Columns
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Mutual Assists: Joanne McNeil on How a Massachusetts Video Store is Aiding Local Journalism
Imagine you are in the basement of a home somewhere in the suburbs amid towers of cardboard boxes and items bought in bulk. There are bikes with training wheels and cobwebs between the spokes. Behind a broken recliner is a fake Christmas tree with garland and fairy lights still on it. On wire shelving racks are boxes filled with VHS tapes and DVDs. You see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Meet the Fockers, Waiting to Exhale, The Godfather trilogy box set and the 25-disc edition of Six Feet Under. A few of the videos are still wrapped in […]
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Loving Cinema, Frame by Frame: The Art of Cathy Lomax
Every now and then—winter break, summer break—I purchase a new notebook at the local Blick intending to take up drawing, a practice far from my discipline of cinema studies. This notebook need is not driven by my usual academic hubris, which asks smugly, often with a shrug, “Really, how hard could it be?” but by something more feral and fervent. Like, if I could put pen or pastel to paper, something pure would pour forth, heart to hand to drawing. There would be color and expression and the ineffable, all in a scribble. And if you think I’m exaggerating: There […]
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How to Ace a Film School Admissions Interview
I turned in this column way late this quarter. My excuse? Admissions. Like film faculty across the country, my colleagues and I in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California are reading dozens of applications for a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate filmmaking, screenwriting and media arts programs, and sorting through personal statements, work samples, grades, letters of recommendation and more, trying to sense who might be best for our program and how our program might best suit potential applicants. There are more applications than ever, even though recent analyses suggest that students consider the […]
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Solutions Based: Who Should Save Independent Film?
The Sundance Film Festival is a time for movie watching, deal making, talent scouting and, often, much soul searching about the state and future of the independent film industry. This year in particular there was no shortage of media coverage and conversations about distribution and the sustainability of the independent business. As Sundance CEO Joana Vicente told The Ringer’s “The Town” podcast, “Everyone is thinking about solutions… How can we help and figure out how all these films find a home, and what’s our role in the distribution exhibition piece?” For Sundance’s more commercial films—of which there were several this […]
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Notes from Inside the Ecosystem: Joanne McNeil on Apple Vision Pro
From the late aughts until pre-pandemic times, Apple’s presence in my life seemed concise and easy to recognize. It manufactured the phone in my pocket and the laptop I worked on. I picked an iPhone and a MacBook over the alternatives for the usual reasons: because Apple products were reliable and well-designed with intuitive user interfaces. The company, as a product manufacturer, appeared to have a vastly different purpose than the neighboring Silicon Valley empires extracting and monetizing data like Google and Facebook. Something changed in recent years. Now, when I think of Apple, I think of the AirTags I […]
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A Blurring of the Real: Damon Packard, Documentary Archival Footage and Generative AI
A crowd of people, animals and AI-generated beings sleeps in a movie theater. Faces are lit by the explosions of an atom bomb on screen. All we hear is the loud snoring of hundreds of people and the sounds of their bodies moving; a nondescript rodent crawls on the floor. We cut to the 70mm IMAX projection room, where the projectionist is also sleeping. The camera moves very slowly, but each shot morphs within itself at a faster pace. These two visual rhythms are layered on top of each other. The explosions on screen intensify; a panic sets in. We […]
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Lessons from the AI Filmmaking Rabbit Hole: Holly Willis on Teaching During Rapid Technological Change
I recently found myself sitting between three tech bros on my right and three cinephiles on my left. The film festival panel was meant to be a discussion about AI in the film industry; instead, it was an exasperating—if entertaining—demonstration of the radical gap in knowledge separating people who have some technical understanding of AI and those who don’t. There were tone-deaf proclamations about “generating content” and “optimizing workflows” on one side. And there was shouting, swearing, table-pounding, finger-pointing and (almost) tears on the other side, culminating in the announcement, “We’re very afraid!” I get it. AI has been foisted on […]
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Hits & Misses: How Six Sundance 2023 Titles Performed in Distribution
After nearly flatlining during the pandemic years, American independent film saw some signs of life in 2023. While optimists might call it a year of transition as the industry looks for new audiences and a new equilibrium, cynics see an unsustainable and contracting arthouse marketplace, with most producers and distributors increasingly unable to recoup. But, if you look at the fates of last year’s Sundance titles, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. For all the doom and gloom about the acquisitions market (“No one is buying films!”), 10 out of 12 films in this year’s Dramatic Competition […]
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Authoring Your Life Story: Joanne McNeil on Self-Archiving and George Westren
For any artist who works with digital files in the twenty-first century (that’s most of us), the work—in addition to making the art—is making sure it sticks around. To both archive and maintain your own work is a reminder of the gap between current practice and public markers of success. It can feel like an exercise in futility: If this work was really worth it—if someone other than you believed in its value—wouldn’t you have the time and money and institutional support to do it right? A library would offer to acquire your letters, no? Or, perhaps, with awards, grant […]
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In an Instance
During the pandemic, while I was stuck at home in Maryland, a friend from California suggested that we catch up in virtual reality. This had been their favorite pandemic activity. We set a time and decided to meet at a specific room in VRChat. When the time came, we were both in our headsets, logged into the same space. The virtual room was crowded, and we couldn’t find each other. I called my friend, and we tried to coordinate our locations over the phone. We went to the same corner of the same room but still couldn’t see each other. […]
