Reports
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Three-Minute Window
Three Minute Window -
Into the Zone: On Geoff Dyer’s Critical Memoir about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
Originally appearing in our Spring, 2012 print issue, my short report on Zona, Geoff Dyer’s fascinating critical memoir on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is being reposted today timed to the film’s run at Lincoln Center and forthcoming release by Criterion. — SM My first Tarkovsky film, my gateway picture, was his penultimate, Nostalghia, at the Olympia Theater near Columbia University in Morningside Heights. The seats slanted one way, the screen slanted the other, and there was a leak in the ceiling. Water dripped from the roof into a bucket on the floor, blending into Tarkovsky’s typically excellent sound design of distant […]
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Into the Light
The 2012 Whitney Biennial, on display until May 27, has received a significant amount of attention for being the first in the series’ 80-year history to prominently include large-scale dance, music and theater productions within the museum itself. Artists from these various disciplines are in residence at Whitney’s Madison Avenue digs for shows and performances that will be premiered alongside the art survey’s customary installations and gallery work. But there’s been another change at the Biennial this year. While film has long been part of the show, curators Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders enlarged the program and invited in programmers […]
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Brave New Worlds: On Transmedia Worldbuilding
“A linear story had a linear workflow, but now we’re in a nonlinear immersive space,” explained production designer Alex McDowell at a recent Flux 5D event titled “Digital Design and World-building in the Narrative Media Landscape” held at the University of Southern California March 13, 14 and 15, 2012. -
Production Portal
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Cinema of Space
At his excellent BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh offers a smart, original perspective on architecture by connecting it with various other disciplines including, this spring, film. -
Voices from the Grave
“I think we have really broken a new genre. It is the next evolution of factual storytelling.” So says Christine Connor, the creator and producer of ABC’s forthcoming drama-documentary hybrid series Final Witness, which begins its debut season in early 2012. In fall 2009, independent producer Connor pitched ABC’s Rudy Bednar the idea of a show that would present “true-crime murder stories told with an emphasis on narrative storytelling, narrated by the character of the victim.” A further hook was that Final Witness, in an attempt to move away from the look and feel of conventional true-crime re-enactment shows, would […]
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Family Matters
As a child growing up in Scituate, Mass., Nick Flynn was often left to explore on his own, and he got into varying degrees of trouble. Flynn’s parents were divorced and he had no contact with his father, living instead with his mother, who worked in a bakery. She remarried to a 21-year-old Vietnam vet, and, after their divorce, Flynn wound up living with her and a new boyfriend — a member of one of the largest drug smuggling rings in New England. Around the age of 18, Flynn started working for the smuggler — unloading fishing boats and as […]
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‘Til the End of Time
While the title of Eve Sussman’s (and her collaborative team Rufus Corporation’s) whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir –– shown as part of New Frontiers at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival –– refers to a seminal abstract artwork dealing with space, the video itself is all about time. In fact, this experimental piece’s apparent story about an American geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood) working in a post-Soviet industrial metropolis called City-A has no fixed time at all. That’s because the sum of the video’s parts aren’t just greater than the whole –– there is no whole. Through an algorithm, which Sussman has dubbed “the Serenity […]
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NETWORKING FRENZY
More Reports: Filmmaking in Afghanistan, L.A. Rebellion, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center amphitheater.
