Issues
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Southern Subjects
No shortage of talented musicians have appeared before Les Blank’s camera, their porch-strum music often laid over savory shots of local cuisine. Like the wind-blown grass Blank always finds time to include, the films undulate between revelry and reflection, while intangible rhythms of life are contoured by a musicality that exists not only in melody, but also in editing and observation. The richest take place in Cajun country Louisiana and rural Texas, where, between home cooking and the push-pull sounds of an accordion, Blank’s subjects unassumingly philosophize about the best ways to get through life and all its thorns. If […]
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When the Streaming’s Over: The Fight to Save Vulcan Video
“A producer buddy once said to me, ’You go to New York and Los Angeles to make movies, but you go to Austin to actually watch movies.’ That’s always rung true to me.” So avers Jacob Knight, general manager of Vulcan Video in Austin, a brick-and-mortar video rental shop that’s helped fuel cinephilia in Texas’s capital for more than 30 years. With an estimated 83,000 titles on DVD and Blu-ray and an additional 7,000 on VHS, Vulcan would’ve ranked as a world-class video store in any city during any era. But as streaming services continue to proliferate and rental shops […]
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Self Reflection in Theater Two
Over the past year, various reckonings—from continued collective and individual action around #metoo to protests against institutions accepting donations from the Sackler family, Warren B. Kanders and oil giants like BP—that media and arts institutions have gone through have brought the weaponization of cultural capital via art-world philanthropy onto the front pages of newspapers. Meanwhile, in the U.S. documentary film field, the way we’re talking about who holds power and how it’s dispensed has remained narrowly focused. Film festivals have jumped into this fray with public forums, panels and talks at which emboldened filmmakers and a new crop of festival […]
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to Filmmaker’s final issue of 2019, which continues something of a new tradition: our Sound and Visionaries section, where we spotlight six below-the-line artists in the awards conversation whose work particularly impressed us. And, accompanying these profiles are three short essays, all by writers new to the print magazine—Mark Asch, Tim Grierson and Beatrice Loayza—that look at 2019 in film through the psychic currents and generational anxieties it mined. There’s a lot elsewhere. On the cover is Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems, a wild adrenaline rush of a movie whose major-league ambition is especially exciting for me as […]
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Hits & Misses 2019: Surveying the Success of the Sundance Film Festival’s Theatrical Releases
The times, they keep a-changin’. In its immediate aftermath, the story out of Sundance 2019 was its bounteous acquisition market and record-setting sales numbers—from New Line’s $15 million purchase of Blinded by the Light to Amazon Studios’ $27 million splurge on Late Night and Brittany Runs a Marathon. By the summer, a different narrative began to emerge. While these top acquisition titles earned millions of dollars at the box office, they all still under-performed in theatrical release. Then, Amazon Studios’ veteran head of theatrical distribution Bob Berney left the company, a departure that potentially signaled shifting priorities at what had […]
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The Inner Reaches Out of Space
“I think one of the things I am most concerned about is how we interact with space in a bodily way,” says LA-based video and VR artist Kate Parsons, who will co-teach an undergraduate studio class, “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space,” next spring at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, with VR veteran Ben Vance. The pair was asked to teach in the Immersion Lab by professors Jenny Rodenhouse, a faculty member in the graduate Media Design Practice (MDP) program, and Maggie Hendrie, chair of Interaction Design. Parsons, who teaches a basic video production course for first-year graduate […]
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Digital Wanderlust: On Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World
Two major anniversaries in digital technology happened in 2019. October 29th marked the fiftieth year since the first message was transmitted via ARPANET, an early network of computers developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and hosted at universities including UCLA and Stanford (where the message was, respectively, sent and received)—a relatively pat and mutually agreed upon milestone for the beginning of the internet as we know it. The other anniversary—the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web—is much less decisive: You might notice people celebrating the thirtieth year of the internet’s most transformative application well into 2021. A quick […]
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Outta Respect: Remembering the Goodfellas Diner
“We tried to do everything we could.” “What do you mean?” “You know what I mean. He’s gone. And we couldn’t do nothing about it.” So kicks off an iconic sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, the emotional summit of a movie that’s basically one iconic sequence after another: the moment on the pay- phone when Jimmy “The Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro) hears his old friend Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) has just been whacked. Jimmy doesn’t just hang up — he bashes the phone into the receiver, finally stomping the booth into the ground between muffled sobs while the film’s narrator, […]
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Outer Visions: Leo Goldsmith and Gregory Zinman on Serving as Ad Astra‘s Experimental Film Consultants
It’s a rare thing for scholars to be asked to serve as advisors on studio films of any size, no matter the topic. (Hell, we’re usually not even asked to authenticate representations of academia itself.) So, it came as a pleasant surprise indeed for Brooklyn-based scholar and curator Leo Goldsmith and Georgia Tech film and media professor Gregory Zinman when they were asked by director James Gray to serve as advisors on his latest film, Ad Astra, scheduled for a September release by 20th Century Fox. Said to be a moody, existential science fiction film (Zinman and Goldsmith have read […]
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Trauma & Transformation: Alma Har’el on Her Shia LaBeouf Drama, Honey Boy
Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy is an emotional prism, generating moments that are warm, traumatic, unsettling and scarring. So, it’s no wonder that the process of constructing such an intimate and emotionally shattering film was equally grounded in feeling. Har’el’s narrative feature debut (her previous features are the documentaries Bombay Beach and LoveTrue) contains Shia LaBeouf’s most gripping performance to date and showcases the two collaborators’ ability to make art containing expressive power and emotional wisdom. In Honey Boy, also written by LaBeouf, we meet Otis (Lucas Hedges), a movie star who’s sent to rehab and forced to confront his childhood […]
