Issues
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The COVID Challenge: Arthouses Adjust to a Reconfigured Landscape
In the Heights, Black Widow, Respect and Candyman—not typical indie-film fare, but because of the pressures of the ongoing pandemic on theatrical moviegoing, these are just some of the films arthouses have booked over the past several months. Granted, the supply of new available films was massively down, and theaters have been desperate to get audiences back into seats, but COVID-related shifts in arthouse exhibition have been significant, myriad and potentially long-lasting. And none of it is good for indie filmmakers. For example, here’s something you probably don’t want to hear from your neighborhood indie venue: “We’re seriously considering playing […]
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North Star: Nina Lorez Collins on Her Mother Kathleen Collins’s Life and Legacy
“It is all about an urge, a powerful and overwhelming urge, to fulfill myself, to fulfill this life that is inside me, to fulfill it in every way, leaving nothing untapped. That is what it is all about: the excesses, the anxiety, the restlessness, the pain, carrying around in me this irrepressible need to fulfill myself in every way possible.”—Kathleen Collins If I were to attempt to choose one word to sum up Kathleen Collins’s work it would be interiority. The idea of leaving nothing untapped or laying it all bare is prevalent across her plays, screenplays, short stories and […]
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Breaking Bodies: Julia Ducournau on Titane
Following her breakout film, the high school cannibal romp Raw (2016), filmmaker Julia Ducournau doubles down on her predilections for freely reconstructed human flesh. The Palme d’Or–winning Titane strays even further from traditional narrative logic, emerging as a baroque investigation of the power of bodies to morph in response to the desires and violence of both people and machines. Taking its title from the metal plate installed in a young girl’s head after her father (Bertrand Bonello, in a fun bit of casting) crashes their car amid her aggressive fury, it is, yes, the movie where a woman fucks a […]
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Stanley Kubrick’s “Manhattan Project”: How Two Experimental Filmmakers Contributed to 2001: A Space Odyssey
It was December 1964, and Stanley Kubrick had a problem: No one wanted his new movie. The 36-year-old director had spent months writing a treatment for a science fiction film titled Journey Beyond the Stars with renowned novelist Arthur C. Clarke. When he started to pitch it, however, he found that no movie company wanted to produce it, with only MGM showing a vague interest. Considering his near legendary status nowadays, it may come as a surprise to learn that in the early 1960s, despite his growing reputation, Kubrick did not yet have movie moguls at his beck and call. […]
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Environmental Storytelling
In August 2021, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new report on the global state of the environment, highlighting the shrinkage of glaciers, warming of oceans, massive forest loss, extreme heat, devastating drought and more. While the report is crushing, it is also fuel for action. Indeed, the BBC’s climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, suggested that 2021 could be the year for finally making climate change a top priority, citing the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in early November as just one landmark event that could help consolidate action. For filmmakers teaching in universities, the […]
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Rubbing Shoulders with Beauty: After a Pandemic Year, Acts of Looking at the Camden International Film Festival
In La panthère des neiges/The Velvet Queen, a feature directed by Marie Amiguet based on an idea by renowned wildlife photographer Vincent Munier, French writer and traveler Sylvain Tesson accompanies Munier to the Sanjiangyuan nature reserve on the Tibetan plateau, hoping for a glimpse of the elusive snow leopard. “Not everything is made for the human eye,” Tesson says at one point, a sentiment that is both a lesson in filmic observation—searching for the unseen in order to record it—as well as a commentary on the responsibilities inherent in that act. In the beginning of his expedition with Munier, Tesson […]
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After the Goldrush: NFTS, the Blockchain and Independent Film
“One week, I didn’t know what an NFT was,” says producer and director Adam Benzine. “Seven days later, I had the first film out as an NFT, and seven days after that, CNN wanted me on as an expert on NFTs.” Benzine is referring to a time just a few months ago—March 2021—when his documentary, Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, a 2015 short about the maker of the classic Holocaust documentary Shoah, was announced as the “first Academy Award nominee to be released as an NFT.” Issued on the Rarible NFT trading site, Benzine’s NFTs (they were released in […]
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Editor’s Letter
Often when I sit down to write this letter each quarter, I’ll scan through our InDesign file and take note of themes or subject matters that flow from article to article across the issue. Sometimes, a business issue will be represented in multiple stories, or several directors will unexpectedly share the same creative inspiration or working method. This time, as I flipped through the pages of this summer 2021 edition, one thing jumped out: There’s no article tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. A year ago, the digital pages I flicked through remained that way. For the first and only time […]
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Dial-up Connections: All About Lily Chou-Chou at 20
Twenty years after the release of All About Lily Chou-Chou, I can’t think of a film that better depicts what first drew people to the internet, and certainly none that matches its expressive use of content-type header errors. Director Shunji Iwai evokes the gaps and hesitancy in early internet communication through the depiction of character encoding across the screen. Posts on an online forum devoted to Lily Chou-Chou, a mysterious pop singer, first appear in a mojibake jumble of accented Latin characters. We can hear the clack of an old keyboard and another tap to refresh. The BBS code is […]
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Knowledge Can Be Scary
No North American city is more synonymous with Bronx-born George Romero than Pittsburgh. A trip to the nearby Monroeville Mall (the setting of Romero’s 1978 satirical screed on mass consumerism, Dawn of the Dead) brings you face-to-face with the horror director himself—a bronze bust of Romero’s head greets shoppers outside Dick’s Sporting Goods. When the filmmaker unexpectedly passed away in 2017, he was at work on his newest sequel, Road of the Dead, in Toronto. News of his death from lung cancer prompted online tributes from the film community, not that Romero would have encouraged any public-facing praise: “I had […]
