Columns
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Cannes 2012 pt. 2
The incongruity of Michael Haneke winning the Palme d’Or for the second time in four years was that his film featured two veteran actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, in a year that may well be remembered for introducing us to several new talents. The common denominator of the films that opened the official competition, Un Certain Regard and Directors’ Fortnight, was that only the parents and school friends of the young actors would have heard of the leads before they became the darlings of the Croisette. Moonrise Kingdom’s Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, as well as Broken’s Eloise Laurence, […]
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Cannes 2012 pt. 1
Normally the spotlight at the Cannes film festival is stolen by attractive young celebrities and hip, hot films (Tarantino’s, for example). This Cannes was a little bit different. The most interesting films addressed Big Issues and, perhaps coincidentally, were awarded the top prizes. They are mature films, for the mature. Two provocative topics stood out. CONFRONTING OLD AGE Very different takes on living out the geriatric years are apparent in Austrian director Michael Haneke’s French production Amour, which took the Palme d’Or, and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s Japanese film, Like Someone in Love (no prize, because, even if it […]
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War of Words
War of Words By Heather Chaplin. -
Culture Hacker: Scarcity and Abundance in the Digital World
Scarcity and Abundance in the Digital World By Lance Weiler.
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Super 8
1 The Chimerist If you’re a new iPad owner, you should know that there are reading options other than iBooks, the Kindle app and Instapaper. Indeed, while games and social apps get most of the iOS press, there are artists who are rethinking the book form for the tablet device. These innovators are chronicled at The Chimerist (thechimerist.com), a Tumblr blog by “two iPad lovers at the intersection of art, stories and technology.” Follow writer, editor and literary blogger Maud Newton and Salon co-founder Laura Miller and learn about new graphic novels (Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze), storytelling game apps […]
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Load & Play
BLANK CITY Lorber Films – available now A group of artist friends make no-budget, handmade films way outside the mainstream, often acting and crewing for each other while developing a defiant, totally alternative sensibility and star system. Mumblecore? No, I’m talking about the downtown New York No Wave film scene of the 1980s, a spirited and impossibly cool movement celebrated in Céline Danhier’s Blank City. Included are scenes from pictures like Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, Amos Poe’s The Foreigner, and, from the subsequent Cinema of Transgression movement, Richard Kern’s The Right Side of My Brain. As interviewer, Dahnier provides […]
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Culture Hacker: Igniting the Imagination of Many
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Listen as Your Story Talks to the Internet
Without a doubt, this is an amazing time to be a storyteller. We have moved beyond the simple democratization of storytelling and production tools. Funding, marketing and distribution solutions are commoditized, providing filmmakers numerous opportunities to bring their work to an audience. And now a new phase is arriving, one that merges technology with the creative process. Filmmakers will soon be able to take advantage of a world of connected objects in what has been termed the “Internet of things.” And in this environment, as always, there will be a need for good storytelling to provide a level of understanding, […]
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Super 8
1 Webdocs With the official partnership of entities as ahead-of-the-curve as IDFA DocLab and Power to the Pixel, among a dozen others, Belgian director Matthieu Lietaert (whose own online project We R Democracy nabbed the BIPS at Sunny Side of the Doc 2010) has put together an offline guide to navigating the field of Web-based documentaries. Titled Webdocs, it covers everything from crowd sourcing to storytelling in a format that includes interviews with 30 cross-media makers and producers, as well as in-depth analysis of six highly successful webdocs. The book is jam-packed with practical information and advice from those on […]
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Load & Play
Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story Antidote Films – Available Now “The separation of craft from art and design is one of the phenomena of late-twentieth-century Western culture,” writes Peter Dormer in The Culture of Craft, cited on the website to Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte’s new documentary, Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story. In his directorial follow-up to Soul Power, Kusama-Hinte (also a producer whose credits include The Kids are All Right and the board chairman of IFP) captures, in loving 16mm, a Martha’s Vineyard boatyard whose work is an elegy to those vanishing values of hand-crafted perfection cited by Dormer. Charlotte follows boat […]
