Features
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The Journey is the Destination: On the Maysles Documentary Center Production, In Transit
Opening tomorrow at New York’s Metrograph and the Maysles Documentary Center is In Transit, about Amtrak’s long-distance passenger train, the Empire Builder. It was legendary Direct Cinema pioneer Albert Maysles’s final directing credit, a collaboration with young directors Lynn True, Nelson Walker, Ben Wu and David Isui. Below, from our Spring, 2015 print issue, is Paul Dallas’s report on the film. An attractive, middle-aged woman sits isolated against a snowy landscape that sweeps by. Her eyes are bright and sad. “I’ve always been a wife, a mother, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s something,” she explains. “But it didn’t matter. I was just […]
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Beyond the Boundaries of Language
In recent memory, there’s been a never-ending deluge of bad news for the arts and humanities in the U.S.: government support, which is already low, may be cut entirely; universities, facing budget crises, have axed language and arts programs; prominent professors spend their time writing books defending the basic value of humanistic inquiry, while their pecuniary graduate students fight for poverty wages as adjuncts, and earn a little money on the side writing articles about their plight. In the midst of all this, I was struggling to put together a dissertation proposal — it was something on the history of […]
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Making of the Murray Hustle
It might have seemed like an odd fit when I was brought in to help launch the new Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri’s esteemed School of Journalism in 2015. If one were to describe my films, such as Kate Plays Christine or Actress, the word “journalistic” isn’t likely to come to mind. Yet there I was, in the hallowed halls of the world’s oldest journalism school, working with Stacey Woelfel, a 30-year veteran of the institution, to build a new program from scratch. We wanted to create what Woelfel calls the “pirate radio […]
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Message From the Other Side
Matthew Heineman’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Cartel Land was a visceral cinematic journey into the Mexican drug wars, focusing on a pair of citizens hailing from both sides of the border who take vigilante action against the cartels. Heineman shot most of the movie himself, and his approach was to startle viewers with his level of access — he and his fellow shooters were in real danger — while, in postproduction, crafting his images, sounds and music with the emotional sweep of a narrative feature. Just two years after Cartel Land, Heineman has returned with another riveting doc, City of Ghosts, […]
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Check Your Canon
The issue of diversity in the film canon — the movies celebrated and studied at film schools across the country — has come under hot debate in the past couple of years, with students starting conversations about the larger consequences of curricular omissions. “When I look at a syllabus and there’s no one from my perspective on there, I wonder if my ideas will be taken seriously by Hollywood or by any producer,” admits Zsaknor Powe, a junior studying film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “It really affects the artistic self-esteem of the students,” explains Powe, […]
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Spinning Out: Edgar Wright on Baby Driver
Writer and director Edgar Wright has long been a fan of mixing tones and genres in his movies, from his celebrated feature debut Shaun of the Dead and its unofficial companion pieces (Hot Fuzz and The World’s End) to the graphic novel adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. All of those movies were at least partially, if not primarily, comedies, and Wright’s latest film Baby Driver, which shares its title with a memoir by Jan Kerouac (Jack’s daughter), has plenty of verbal and visual laughs scattered throughout its narrative. This time, however, the laughs coexist with an emotional weight that’s […]
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Pedagogical Praxis
George Bernard Shaw’s famous adage, “Those who do do, those who can’t, teach. He can do, does. He who cannot, teaches,” fails when it comes to film schools. Scratch the surface of most film school faculty lists, and you’ll find filmmakers who not only do but are also doing. Developing scripts, raising financing and shooting while on sabbatical, university-ensconced independent filmmakers have one foot in the ivory tower and one foot in the shape-shifting world that is today’s independent film production. Inevitably, then, they bring their hard-fought wisdom into the classroom, which means they must also grapple with one tough […]
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All Day and a Night: Josh and Benny Safdie on Good Time
I’m in the Safdie brothers’ office in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, looking at a giant Japanese King of New York poster, and we’re talking about fired FBI director James Comey, whose awkward dinner with Donald Trump has just hit the news. “The guy is 6 foot, 8 inches,” Benny says. Or maybe it’s Josh. My tape recorder isn’t turned on yet, and the two talk rapid-fire, trading sentence fragments and out-exclaiming each other. “And he refused to play basketball with Obama! The one president who played basketball, Comey would be the tallest guy on the court, and he didn’t want […]
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Time Waits For No One: David Lowery on A Ghost Story
Most readers of this magazine will recognize David Lowery as the director of the breakout picture Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a Malickian, modern-day Western containing a beautifully spare, elliptical romance between Casey Affleck’s Bob and Rooney Mara’s Ruth. More mainstream moviegoers will recall Lowery from last summer’s multiplex, where his fantasy drama Pete’s Dragon, a remake in name only, pulsed with both wide-eyed innocence and emotional heart — two qualities often lacking in blockbuster entertainment. But more perspicacious viewers will go back further and remember two earlier works. The first is Lowery’s micro-budget 2009 debut feature St. Nick, a tale […]
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VR.edu
When I studied at the London Film School just over a decade ago, students originated all of our projects on 35 and 16mm film and cut them on Steenbecks and Avid Media Composer. What a difference a dozen years make: Now schools have moved beyond the digital video revolution and computer animation to whole new media and formats. Virtual, augmented and mixed reality are forming increasingly large components of university curricula, giving a shot of innovation to narrative filmmaking in the academy and bringing university computer science programs into the realm of traditional film schools. You might expect VR courses […]
