Issues
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Editor’s Letter
There was an interesting exchange of views on the Filmmaker blog afew weeks back about documentaries and the changing nature of story. The posts had to do with Doug Tirola’s documentary All In – The Poker Movie, which won the Best Documentary prize at CineVegas a few years back but was then re-shot and re-edited for theatrical release just this year. The reason for all that extensive work was “Black Friday.” After the film’s premiere the Feds shut down multiple online poker sites, thus fundamentally altering (and dating) the world depicted in the movie. The blog posts had to do […]
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Good Things in Smaller Packages
For those of us excited by the advent of large-sensor motion picture cameras, this past year has been the Great Leap Forward. Signs are everywhere. ARRI’s ALEXA swept TV series production in the U.S. Canon harnessed Hollywood pomp for the November launch of its C300. RED placed an eight-page glossy fold-out to tout EPIC in April’s Vogue (“The camera that changed cinema is now changing fashion”). Sony shipped no less than 100 F65s, the first Super 35 camera with an 8K sensor. A year ago, in “Does Size Matter?” I surveyed the still-budding field of large-sensor cameras for Filmmaker and […]
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Culture Hacker: Igniting the Imagination of Many
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Cinema Eye
Each year, Filmmaker sponsors Cinema Eye’s Heterodox Award, given to the fiction film that most compellingly illuminates the formal possibilities of nonfiction filmmaking while raising provocative questions about on-going documentary orthodoxy and the perceived boundaries between narrative and nonfiction filmmaking. The winner this year was Mike Mills’ Beginners, and below, juror Kimberly Reed (Prodigal Sons) takes you into the deliberation chamber. When asked to jury the Heterodox Award, I was eager to engage in a conversation about cross-genre filmmaking that was artist-led, the aim of the award. The panel — Alrick Brown, Shannon Kennedy, Natalia Almada, Sandi DuBowski and […]
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Decisive Moments
“All you need for a movie is a gun and girl,” Jean-Luc Godard famously wrote in one of his journals. But, of course, to make a good movie, you need others things too. An observant, imaginative eye helps, as does fresh context and a director’s understanding of the community containing that gun, that girl and, inevitably, the guy who stands behind — or in front of — the trigger. Restless City, the exciting dramatic feature debut of Nigerian-born photographer and music-video director Andrew Dosunmu, has all of these elements, and it mixes them into a hauntingly sensual take on the […]
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Changing Channels
Earlier this year, The New Yorkermagazine hosted a panel discussion titled, “Is Television the New Cinema?” In his opening remarks, The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, posed the question, “Television is in the process, in many ways, of eclipsing cinema: True or false?” While the panelists didn’t give a definite answer, it was generally agreed that the TV medium — once considered a mainstream form of “junk storytelling” — has recently blossomed. Journalist Emily Nussbaum noted the rise, beginning in the late ’90s, “of a breed of irascible, aggressive and auteurist TV makers,” and the creation of shows like Buffy […]
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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. -
Parting Shot – Marina Abramovich
The sitter approaches the chair and sits, gazingat the woman directly across the table separating them. There’s a pause as the woman senses that the sitter is there, in the chair. Then the woman lifts her head, opens her eyes and stares directly at the sitter. And at that moment … what? The subtle yet powerful expressions that course through artist Marina Abramovic’s face are near impossible to describe. Warmth, yes. Empathy, surely. But overwhelmingly, just presence. For those moments, the sitter is with Abramovic only. They are present, and there is no one else in the world. “Only connect,” […]
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We Are All Auteurs: YouTube’s Channels of Reality
In his prescient 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” theorist Roland Barthes celebrated the birth of the reader at the expense of the death of the author: “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit . . . to close the writing.” Coming during the expressive, anti-authoritarian energy of the counterculture, Barthes’ essay served as a manifesto for a democratic impulse that would transform the readers, in fact, into the creators of the text. This was also an era of radical experiments […]
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Prophet Motive
Save for the beard, Vikram Gandhi resembles nothing of his fictional creation Sri Kumaré, “a revered yoga master known to his contemporaries as Adarsha or ‘The Mirror.’ He is the current torchbearer of the Kumaré lineage and a respected, charismatic teacher of Yogic Science. Sri Kumaré is known for his youthful energy, transformative philosophy and divine blessing.” (That’s all from the Kumaré website — yes, Gandhi’s made-up character has his own website.) Instead, Gandhi comes across as the humble and inquisitive New Jersey native that he is in real life — a guy whose mischievous curiosity about humankind’s search for […]
