Reports
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Boycott!
For several weeks at the end of last year, it seemed as though the racial tension building in the United States might reach a boiling point. The deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice at the hands of law enforcement had produced an energy of outrage and frustration, sparking heated national debate. It was a debate that didn’t hinge on whether or not America had a race problem, but how bad America’s race problem actually was. For some, the deaths of Brown, Garner, Rice and others were proof that there was a systematic, inherent disregard for black lives […]
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Goodbye to 3-D Rules
To a degree, the content of Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language will be familiar to viewers who have kept up with the director’s latter-day work: aphorisms and quotations by the score, obdurately unidentified characters whose relationship to each other is unclear, snatches of disparate music cued and cut off with disorienting abruptness. It’s not for everyone, but Godard’s first three-dimensional film is so visually astonishing that a lack of comprehension isn’t a barrier. Outdoors, sea and land stretch out into a receding horizon deeper than anything you’ve seen. Inside, there are more knockout distortions transforming even the most banal objects: […]
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Redrawing the Boundaries
MDFF is a Toronto-based production company steadily churning out nuanced humanist films that capture a particular middle-class Canadian experience, while at the same time challenging the tendency for Canadian cinema to stay ghettoized within its own borders. Its founders, Kazik Radwankski and Dan Montgomery, are doing more than just bringing regional idiosyncrasies such as Toronto’s racoons or Vancouver’s methadone clinics to European film festivals. They’re using MDFF as an umbrella to foster a film-going culture in their own city, simultaneously supporting the emerging independent filmmakers north and south of the border whose films they produce and screen. Radwanski and Montgomery […]
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When Restoration Met Distribution
As CEO of the Los Angeles-based creative studio and postproduction house Cinelicious, Paul Korver had the unsettling feeling that too many deals were passing him by. The preferred film scanning and restoration vendor for Criterion and Alamo Drafthouse, Cinelicious was also making a name for itself as a digital intermediate supervisor. Touring the festival circuit with the likes of Boyhood and Prince Avalanche, Korver found himself in conversation with various rights holders who were looking to restore films but without the funds to do so. What if, he thought, Cinelicious had a distribution arm to monetize that restoration investment? Thus […]
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School of Protest
A collaborative work made by 10 former students, Winter, Go Away! is one of the most exciting documentaries to come out of Russia in recent years. Taught by Marina Razbezhkina, producer and guiding force, graduates of the School of Documentary Film and Documentary Theatre in Moscow grappled with 1,000 hours of footage and a set of restrictive dictums — the institute bans the term “artist” as well as the use of interviews and talking heads — to create a mosaic-like depiction of the 2011 Moscow winter protests. It’s just one of several fascinating collaborative films to emerge from a slowly […]
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Theatrical, Regained
In 2008, Jake Perlin launched his specialty repertory film label The Film Desk with the first U.S. release of Philippe Garrel’s 1991 I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore, a compressed tragic romance doubling as a eulogy for the director’s ex, Nico. Perlin followed with reissues of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Susan Sontag’s Promised Lands. Today, Perlin thinks that adventurous opening trio still represents the kind of movies he wants to reissue. “I go after movies I’m interested in, and part of my interest in them is that I can make prints.” With a few exceptions made for films where […]
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Ecstatic Truth: 15 Years Of Hybrids Rising
Speaking April 30, 1999, at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, Werzog Herzog laid down 12 edicts on the pursuit of “ecstatic truth” in the documentary. “The so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité,” Herzog proclaimed in his “Minnesota Declaration,” announcing instead his devotion to “poetic, ecstatic truth” accessible “only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” He was speaking specifically about his 1992 masterwork Lessons Of Darkness: unfaked, awe-inspiring footage of Kuwait’s oil fields on fire after the Iraq War, framed by a made-up Pascal epigraph and narration from the perspective of an alien intelligence baffled by what it’s seeing. Herzog unrepentantly […]
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Instant History: Fukushima and Tahrir Square On-screen
The 24-hour news culture of immediate reaction, Internet-enabled connectivity (from emails to Twitter) and the so-called “now generation” have impacted the way the filmmaking community reacts to real-life disasters, not always positively. After 9/11, the question was asked: How much time must pass before filmmakers can deal with such a destructive event? Films featuring terrorist activity, such as Collateral Damage, had their releases postponed to avoid offending sensibilities, while Sam Raimi deleted a Spider-Man shot of the Twin Towers. But other filmmakers raced to include, not exclude, 9/11. Spike Lee altered David Benioff’s script for 25th Hour to include a […]
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Sharing The Grief of Others
One of 2011’s best independent films, Patrick Wang’s debut In the Family almost didn’t get discovered. After being rejected by the top festivals, Wang premiered regionally, at the Hawaii Film Festival and San Diego Asian Film Festival, before four-walling New York City’s Quad Cinema, where sterling reviews from everyone from Filmmaker to The New York Times jumpstarted a 30-plus-city DIY theatrical tour. If In the Family was one of those “out of nowhere” films, Wang is determined that not be the case for his follow-up feature. For The Grief of Others, based on the novel by Leah Hager Cohen and […]
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Down in the Valley
Trespassing tire tracks. Binoculars slightly out of place. Gun gone missing. Multiple clues confirming Mike Rust’s worst fears — someone had violated his home, a sanctuary nestled on 80 acres of wild land deep in south central Colorado’s remote San Luis Valley. Suddenly, two shadows buzz along the horizon. One man sets off alone in hot pursuit. It is the last thing he will do?? That was March 31, 2009, the last time anyone heard from this beloved 56-year-old hall-of-fame mountain biker. Evidence found, including a blood-stained gun butt and vest, suggests that Rust caught the perpetrators, a violent confrontation […]
