakers, game designers, media artists and storytellers of all kinds are exploring a new language of story experience, while culturally, pundits are pondering the benefits, and problems, of VR, as evidenced in Maria Konnikova’s “Virtual Reality Gets Real” piece in the October 2015 issue of The Atlantic. Last April, The New York Times Magazine took things a step further with a cover for […]
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Blood, Simple
Creative freedom can be a real motherfucker. As anyone who has tried to make something — a story, a poem, a painting, a movie — can attest, the mantra “go ahead, make whatever you want” can lead to paralysis when it comes to actually creating something of distinction. Having unlimited creative options is like having none. There’s a long and rich history in cinema of self-conscious efforts to impose strictures on the filmmaking process, whether it be the Dogme 95 movement, the single-take technique (Victoria, directed by Sebastian Schipper, is a recent example), or the structural limitations imposed by the […]
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Is TV Killing Indie Film?
Is TV usurping independent film? That was one of the main takeaways in a recent Filmmaker Magazine article written by producer Mike S. Ryan (“TV is Not the New Film”). With veteran producers, writers and directors heading to HBO, Netflix and Amazon in droves; with audiences affixed to the latest show recaps; and with film festival programmers dedicating more slots to episodic storytelling, it sure seems so. But if you talk to working indie-film professionals, the question appears to be slightly off the mark. Maybe we shouldn’t be asking whether long-form storytelling is supplanting indie film, but how it’s enabling […]
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Load and Play: Killers, Wage Slaves and Varda in the Sun
Agnès Varda in California Several directors of or related to the French New Wave flirted with Hollywood, from those who actually completed studio pictures (François Truffaut, Jacques Demy) to those whose efforts crashed and burned (most famously Jean-Luc Godard, whose proposed gangster picture with Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton remains one of the most tantalizing unmade films of all time). None of them managed to turn their detours in Los Angeles into as singular a cycle of films as Agnès Varda, whose two periods in the city (in the late ’60s and early ’80s) yielded five highly personal works […]
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Editor’s Letter
“Call me crazy, but I don’t think distribution is the greatest problem facing independent cinema right now,” wrote producer Mike Ryan in these pages back in 2010. In an opinion piece titled “Straight Talk,” Ryan railed against what he saw as an overemphasis in our community on business plans and online marketing at the expense of innovative filmmaking. “Developing content and nurturing auteurs should be our top concern, not figuring out distribution models or revenue schemes,” he continued. “The whole purpose of independent film is to make films that aren’t pre-fabricated to hit a target audience of someone else’s devising. […]
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Super 8: Toy Cars and Tomorrow’s Education
Dear Sugar Radio For those who worried that, after her Wild success, Cheryl Strayed’s lucid and literate advice column “Dear Sugar” was no more, fear not. “Dear Sugar” has been resurrected, this time as a podcast co-hosted by “Mr. Sugar,” the writer Steve Almond. The original “Sugar,” in fact, and Strayed’s recruiter, Almond adds a probing rhetorical counterpoint to Strayed’s personal counseling, making Sugar 2.0 a multilayered conversation about such topics as ditching friends, cheating and families good and bad. Produced by WBUR, Dear Sugar Radio can be found on iTunes. The Graduate School Mess On the heels of last […]
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Theatrical 2.0
Releasing movies in U.S. theaters isn’t going away anytime soon. But indie film distribution is experiencing a significant tipping of the scales. While theatrical distribution has always been an advertisement for foreign sales and ancillary platforms, like VHS and then DVD, a new wave of film companies are shifting the balance even further, where theatrical distribution is a means to a digital end. As Vincent Scordino, senior vice president of marketing at rising distributor Alchemy says, “Ancillary platforms have always been important to a film’s profitability, but now we’re talking about them more with the rise of iTunes and the […]
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Creeping Time
There is nothing new about Slow Cinema. From the very beginning of projected motion pictures in the late 19th century, the Lumière brothers utilized the single take, allowing for the temporal flow in the frame to coincide roughly with the audience’s experience of time. The fracturing of time through editing — borrowing from and keeping with the realist conventions of the novel — put cinema on the path of montage: the art of visual storytelling became equated with rapid movement across time (flashbacks and the implied “meanwhile…”) and space (multiple locations). Even cross-cutting — shifting back and forth between two […]
