Features
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Into the Spotlight: Bradley Cooper on A Star is Born, Consulting with Terrence Malick and Shooting his First Feature in 42 Days
Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, A Star is Born, is the kind of movie that feels as though it contains decades’ worth of saved-up ideas and feelings, yet never strains under the weight of its ambition. It’s simultaneously sweeping in its scope and razor-sharp in its clarity, passionate and exuberant but restrained and confident. Although the tale has been told several times before, most memorably in George Cukor’s 1954 CinemaScope extravaganza, Cooper (who collaborated on the screenplay with Eric Roth and Will Fetters) makes it his own by using the basic premise as a springboard for a sophisticated meditation on fame […]
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The Agony and the Ecstasy
I’m a midcareer filmmaker with a few features that have played at major international film festivals, including Sundance and Cannes, followed by modest distribution. So, you can imagine my shock when my third feature, Rogers Park, was programmed by… almost no festivals. Despite having what I thought was a track record, I found myself in the wonderful position of having made a no-star ensemble film that had no industry champions, no curatorial validation and no traction. After regrouping from a year of festival rejections, I had to make a decision. Should I throw in the towel and post my film […]
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Between Bodies
March 16, 2019: Barbara Hammer died today. On this sad occasion we’re reposting this article from our Fall, 2018 edition — a conversation this extraordinary filmmaker at Temple University with Elisabeth Subrin, Sarah Drury, and a number of attending students. It’s a talk that covers her early years as an artist, her process for making work, and, finally, her thoughts on illness and end of life. *** On May 2, 2018, legendary filmmaker Barbara Hammer was honored at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she was awarded its Department of Film and Media Arts Annual Tribute Award, selected by the film […]
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Love is Colder Than Death: Luca Guadagnino on Suspiria
I’m not sure whether or not Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a masterpiece, but I’m certain that it warrants being compared to quite a few films that are. The one that immediately sprang to mind when the lights came up was The Godfather. With The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola took the gangster movie and attempted to expand its emotional range and social and political themes without sacrificing the visceral pleasures of genre filmmaking. Guadagino’s Suspiria attempts to do something similar with the horror film, with a startling degree of success. Here is a curious fact of film history. Though horror movies […]
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What Can Happen in the Frame: Sasha Waters Freyer on Her Doc, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
Photography was all over the New York City art world of the late 1980s. There was the Pictures Generation—artists like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Laurie Simmons, who began in the mid ’70s and whose conceptual use of appropriated or staged photographs cast a critical and sometimes seductive eye at the way mass media imagery shaped consciousness. Jeff Wall, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and, later, Gregory Crewdson were bringing the staging techniques of film and theater to photographs charged with emotional and narrative possibility. And the work of photographers of an earlier generation, like Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, was still highly […]
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Moment of Conception
“All it takes is one good egg.” This refrain is uttered more than a few times throughout the course of Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, her first feature since 2007’s The Savages. A meditation on marriage, middle age and the haves and have-not’s of fertility, the film stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as an artist couple—she’s a writer, and he runs both a theater group and an artisanal pickle company—desperate to conceive in their 40s. While the pair loads up on IVF hormones and diminishing hopes, they must also make room in their realistically cozy East Village apartment for their […]
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Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2018: More Pixels, Better Pixels
Alvin Toffler in his prescient 1970 bestseller, Future Shock, predicted that in a post-industrial society the design of goods would turn over frequently as they became quickly outdated and triggered their own replacement. They would grow disposable too, with the cost of repair exceeding cost of replacement. His emblem of discardability was the disposable lighter. (He also foresaw the rise of the freelance economy in which people would change career and workplace frequently—a fact of life for most of us in this industry.) At NAB in April, Blackmagic Design advertised a new “Professional Ultra HD broadcast camera for less than […]
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Action and Cut: Film Schools, Guerrilla Filmmaking and the New “Saudi Cinema”
“End the trip? I’ll take you to the police.” The driver, Saudi, early 20s, looked into the rear view mirror at me and the woman next to me in the back seat. I had asked him, “You always ask your riders their nationality?” Finally, he responded, “You’re in an Islamic state, and you must respect the laws of this country!” Having lived in Sudan and Libya and grown up in largely conservative Chad just a couple countries over, I was not new to “Islamic states.” Despite Saudi Arabia’s massive economic and cultural overhaul in recent years, the legal system still […]
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Pre-Course Work
With most incoming film students being required to make shorts during their undergraduate or graduate studies, what exemplars of the form should they look to for inspiration? Filmmaker asked a number of friends—all filmmakers—who teach filmmaking at a cross-section of institutions to list the short films they think all incoming students should check out and be inspired by. Howard A. Rodman, professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts: I consistently recommend to my students—whose films often lead with cinematography, visual effects and sound mix—that they see Andrea Arnold’s Academy Award–winning 2003 short film Wasp. Adequate direct sound, wobbly cam, minimalist VFX, yet […]
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Teaching on the Horizon Line
In last summer’s issue, I looked at the development of new virtual and augmented reality programs on campuses throughout the United States, examining how they were funded and formed, what type of equipment they were using, which departments administered them and how they fostered cross-departmental collaboration, and what types of projects students were undertaking. I found that universities were using VR in a variety of ways unrelated to filmmaking, including advancing research in medicine, architecture and other fields. But the strongest programs that taught VR as a discipline were oriented toward gaming and narrative storytelling, in both fiction and nonfiction. […]
