Reports
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Happiness is Overrated: A New Book Examines the Arthouse Sub-genre, “the Feel-Bad Film”
This summer I have brutalized myself with one challenging theater drama after another, and I have been utterly enriched by the truthful and uncompromising bleakness of these experiences. Stephen Karam’s Tony-award winning The Humans is a play about a family that comes together in a crummy New York City apartment to share secrets of infidelity, sickness, aging, unemployment and just overall sadness. It ends not with a resounding “chin up” march into sunlight but with a cinematic, dialogue-free, horrific sequence that plunges us even deeper into the dark than when it started. Watching the play in a crowded theater is […]
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Politics of Style: Restoring and Rediscovering Apparatus Films
“I want to make films on the other side of fashion, on the other side of taste,” whispers a melancholic starlet into a velvety black void. It’s the 1930s, and the alluring actress — known in Europe as “La Divina” — has been brought to Hollywood to vamp in commercial confections alongside an American matinee idol. She doesn’t fit in. She wants to play real roles, like Dorian Gray or Christ. Her nervy agent is bewildered. “That’s art!” he scoffs. “Who’s gonna to pay for that?” Brooke Dammkoehler’s 45-minute La Divina (1989), a buoyant pastiche of Golden Age melodrama by way […]
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Lost in the Funhouse
House of Eternal Return is an overwhelming — 20,000 square feet! — immersive experience dreamed up by Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe art collective turned production company. Upon its March opening, the interactive art piece — realized through a multimillion dollar investment by Santa Fe resident George R.R. Martin, who also happens to own the local Jean Cocteau Cinema arthouse — garnered national attention from such mainstream outlets as The New York Times and NPR (which called it “Pee-wee’s Playhouse on steroids”), and drew the likes of Martin and Neil Gaiman. Yet at this moment, when artists are scrambling to […]
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Out of Great Silence
Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur unfolds in obstinate silence. Shot duration is prolonged beyond the point of narrative or reason, and the narrative is oblique in the extreme. There’s a man, a woman and a child in various configurations: in a house, running through fields, separated and together. In extended tracking shots, the woman runs through a dark forest, illuminated by a relentless light that isolates her in high contrast, as if she were fleeing a prison-yard. The thrust of what’s being seen is unclear, and the silence grows oddly confrontational. Now the hour-long 1968 film has a score. Written and […]
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Fukushima Story
Just days after the March 2011 tsunami off the Japanese coast, Brooklyn-based photojournalist and documentarian Jake Price found his way to the Tōhoku region of northern Japan, the area hardest hit by the devastation. He stayed for months, living with Japan’s internal refugees and carefully chronicling their lives as they sought to come to terms with the disaster and rebuild. The result, Unknown Spring (2013), is an online interactive documentary that testifies to its subjects’ resilience and humanity in the face of unspeakable odds. But Price, who has had photography assignments across the globe, is no “parachute journalist.” Even before […]
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Virtual Crime Scene
Since the 2012 Sundance premiere of Hunger in Los Angeles — a virtual reality piece derived from an actual incident in which a man had a diabetic seizure while waiting in line at a food bank — Nonny de la Peña has become one of the most celebrated artists in the VR world of immersive journalism. With One Dark Night, the “godmother of virtual reality” (as Endgadget dubbed her) has set her sights on another in-the-blink-of-an-eye tragedy — the killing of Trayvon Martin while the unarmed African-American teen was visiting his father’s fiancée’s condo complex in Sanford, Florida. Through 911 […]
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Jump! How New Distributor Grasshopper Film Plans to Succeed
Before going to meet Ryan Krivoshey — the founder and, for the moment, sole employee of new distributor Grasshopper Film — I emailed a friend who works in distribution to ask what questions he would ask if he were picking Krivoshey’s brain. “HOW DOES HE MAKE MONEY?” he wrote back in emphatic all-caps. A fair question when you look at Grasshopper’s ambitious slate of first releases, which kicked off with Asghar Farhadi’s previously unreleased 2006 film Fireworks Wednesday. That’s a comparatively viable commercial proposition, given Farhadi’s high profile as the director of A Separation and relative audience friendliness. What’s coming […]
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Worlds Within
Oculus Rift Just reaching stores is the long-awaited Oculus Rift ($599), the highest-end VR headset presently on the consumer market. Launched in 2012 with $2.5 million in Kickstarter funding and purchased two years later by Facebook for $2 billion, Oculus Rift in this early iteration is focusing on gaming, with EVE: Valkyrie bundled with the kit. The company is developing film applications too. There’s Oculus Video, an app allowing viewers to watch movies in either 2-D or 3-D from within a virtual cinema space. (You can even select your seat and angle of view.) And there are already dramatic VR […]
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Indie Housewarming
When IFP Minnesota was deciding whose name to place above the exhibition galleries in its new space in St. Paul’s Vandalia Tower, executive director Andrew Peterson and its board of directors didn’t go the obvious route. There’s not a corporate sponsor logo in sight. Instead, the organization named the gallery after two local photographers, Ann Marsden and Gus Gustafson, both of whom were avid chroniclers of the Minneapolis/St. Paul arts community before they each passed away in recent years. Along with IFP Minnesota’s offices, four classrooms and two editing suites, the Marsden/Gustafson gallery opened to the public and members this […]
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Rep Reborn, Downtown: The Story Behind NYC’s Metrograph Theater
Though NYC is one of the best places in America to see repertory cinema, the number of theaters in the city has decreased greatly over the decades. That’s as true for rep houses as it is for first-run venues; the Metrograph will be programming in both fields. When the two-screen venue opens in March, it’ll be the first new independent movie theater to open in Manhattan in a decade; fittingly, it sits across the street from the long-boarded up Loew’s Canal Theatre. On a mid-December day, founder Alexander Olch, CEO Ethan Oberman and programming and artistic director Jake Perlin walk […]
