Issues
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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 […]
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Across Time: Filmmakers Reflect on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror
The year after I graduated college, I’d go to Andrei Tarkovsky double bills a lot. In the New York of the mid-1980s, there would be a Tarkovsky retrospective every few months at Film Forum and now-shuttered spots like the Thalia and Metro Twin. The Russian director’s 1975 Mirror would always be the second film on the program—Andrei Rublev and Mirror, Stalker and Mirror, Solaris and Mirror—so, I wound up seeing Mirror many times. This was partly due to fatigue. My day job was writing grants for a nonprofit. I’d see these movies after work and would invariably drift off during […]
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Battle Cry: Beth B and Lydia Lunch on Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over
Beth B’s films take you deep into the darkness of the human psyche. With a body of work that includes shorts, features, video installations and episodic television, she creates from a place of pure opposition and resistance, standing up against oppressive systems of control and calling them out with the knowledge that discomfort and provocation are what creates dialogue and generates positive change. B’s films are not easy. B’s new documentary film, Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, may be her most compelling and powerful film yet, as it looks at musician, writer and provocateur Lydia Lunch’s 45-year career […]
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A Colander in the River of the World: On Decolonizing Film Studies
American film studies and production programs are undergoing a major structural overhaul. A long-burgeoning movement comprised of academics and filmmakers are calling for the full decolonization of syllabi and cinematic offerings within these courses, which have historically foregrounded work by straight, white men as the pinnacle of what’s worth studying and emulating. Many academics and scholars hesitate to use the term “decolonize” broadly for fear of rendering it into a tepid buzzword (or worse, deflating the term to a borderline-meaningless liberal t-shirt slogan), yet it’s become an essential framework for many who wish to make meaningful changes within the confines […]
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Beautiful Syllabus Design
Is there any document more compelling than a good syllabus? I have a collection of favorites in a folder on my desktop and often daydream about following a particular professor’s list of screenings, readings and writing prompts to create my own individual class, a kind of private self-improvement gambit or—even better—a venture into some fantastic cinematic territory still unknown to me. A good syllabus is a treasured resource; a great syllabus, though, with its hints and errant connections, exudes the magic of possibility and epiphany. As an example, I remember reading my colleague Priya Jaikumar’s syllabus for a graduate seminar […]
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Getting Started with NFTs on Hic Et Nunc
Hic Et Nunc (HEN) launched in March. The site and interface have been growing rapidly and are still evolving. Here is how to get started on the platform. Setting up a wallet Your wallet will hold your cryptocurrency and enable you to buy and sell. It’s also how you connect, or log in, to HEN. We’ll focus on the Temple and Kukai wallets, which at different points have been recommended by HEN. These options store your data locally on your computer. When setting up a wallet, you’ll be presented with an automatically generated 8- to 12-word seed phrase. You’ll need […]
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Where Have the Low-Budget Movies Gone?
While streamer-backed productions promise a golden future for a lucky few, for most independent filmmakers these days, it’s more challenging to subsist by making the sort of professionally budgeted, less than $3 million films that used to be hallmarks of the sector. One significant reason, according to producers, is that it’s much more difficult to shoot a nonunion film. IATSE has become a more dominant force in the independent industry, which has consequently expanded budgets well above that number. “I don’t think you can do a union movie for less than $3 million,” says one producer. Although some nonunion shows […]
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Pregnant Pauses: Matías Piñeiro on Isabella
Matías Piñeiro’s sixth feature and seventh Shakespeare-related film, Isabella, begins with purely abstract images whose use here is new in his work: four different shades on the blue spectrum, alternately lighter and darker in smaller and smaller concentric rectangles. The smallest, central rectangle fades to purple before three different shades of that color pulsate outward to the largest rectangle. The rectangles then dissolve into one unified purple that fills the rectangular frame containing the film itself, which starts gently pulsating in different shades under silent opening titles. These abstract color studies (whose resemblance to the work of James Turrell was […]
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Love and Memories: Director Phil Lord Interviews Director Heidi Ewing About Her Debut Narrative Feature, I Carry You With Me
This article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 2021 edition. It is being posted today online in conjunction with I Carry You With Me‘s release in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. Arriving amidst a number of recent pictures exploring notions of hybridity—mostly documentaries that incorporate narrative or meta elements—nonfiction filmmaker Heidi Ewing’s feature dramatic debut, I Carry You With Me, deploys its formal invention in movingly unexpected ways. Taking the recounted memories of an undocumented Mexican couple living in New York, Ewing tells a swooning, deeply romantic period love story. And it’s one that achieves an arresting sobriety with contemporary […]
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Technology Tailwinds — Where Are They Taking Us?
The following article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 2021 edition. Digital technologies, incessantly lurching forward, are the ground we filmmakers stand on. No wonder we’re often unsteady on our feet. The pandemic has only become an accelerant. Although FaceTime and Skype were around awhile before both became verbs, it took the exigencies of the pandemic to flood our lives with Zoom calling, a digital convenience that has reshaped our relationship to proximity, travel and geography. Just ask Joe Biden. Doesn’t every production meeting now take place on Zoom? Production practices with renewed COVID relevance include use of zooms instead […]
