Columns
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Goodbye to the 14-Hour Day: The Entertainment Industry’s Shifting Work/Life Balance
“[I]t’s as if our whole society is burned out.”—The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 20, 2022 During the ongoing “Great Resignation,” tens of millions of Americans—including those in the film industry—have quit their jobs. But the employment shifts in the entertainment business have as much to do with people leaving their work as with reassessing the ways in which they work. After months of pandemic-mandated pauses and soul-searching, phrases such as “work/life balance” and “self-care”—previously anathema to a culture of all-hours dealmaking and work—have finally arrived. If, as one executive says, “14-hour workdays, sleep deprivation and, too often, unhealthy meals” used […]
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Pedagogical City Hopping: the DocNomads Film School
“What if we create a curriculum for a school we’d like to attend ourselves?” That question was the foundation for a group of five educators who gathered in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2011 to brainstorm an entirely new two-year Masters-level film program dedicated to documentary production. The partners came from Lusófona University in Lisbon; the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, Hungary; and LUCA School of Arts/College Sint Lukas in Brussels, Belgium. Vítor Candeias, who represented Lusófona University in designing the program and is a course director as well as a documentary filmmaker, says that the original idea was […]
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Hits and Misses, Pandemic Edition 2.0: Anthony Kaufman Breaks Down Six Sundance 2020 Films’ Theatrical Releases
According to Box Office Mojo, our contemporary plague ended on June 14, 2021—the last day the label “COVID-19 Pandemic” was included on its daily box office reporting. But don’t tell that to anyone trying to release a film in the second half of 2021, as viral variants spread widely across America, plunging the hopes of many filmmakers and distributors. Welcome to Pandemic: Year 2. The merciless persistence of the coronavirus and its wide-ranging impact on theatrical moviegoing and home viewing habits became more entrenched over the past several months—with indies on the losing end of the stick. Struggling to gain […]
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Freedom as a Preset: Joanne McNeil on Metaverses Past and Present
“What we’re selling is freedom,” says a digital media executive played by Demi Moore, of the promise of virtual worlds in Disclosure (1994). “We offer through technology what religion and revolution have promised but never delivered: freedom from the physical body; freedom from race and gender, from nationality and personality, from place and time.” Based on a Michael Crichton novel, the movie explores in classic Crichton fashion a theoretically possible but highly unlikely scenario—in this case, a 32-year-old single woman who sexually harasses her married 50-something male subordinate; it is also one of a number of features from the 1990s […]
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Twilight of the Robots? Androids in Contemporary Cinema
In August 2021, Elon Musk announced that his company is prototyping a humanoid robot called the “Tesla Bot.” He shared the stage with an ecstatically dancing figure that was obviously a human in a robot costume. Musk assured the audience that eventually the robot “will be real” and will derive from the AI system used in Tesla vehicles. The cars are already “semi-sentient robots on wheels,” Musk said, in yet another of his grandiose claims intended to disguise their minimal autonomous driving capabilities. It all appeared like a desperate attempt to siphon some of the nervous excitement that Boston Dynamics […]
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The COVID Challenge: Arthouses Adjust to a Reconfigured Landscape
In the Heights, Black Widow, Respect and Candyman—not typical indie-film fare, but because of the pressures of the ongoing pandemic on theatrical moviegoing, these are just some of the films arthouses have booked over the past several months. Granted, the supply of new available films was massively down, and theaters have been desperate to get audiences back into seats, but COVID-related shifts in arthouse exhibition have been significant, myriad and potentially long-lasting. And none of it is good for indie filmmakers. For example, here’s something you probably don’t want to hear from your neighborhood indie venue: “We’re seriously considering playing […]
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Environmental Storytelling
In August 2021, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new report on the global state of the environment, highlighting the shrinkage of glaciers, warming of oceans, massive forest loss, extreme heat, devastating drought and more. While the report is crushing, it is also fuel for action. Indeed, the BBC’s climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, suggested that 2021 could be the year for finally making climate change a top priority, citing the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in early November as just one landmark event that could help consolidate action. For filmmakers teaching in universities, the […]
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Dial-up Connections: All About Lily Chou-Chou at 20
Twenty years after the release of All About Lily Chou-Chou, I can’t think of a film that better depicts what first drew people to the internet, and certainly none that matches its expressive use of content-type header errors. Director Shunji Iwai evokes the gaps and hesitancy in early internet communication through the depiction of character encoding across the screen. Posts on an online forum devoted to Lily Chou-Chou, a mysterious pop singer, first appear in a mojibake jumble of accented Latin characters. We can hear the clack of an old keyboard and another tap to refresh. The BBS code is […]
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Beautiful Syllabus Design
Is there any document more compelling than a good syllabus? I have a collection of favorites in a folder on my desktop and often daydream about following a particular professor’s list of screenings, readings and writing prompts to create my own individual class, a kind of private self-improvement gambit or—even better—a venture into some fantastic cinematic territory still unknown to me. A good syllabus is a treasured resource; a great syllabus, though, with its hints and errant connections, exudes the magic of possibility and epiphany. As an example, I remember reading my colleague Priya Jaikumar’s syllabus for a graduate seminar […]
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Where Have the Low-Budget Movies Gone?
While streamer-backed productions promise a golden future for a lucky few, for most independent filmmakers these days, it’s more challenging to subsist by making the sort of professionally budgeted, less than $3 million films that used to be hallmarks of the sector. One significant reason, according to producers, is that it’s much more difficult to shoot a nonunion film. IATSE has become a more dominant force in the independent industry, which has consequently expanded budgets well above that number. “I don’t think you can do a union movie for less than $3 million,” says one producer. Although some nonunion shows […]
