Issues
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Necessary Filmmaking: An Excerpt from Jake Mahaffy’s Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling
A Filmmaker 25 New Face from 2005, Jake Mahaffy has been making microbudget films for two decades and has now distilled his creative and production philosophies in a new book, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means, published April 2025 from Routledge. In the excerpt below, Mahaffy outlines several foundational concepts microbudget filmmakers should embrace.—Scott Macaulay Ownership, Intelligent Design and Creative Control Limitations imposed upon you are called “restrictive,” but limitations you impose on yourself are “creative choices.” Professionals set their own rules all the time. Regardless of budget, directors will force themselves to […]
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Black Smoke: David Lynch, L. Frank Baum and California
On day two of January’s Los Angeles fires, I took a picture looking east from the hills where I live. The zoomed-in, abstracted shape in the frame resembles a reverse hourglass; the dark plume rising from the center, Altadena, seems drawn up from the ashen ground to fully conceal the sky. The color of that central plume isn’t the rusty brown of wildfire smoke but an artificial black, like burning tires or the “SURRENDER DOROTHY” message the Wicked Witch writes across the sky with her broom—one of the great practical effects in The Wizard of Oz. I’ve read that David […]
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Stepping Inside: How David Lynch Tapped Into the Unconscious
David Lynch’s death was a big personal loss of a friend, confidant and mentor, but it’s been astonishing to me how many people who knew him only through his art have been affected. He got inside our heads so effectively; like Kafka, he had remarkable access to his unconscious. He seemed as though he could dream while awake, and being on a set with him, not only were you entering his dream, but everybody there was having a collective dream. I saw Eraserhead when I was in high school; friends took me to a midnight showing at the University of […]
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Following the Currents: Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao on Caught by the Tides
Few major auteurs have successfully used footage from their previous films to create an entirely new one on equal footing with their greatest works, but for Jia Zhangke, whose project has in large part been to document changes in China’s landscape and society, such reflexive behavior makes particular sense. In Caught by the Tides, we witness the intertwined changes in his aesthetic sensibility as partly determined by the technology that’s enabled it, from mini DV to the cold, immaculate sheen of today’s professional grade digital cinema equipment. Moreover, we witness the changes in Zhao Tao—Jia’s collaborator since Platform (2000) and, […]
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Weird Life Events: Universal Language Director Matthew Rankin’s Awards Season Diary
30 August 2024. Montreal. Our movie has been named as Canada’s Official Supplication to the Academy Awards. Lord, please increase my bewilderment! So crazy. I think it’s the first Winnipeg movie to enter this horserace since Richard Condie’s La Salla in 1996. We are told that months of campaigning await! We are not competitive people, but Pirouz Nemati came over and led the whole team in a 12-minute group hug, and we started practicing our back-slapping and glad-handing techniques. David Lynch says, “Look ‘em in the eye and speak from the heart.” FOOTNOTE: My Hater has started an ambitious letter-writing […]
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Made in the USA: Tax Credits in 2025
Canada has long been known as “Hollywood North,” with American production companies taking advantage of the country’s favorable exchange rate, tax incentives and crew base to make movies for cheaper than they can in the United States. But, increasingly, a number of other countries and regions—the United Kingdom, Spain, the Canary Islands, Eastern Europe—have instituted enticing tax credits aimed at attracting international production, so much so that, for many U.S. independent producers, making a low-budget indie in the States is no longer an automatic proposition. After considering multiple locations, for example, Brady Corbet’s Oscar-nominated The Brutalist wound up faking the […]
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Arriving at a Resolution: Remastering Movies for 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
We have reached a tipping point in the format wars, with UHD poised to overtake standard definition DVDs for first place. Now, there’s a new species of reply guy—one who responds to every Blu-ray release announcement with, “Why no 4K?” As a home video producer for Kino Lorber, I will try to explain the continuing rise of 4K UHD, as well as the economic realities of why it’s not possible to release everything in the format. 4K UHD (full name: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray) is the highest resolution disc available and the one preferred by collectors. Introduced in February 2016 […]
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Conspiracy of the Dead: David Cronenberg on The Shrouds
“Long live the new flesh.” The most famous line in any Cronenberg picture, uttered by Videodrome’s Max Renn (James Woods), is also something of a mission statement for much of the Canadian master’s work. The technological and corporeal fuse across his filmography, resulting in new sensations, desires and ways of being in the world. In Videodrome, unusual orifices form, as stomachs become insertion points for violent VHS tapes. Real and virtual worlds blur in eXistenZ as videogame controllers jack directly into spinal cords; more recently, in Crimes of the Future, the surgical removal of surreal organs is the latest form […]
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Passing Through the Black Lodge: David Lynch and Native Culture
There’s an episode in David Lynch’s memoir Room to Dream that I think of often, from his cross-country journey from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to begin his time as a student at the American Film Institute, where he would go on to create Eraserhead. At the end of the drive’s second day, David, his brother John and future collaborator Jack Fisk pulled over to the side of the road in the New Mexican desert: It was a moonless night and we went down into these bushes to sleep. It was real quiet, then suddenly there was a whooshing sound and […]
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Speaking in Tongues: How Koyaanisqatsi Was Reborn as The Vivid Unknown
When I step into the exhibition hall, three large screens display rapidly shifting, AI-generated images of natural and industrial landscapes. The overstimulating visuals resist easy interpretation, and they are also responsive to the viewers in the room. The video stops when the room is empty and speeds up as the room becomes more crowded. The longer one stays in the room, the more one’s “shadow” on the screen becomes visible—effects all made possible by a complex real-time vision-tracking system. This is The Vivid Unknown, an immersive installation that recreates the groundbreaking 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi using AI. The piece is a […]
