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¡Viva La Revolución!
A few months ago I went to the Los Angeles premiere of a horror film, Aftershock, directed by Nicolás Lopéz and produced by Eli Roth. Roth stars as an American who travels to Chile to visit local friends, but what starts as a romantic comedy about a trio of losers trying to get laid shifts dramatically and horrifically when a massive earthquake hits. Roth, in a khaki suit, plaid shirt and blue tie, looked more the producer than director of horror films such as Hostel and the upcoming The Green Inferno. He introduced Lopéz with generous praise. Roth had known […]
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Meeting Ingmar Bergman
“Dear David, the important thing is you told me the truth.” — Ingmar Bergman Early 1964 “It’s Paul Kohner. Do you want to talk to him?” asked my assistant Peggy. Why not? Paul, who was born in Germany and worked for several American studios in Europe in the ’30s, was a highly respected agent in Hollywood representing mostly talent born or based in Europe. The good news with Paul was that you never knew what he might have up his sleeve, since his representation was reasonably unpredictable. The other good news was that he was on the phone from Los […]
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Numbers? What Numbers?
I’m sure I’m not the only person who wondered why the Sundance Institute and Women in Film Los Angeles needed to spend who-knows-how-much money and time to study whether women are getting a fair shake in the independent film world. The answer has two letters, and it starts with “n.” Am I right, ladies? Nevertheless, they went ahead with the research, and the resulting 43-page report, “Exploring the Barriers and Opportunities for Independent Women Filmmakers,” was released in January. Spoiler alert: The news is not good. While independent film has a higher percentage of women behind the lens, compared to mainstream […]
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Learning to Love the Heterodoxy
During this year’s True/False Film Festival, I sat on a panel with four formidable colleagues to bat around the question of how, pray tell, critics should evaluate documentary films. Should we approach nonfiction films differently than we approach fiction films, or as part of the same continuum? Should we evaluate documentaries on a content curve, taking subject matter, political intent or real world impact into account, or should we see them as cinema, full stop? I’m not sure we made any great strides toward consensus on these questions, but I’m also not sure that consensus would be of any service […]
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Should Documentary Filmmakers Learn to Code?
A decade ago, the question would have seemed outlandish, but today, interactive documentaries have established themselves as a small, but growing, genre. Born out of experimentation, interactive docs are at once hard to define and easy to recognize. Some look like films and some don’t, but all draw on the language of cinematic storytelling, even though they’re native to tablets, mobile phones and the Web. Inspired by the impact of emerging technologies on nonfiction storytelling, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department launched the Open Documentary Lab last March. As our team at the MIT OpenDocLab mapped the field and connected with […]
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Secrets of the Glam Squad: Inside the World of Film Hair and Makeup Departments
You’re the producer of a low-budget movie, and, as usual, there isn’t enough money. Each department is straining against their budgets, and you don’t want the production value of the film to falter. So you are forced to prioritize. More lights? Well, that’s hard to argue with — the movie has to look good. Another van? No way around that; you have to get people to the next location in time. But makeup and hair needs a space heater? Um … can’t they just put on sweaters? “If the electric department says they need two hours, no one questions it,” […]
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Back to the Future with 4K: Large-Sensor Motion Picture Cameras in 2013
A motion picture camera used to be a light-sealed box with a strip of film running through it. Was it easy to thread? Did it run quiet? How bright was the viewfinder? Today’s cameras are exponentially more complex. They are literal bundles of separate technologies, each lurching forward at a different rate. To understand today’s cameras, you must understand the parts to understand the whole. This is my third annual overview of digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker, and it is being written in the run-up to NAB 2013 in Las Vegas, the world’s largest trade show devoted to digital video […]
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VOD: Where are the Numbers?
Alicia Van Couvering on the mysteries of VOD reporting.
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Rise of the Neuro Eye
At some point in every film nerd’s life we watch Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera. We learn of the foreboding “cinematic apparatus” — of how the film projector mimics our human eye, causing the audience to become a part of the machine, to identify with the protagonist, to root for the hero with all of our psychological ego-driven urges as we complete the circuit of cinematic perception. But now what? As theaters all over the world are moving to digital projection, the simple mechanism that mirrors our human eye is becoming obsolete. Film prints have now become a […]
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The New Professionalism
Over the last decade, as the tools of filmmaking became less expensive and more generally accessible, there was much excitement about what came to be known as the “democratization” of filmmaking. Suddenly, one didn’t have to be rich or the relative of a studio executive to get a movie made. In addition, websites such as YouTube and others opened up distribution to the masses, creating a new paradigm that was dubbed “user-generated content.” All of this sounded great on the surface, but like other seemingly positive advances — remember the “1,000-channel universe” or the “long-tail theory?” — there are always […]
