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The Most Valuable Lessons: Filmmakers Remember Their Iconic Instructors
Teaching is a complex act, but most of us standing in front of students in film classrooms have never been taught to teach. Instead, we recall the teachers who impressed us, then try to repeat some part of that practice and hope for the best, often never quite realizing the impact we are in turn having on our own students. Here, three current faculty members recall iconic instructors from their college experience, and the lasting effect of key ideas and behaviors. Cauleen Smith on Lynn Hershman Leeson and Trinh T. Minh-ha Interdisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith earned a BA in creative […]
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Glitches in the Matrix: Adventures in the CGI Wilderness
“Working with computer graphics, labor becomes so present in your mind because you’re hunched over a computer for such a long time trying to deliver something that looks right,” the artist Alan Warburton told me. What’s “right” tends to be a seamless and effortless look, which means there is a paradox to the trade—all that work, at best, appears as if it never happened at all. Warburton’s art practice, which mines his commercial work at post-production studios, departs from these objectives. His labor is noticeable, rather than invisible—imperfect and unfinished in projects like his animation series Homo Economicus (2018). That […]
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Digital Haves and Have-Nots: Disappearing SVOD Deals and Independent Film
Subscription streaming services are dominating the independent film marketplace—in more ways than you think. Yes, Amazon dropped nearly $50 million at Sundance to buy several movies, and Netflix spent another $25 million in the days and weeks that followed. Beyond inflating acquisition costs over industry norms, the outsized influence of the over-the-top new media giants are affecting all sectors of the distribution business. Some industry veterans suggest this isn’t so different from previous bullish markets when well-heeled specialty divisions like the Weinstein Company or Fox Searchlight drove up prices. “Sundance has been competitive for years, so I’m not sure it’s […]
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When 2019 Was the Future
The artist David Levine once staged reenactments of memorable film scenes at their original locations in Central Park. A performer ran laps around the reservoir in a nod to the opening of Marathon Man, while stand-ins for Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis acted out the Cracker Jack scene in The Out-of-Towners by the Trefoil Arch. Scenes from The Royal Tenenbaums, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm and Portrait of Jennie, among others, were underway elsewhere in the park. The performances were unmarked, and some were more discernibly theatrical than others. Period clothes or the spectacle of a confrontation played and replayed in intervals could tip […]
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Breathe Deep
“I prefer placing the perceptual, intuitive, emotional and spiritual growth of the student at the center.” That’s the succinct teaching statement of Pablo Frasconi, a soft-spoken, thoroughly grounded filmmaker and faculty colleague of mine in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has developed a three-course sequence that helps students engage in a form of creativity based on quieting the mind. “Mindfulness and meditation are central,” Frasconi explains. “It is where these classes begin: by looking inward to discover the ’moving visual thinking’ and ’song of the cells’—as Stan Brakhage called these experiences—that is our […]
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Expanding Horizons: How Film Schools Are Adjusting to a More Diverse Future
I’m just going to say it: Every film student should know how to light and photograph a full spectrum of skin tones. But do they? Let me back up a bit. One of my current tasks at USC involves working with a team of faculty members to comb through the websites and resources of other universities to see what they’re doing with regard to equity, diversity and inclusivity (aka EDI). Why? So that we can build USC’s infrastructure, research agenda and programming to better reflect diversity and inclusiveness. I also serve on another committee called Race, Arts and Placemaking (a.k.a. […]
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Victims of the Dance: Gaspar Noé Breaks Down a Scene from Climax
“Birth is a unique opportunity. Death is an extraordinary experience. Life is a collective impossibility.” –CLIMAX (2018) The film A dance company celebrating the end of their rehearsal on a snowy night in 1996 lose themselves to bacchanalian depravity in Climax, divided into two parts, each shot in long, continuous takes. The latest from Gaspar Noé, the director of Enter the Void and Love, returns to themes of his greatest dreams turned into nightmares through the hypnotic expressions of dance — and some surreptitiously drugged sangria. Who I spoke with Gaspar Noé: Director, Writer, Co-Editor, Co-Producer Serge Catoire: Line […]
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Sundance Hits and Misses: How MoviePass, Politics and Streaming Boosted the Indie Theatrical Box Office of 2018
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. After theatrical box office numbers for indies looked hopeless last year, 2018 proved all the doomsayers wrong. That’s thanks to such non-Hollywood hits as Hereditary, a Sundance Midnight entry partially financed and released by A24, which grossed more than $44 million in the United States and $35 million internationally. And it’s thanks to Searching, a Screen Gems acquisition out of the NEXT section, which grossed $26 million domestically and another $42 million abroad. Even Sundance’s 16-film Dramatic Competition — which offers a decent test sample of the overall truly indie marketplace — saw […]
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The Cine-Ghosts of Shirkers
Some of my best conversations have been with people who weren’t there. Absent was OK—even nonexistent was OK. As long as I imagined somebody was there. I did that as a prolific letter writer, I did that as a novelist, and most recently, I did that as a filmmaker. More than 20 years after the defining trainwreck of my youth—having my teacher/mentor disappear with all the footage of a 16mm film we’d shot together—I decided to make a film that would both document the joys and perils of teenage creativity and unfurl the detective work behind the mystery of the […]
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What Makes a Good Production Designer?
As a kid, the first and only thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up was an artist. I never got bored or minded being sent to my room as long as I could draw. I wasn’t the “good artist” at school—I couldn’t draw a superhero, or a realistic Snoopy. But I was often told (only by adults, so it didn’t mean much to me) that I had a great imagination. I had a pretty rich fantasy life and drew pages and pages of imaginary interiors, collections of objects and fashion wardrobes. If I had known what a […]
