Columns
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Blackmagic Announces New Cameras at NAB
It’s NAB, and Blackmagic have once again announced some exciting new cameras. Blackmagic has developed a bit of a reputation for announcing cameras with amazing specifications at incredibly good prices. They may not be as refined as the cameras from Sony, Canon et al., and they may not always ship on their announced dates, but if you’re a shooter on a budget you have to look at Blackmagic’s camera offerings. Blackmagic’s first camera was the Cinema Camera. Despite its unusual shape and user interface, this camera was a hit because of its high dynamic range, reasonable price, and its support […]
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Somebody Wake Me Up Please
My phone is ringing. The sound pulls me from a deep sleep. It’s 5:30 a.m., the room is dark, and for a moment I’m confused. As I push the phone into my ear I hear a female voice singing. Slowly it registers; this is the wakeup call that I requested. But I’m not staying in a hotel, and the woman calling me is a complete stranger. The singing stops and the voice on the other end of the line tells me to have a wonderful day. I express my gratitude and ask her name. “Sarah from Dublin,” she replies, and […]
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Parting Shot: Maika Monroe
Filmmaker David Robert Mitchell developed rich, resonant teenage characters in his independent sleeper, The Myth of the American Sleepover. With his sophomore feature, It Follows, he again essays the emotional lives of attractive, sexually adventurous suburban youth, this time within a high-concept genre framework. It Follows is eerie, Carpenter-esque horror, the tale of a slow-moving demon who shuffles steadily, invisibly and scarily toward a single victim. Here that’s mostly Jay, played with real “Final Girl” charisma by Maika Monroe, who has quickly emerged as a strong lead and supporting player in several notable films. She co-starred opposite Zac Efron in […]
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Without Words
Although it’s too early to designate this a golden age of film editing, examples of unexpected, creative and sometimes flat-out radical cutting continue to suggest that the digital turn in cinema has always been, at its fundamental and structural level, about new possibilities for joining together images and sound. This column will explore the rhythms of editing in films that are exemplary — each in their own way — in the manipulation of time and space that is the foundation of editing. First up is the remarkable, wordless 13-minute-plus opening of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, which recalls René Clair’s […]
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Girl Gangs and Tweetstorms: Super 8
Larry Gross’s Twitter Amidst of sea of social media me-too-ism and diffidently composed schtick, screenwriter and critic Larry Gross’s Twitter feed stands out. Often composed in tweetstorm-style, the author of films ranging from 48 Hours to We Don’t Live Here Anymore spills out arresting meditations and poetic aphorisms on everything from Alain Badiou’s take on St. Paul to the poetry of Wallace Stevens to Paul Thomas Anderson’s intuitive understanding of the crisis in American cinematic narrative. twitter.com/@larryagross Y2K What separates Y2K from other independently developed role-playing games? According to the designers at Ackk Studios, their novelty comes from being a […]
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Computational Storytelling
In October 2014, the University of California, Santa Cruz announced a new Department of Computational Media. Described as the first of its kind and housed in the university’s Baskin School of Engineering, the department is designed to create a truly interdisciplinary home for new directions in computation as an expressive form by uniting the humanities’ concerns and methods with those of computer science. The department builds on the existing game design and computer science programs, as well as on the work of faculty members, research groups and graduate students who, over the last decade, have explored the computational processes of […]
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Venice, Paris, Brazil…: Load & Play
Don’t Look Now Asked by Time to name the sexiest sex scene of all time, three female writers and producers of Showtime’s Masters of Sex came to immediate agreement: Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s memorable coupling in Nicolas Roeg’s otherwise entirely scary Don’t Look Now. Simultaneously encompassing lust, despair and forgiveness, the scene shows the married couple passionately overcoming grief and mutual recriminations in their new Venice flat following the drowning death of their young daughter back in England. The scene sparked rumors neither actor was acting — an allegation Roeg has denied — but what makes the scene so […]
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2014: The Year of 4K
At the end of 2013 I wrote: 2013 wasn’t so much the year of 4K, as the year of “do we need 4K?” For most of the year I was a skeptic, but now I’m starting to think that 2014 will bethe year of 4K. And here we are at the end of 2014 and I look back and think, “I really hit that one out of the park!” Not that it took a lot of genius to read the tea leaves or see the writing on the wall: 2014 was definitely the year of 4K. Whether it was the F5/F55 […]
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“I’m at a Precarious Age. I Don’t Know How Much Longer I’ll Get to Have This Life”: Cécile Tollu-Polonowski on Multitasking in the Berlin Film Industry
I am at Tempelhofer Park on a cold Saturday morning in Berlin. An airport reconstructed by the Nazi government in the 1930s, Tempelhof today is an epicenter of kite flying, urban farming, summer barbequing, and most impressively, unrestricted dog romping. My mother is a dog-walking regular at several public parks in Ohio and has witnessed a good many leashed vs. unleashed dog controversies over the years. As I take in the expansive landscape of Tempelhof, I’m subliminally considering the transformation from Third Reich austerity. I’m distracted by the notion that these Berlin canines are experiencing a freedom that American pooches […]
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“You Have to Learn Fast if You Want to Stand Out”: Lorna-Lee Sagebiel on Film Sales
I’m on my terrace watching what will probably be my last New York sunrise before I move to Berlin. Later, I learn that my early morning insomnia coincided with not just any sunrise, but a total lunar eclipse, which is technically called syzygy — when the sun, earth, and moon are aligned to form an almost or exact straight line. I couldn’t have contrived an experience more poetic — my final New York sunrise, my first and probably last syzygy. Like all perfect New York moments, this feels like the most perfect New York moment, which is another way of […]
