Issues
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The Wind is Your Enemy
Countless books, essays and stories have been written about legendary German director Werner Herzog—his various earthly escapades, his endless search for the ecstatic truth and, of course, his always entertaining meme-ability—which mostly make heavy-handed attempts at understanding that which is simply impossible to understand: What makes Herzog so unique? Even after spending two weeks alongside the man on the island of Lanzarote, I will not attempt to explain the unexplainable. I shot an interview with Herzog at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago in 2019. As someone described the video to him, he slowly turned toward me and extended his […]
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Editor’s Letter
My 2020 pandemic purchase was a new LG TV, replacing the Samsung that was more than a decade old. The new TV is bigger, of course, but it’s also got way more “smart” features than the old one ever had. I don’t use an Apple TV or Roku, and I probably missed a step or two in the set-up process, but when I turn on the TV, I’m launched into a disorienting grid of dozens of channels offering everything from Johnny Carson reruns to celebrity cooking shows to, on NatureVision TV, “soothing, relaxing programs in crystal clear HD.” Oh, and […]
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The (Approximately) 30 Movies of 2021 Shot on 35mm
As I began, for the eighth year in a row (!), to research the year’s U.S. releases shot in 35mm1, the two movie events I was personally anticipating didn’t primarily revolve around that format. One was Anthology Film Archives’s pandemic-delayed retrospective of Canadian experimental filmmaker, multihyphenate artist and all-round hero Michael Snow—initially scheduled for March 2020, finally screened in December and finished just before Omicron started surging around me. Most of his films were shot and shown on 16mm, making the few 35mm inclusions startling for their comparative, immediately perceptible sharpness and sheer volume. I went all in, taking a […]
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Freedom as a Preset: Joanne McNeil on Metaverses Past and Present
“What we’re selling is freedom,” says a digital media executive played by Demi Moore, of the promise of virtual worlds in Disclosure (1994). “We offer through technology what religion and revolution have promised but never delivered: freedom from the physical body; freedom from race and gender, from nationality and personality, from place and time.” Based on a Michael Crichton novel, the movie explores in classic Crichton fashion a theoretically possible but highly unlikely scenario—in this case, a 32-year-old single woman who sexually harasses her married 50-something male subordinate; it is also one of a number of features from the 1990s […]
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Echoes
What is a sound if only you can hear it? And if you heard such a sound, would you think it came from outside, somehow bypassing everyone else as it enters your brain? Or would you think it emanated from within, never escaping your own field of perception and thus becoming your own private mystery—or, as Memoria director Apichatpong Weerasethakul writes, your own “sonic companion?” The Cannes-premiering Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton and now in release from NEON, originated from the director’s musings about his own auditory disturbances, a series of enormous bangs that erupted in his sleep and would put […]
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Overdraft Protection: Chloë Sevigny Talks to Amalia Ulman About her Feature Debut, El Planeta
Starting in 2012, the saga of mother/daughter scammers Justina and Ana Belén was low-key Spanish news fodder. Their scheme followed a buy-first, pay-never model, using a variety of excuses to dodge their bills. They came to legal attention when they attempted to dodge a hotel bill in Gijón, Spain, by threatening to accuse the proprietor of sexual harassment; a year later, in 2013, they were again arrested in the same city for racking up thousands of euros in unpaid dinners. In 2017, Argentinian-born artist Amalia Ulman received a photo of the Beléns from her mother, Ale, who still lives in […]
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The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Bong Joon-ho Interviews Edgar Wright about Wright’s Exhilarating, ’60s-Set Psychological Thriller, Last Night in Soho
“A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever,” J. G. Ballard said in an interview contained within the 1983 reissue of his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. In Ballard’s view, the decade’s political and cultural jolts, coupled with the rise of mass media, produced what he called in another interview “a peculiar psychological climate…” a “landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic novel; we were living more and more inside a strange, enormous work of fiction.” Eloise, the 18-year-old heroine of […]
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to Filmmaker’s 29th anniversary edition—and, as has been the case the past several years, the fall edition is also our 25 New Faces issue. Here, you’ll meet 25 filmmakers—or sets of filmmakers or, in one case, a production company—that have impressed, moved or surprised us, and who we are eager to track into the future. We started the list in 1998 and, looking back, it’s fascinating to see the trajectories of its first graduating class. Peter Sarsgaard, of course, is an in-demand actor. Jamie Babbitt’s But I’m a Cheerleader recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, was rereleased in a new […]
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Twilight of the Robots? Androids in Contemporary Cinema
In August 2021, Elon Musk announced that his company is prototyping a humanoid robot called the “Tesla Bot.” He shared the stage with an ecstatically dancing figure that was obviously a human in a robot costume. Musk assured the audience that eventually the robot “will be real” and will derive from the AI system used in Tesla vehicles. The cars are already “semi-sentient robots on wheels,” Musk said, in yet another of his grandiose claims intended to disguise their minimal autonomous driving capabilities. It all appeared like a desperate attempt to siphon some of the nervous excitement that Boston Dynamics […]
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My Job During a Pandemic: Launching a Film Publishing House
We’d been planning the launch of the publishing house for two years before the pandemic made a joke of all timelines and schedules. Our original idea was to inaugurate Fireflies Press in 2020 with the art book Memoria, a chronicle of the making of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film that exemplifies the creative forms of commentary we’re interested in exploring with the press. What better launching pad, we thought, than the film’s much-anticipated premiere at Cannes in May? On February 27, 2020, our designer and art director James Geoffrey Nunn flew to Berlin for what was supposed to be the start […]
