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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 […]
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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 […]
