Features
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So You Didn’t Get Into Sundance, Redux
“So you didn’t get into Sundance.” That’s the title of a 2009 blog post I wrote for Filmmaker’s website that gets a flurry of hits each December as, yes, a lot of people don’t get into Sundance. My post was written with a tone of plucky defiance — that mixture of self-care and can-do-ism that is the stuff of so much online film advice writing these days. I started by recommending filmmakers change their headspace by going to a museum or walking in the park, and then, a week or two later, dive back into their films by critically rewatching […]
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At Bydgoszcz, Bigger Was Better — A Glimpse at Our 8K Future
DPs, not directors, are the rock stars at Camerimage, the film festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland, devoted to the foundational art of the motion picture camera. The world’s best cinematographers, if not working, flock there each autumn.The 25th edition, which wrapped several months ago in November 2017, proved no exception. The festival hub is a modernist opera house, perched above The Brda, the narrow river that bisects picturesque Bydgoszcz (once known as “Little Berlin”). Centrally located, Opera Nova hosts two theaters, including the festival’s main venue. A long, ground-floor lobby and second-floor hallway, curved thanks to the building’s cylindrical shape, house […]
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The Politics of Waiting: Lucrecia Martel on Zama
Lucrecia Martel’s ambitious historical drama Zama opens with a decidedly muted image. The film’s eponymous protagonist stands alone at a river’s edge staring into space with a look of quiet expectation. The water faintly laps at his feet, and a pale sky provides an indifferent light. Suited in full colonial regalia, he appears small and lonely against the rugged landscape, a man lost at the edge of the world. Moments later, he is seen hiding in the grass like a naughty child, spying on a group of naked women bathing in the river. They laugh and call out, “Voyeur! Voyeur!” […]
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Beautiful Abyss: Eliza McNitt on her Visionary VR
Filmmaker Eliza McNitt’s second VR film, SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime, has made history as the first VR film to sell at Sundance. CityLights, a VR financing and distribution company, acquired the project as a three-part series for a significant seven-figure deal. Narrated by Jessica Chastain, SPHERES is inspired by the recent discovery that gravitational waves make their own music, and it visualizes the collision of two black holes that produce these movements. With the Oculus Rift headset and hand controllers, the viewer uses their voice and body to interact with the cosmic landscape, drawing stardust circles while being pulled into […]
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Here Comes the Automation: How AI is Poised to Change Filmmaking
I’d like to start with a disclaimer. This article does not present a dystopian view of the rise of automation. There will be no musings about Skynet or how artificial intelligence (AI) is going to exterminate the human race. While there is no doubt that a ubiquitous and pervasive technology like AI will forever change the way we live, learn and work, many of those stories have been already written and will continue to be. With the rise of AI comes a host of ethical, political, and economical challenges. But for now, let’s focus on how machine intelligence can augment […]
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Rodeo Dream: Chloé Zhao on The Rider
The Rider, Chloé Zhao’s miraculous second feature, possesses a narrative that feels both as old as time and riveting in its newness: A young rodeo star has a tragic accident and must battle adversity on his way to recovery. You know this story. Except, through Zhao’s eyes, “redemption” looks different from what we’ve been conditioned to expect in a culture built on stories of success and celebrity. Every character on screen in The Rider is a real person, playing a version of themselves. But this is not a documentary. The performances in The Rider are exhilarating and deep and true. […]
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Disquiet
“There’s an ambition that comes with wanting to work for Harvey Weinstein. Every day that I worked for The Weinstein Company I woke up with fear. You rationalize it as normal, that this is the dream we all want to be a part of; thinking you have to act a certain way, even though it’s an outdated way, an old way of doing business, but still how TWC operated. You begin to feel that hopeless, dreamless Hollywood factory. The culture was just so toxic. Everyone was scared, nervous, anxious, and now we’re confronting not only the sexual violence but the […]
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Keeping Print Criticism Alive in the Digital Age
As Filmmaker contemplated its 25th year of print publication, we took note of a younger generation of filmmakers and critics investing their own new energies into the form. One is SVLLY(wood), a “biannual multimedia experimental print and digital magazine, geared toward building a new cinephilia through diverse themes and leftist ideology.” Here, its editor and founder, Rooney Elmi, explains the magazine’s creation. SVLLY(wood) was created on a whim or, as stated in our inaugural bulletin: “This magazine is the creation of the goals, ideas, ramblings, heartache, desire, and — most supreme — sheer optimism for carving a subversive current in […]
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Clothes Make the Man: Costume Designer Mark Bridges on Phantom Thread
His last narrative feature, Inherent Vice, focused on disheveled hippies in 1970s Los Angeles. With his latest, Paul Thomas Anderson has swung to a wildly different milieu. Phantom Thread concerns Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) — a near-monomaniacal designer working during couture’s greatest age, the early 1950s — and Alma (Vicky Krieps), the young woman who is sucked into his orbit. With Anderson goes his longtime costume designer, Mark Bridges, here given a dream assignment: not only to design his own couture visions but also to dress the entire world that surrounds them. The film is about an artist, and Bridges’s […]
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On the Cut
On a film screen, a single edit flies by in the blink of an eye — usually, in 1/24th of a second. In the edit room, though, a cut is teased, strategized, finessed and obsessed over. We asked six editors from six of the fall’s best films to give us the frames on both sides of one particularly noteworthy cut — and to explain why these edits are so important. Call Me By Your Name Director: Luca Guadagnino Editor: Walter Fasano Fasano: Sensual. That’s the way I’d like to define our approach to the editing of Call Me By Your […]
