Issues
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The Right Time to Sell? Pinpointing Trends in Independent Film Sales
Just as the marketplace for independent features is shifting on the distribution side, so is the world of film financing. Since 2009, raising financing for low- to mid-budget films has been in a state of flux, a series of changes now culminating in the dominance of streaming platforms, which are disrupting traditional territory-based sales models while also employing inscrutable algorithmic methods to guide their purchasing decisions. “The middle has dropped out, and budgets are getting smaller,” says Matthew Helderman, partner in BondIt Media, which provides credit financing for film and television productions. Projects that a few years ago might have […]
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Messing With the Medium: On the Textured Pleasures of the Handmade Film
Last summer, filmmaker Jennifer West and I were invited to talk at Femmebit, an LA-based triennial celebration of media made by women. I had been thinking about materiality and mediamaking practices, and Jennifer is known for a stunning body of work centered on physically manipulating strips of film. We decided to call our event “Messing With the Medium: Radical Materiality in Feminist Media” and challenged each other on stage in a battle of clips, each of us presenting a visual example of some sort of feminist creative intervention, along with a two-minute argument for its contributions to an expanded history […]
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Team Building: On Wanda Bershen and Film Safety Nets
On September 28th, 2019, Wanda Bershen died quietly, alone and under fairly tragic circumstances, after being rushed to the hospital from a rehabilitation facility on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 75 years old, and very few people were aware of her passing. This piece is one part obituary for Wanda—a remarkable woman who certainly deserves to be remembered lovingly in Filmmaker—and one part urgent call-to-action for our industry to have a long-overdue discussion about a difficult and troubling topic: the lack of safety nets, resiliency and end-of-life supports in place for aging independent film professionals. The vast […]
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Her Decision: Eliza Hittman on Her Observational, Intimate and Necessarily Political Never Rarely Sometimes Always
“It’s so important for me to be thinking about a movie all the time,” says writer-director Eliza Hittman, reflecting on her creative process. “I don’t spend so much time sitting at a computer. I want to walk around, be in locations, spend my Saturday on a handball court or in a park or in Port Authority and respond to the environment.” Evidenced by the authenticity and truthful immediacy—laced with deeply neorealist touches—of her films, there must be something to this observational method of writing the burgeoning American auteur calls “experiential.” It births a singular high-stakes quality that guides It Felt […]
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There’s Something in the Air: With The Vast of Night, Director Andrew Patterson Reinvents the UFO Movie
Director Andrew Patterson’s film The Vast of Night, which premiered to great acclaim at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival, is informed by many genres and influences but beholden to none of them. Part Twilight Zone–esque sci-fi tale, part young adult romance, part David Fincher–inspired suspense movie with a dash of The Last Picture Show’s small town poetry, it is most of all a haunting and startling debut feature that teaches the audience how to watch it as it progresses—which means it not only rewards but demands repeat viewings. Set over the course of one night in 1950s New Mexico, The […]
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Conceiving the Future: The Prescient Lynn Hershman Leeson
There’s no question that Lynn Hershman Leeson is a prescient artist and filmmaker. Prescience is even a theme in her work, one she grapples with as a double-edged sword. Impossible to measure except in retrospect, it is a lonely quality to have in the present. After Leeson rocketed to art stardom following a 2014 career retrospective at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, her success was widely praised as “overdue”—another word that culture’s Cassandras are used to hearing. It seems unwise to disentangle her originality and influence from her tenacity and patience. Her 2019 interactive installation “Shadow […]
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The Low Down: Is Microbudget Production the Response to the Industry’s Devaluation of the Dramatic Feature Film?
There are conflicting opinions regarding the budget cutoff for the category commonly referred to as “microbudget filmmaking.” Sometimes referred to as “no-budget,” “ultra-low-budget” or “nano-budget,” the term refers to an increasingly popular level of filmmaking below “low-budget” that emerging filmmakers as well as, in some cases, veterans engage in. When Venice’s Biennale College Cinema was started eight years ago, the budgets of €150,000 (about $162,000) awarded to each filmmaker seemed low. And indeed, while makers of films—ambitious pictures such as The Fits, H., Memphis and This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection—produced through that program struggled with the budget […]
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The Parasite Eight-Minute Meal
Bong Joon-ho’s class warfare thriller Parasite has already entered the food film canon, and its signature entrée sits in the dead center of the highbrow-lowbrow matrix. Jjapaguri (translated as “ram-don” in the subtitles) is a mashed-up concoction of two different types of instant noodles: jjapaghetti (an abridged version of the Chinese-Korean black bean noodle dish, jjajangmyun) and Neoguri (a brand of packaged spicy seafood udon). The dish is prepared in just under eight minutes in Parasite, as the wealthy Park matriarch, on the way home from a cancelled family camping trip, calls in an order to her new housekeeper. Against […]
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Fast, Cheap and Good
“I’ve wasted the greater part of my life looking for money, and trying to get along… trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box which is…a movie. And I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with a movie. It’s about two percent moviemaking and 98 percent hustling.” — Orson Welles I never heard “hustling” mentioned in film school, college theater or acting class. I agree with Mr. Welles about the two percent moviemaking part of the equation; it’s just that, for my kind of independent filmmaking, the other 98 percent is self-reliance. […]
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Sonic Menace: Composer Mark Korven on Scoring Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse
Thunderous farts and the roiling sea, booming foghorns and the menacing squawks of predatory seagulls—the Melvillian world of Robert Eggers’s supernatural-tinged film The Lighthouse offers a composer many sources of sonic inspiration. Mark Korven, who reunited with Eggers following their collaboration on the director’s 2015 feature, The Witch, admits that the environment of the film dominated their early conversations. “We did discuss nature a lot,” he says, “and also the world the characters inhabited. There might be a rusty old cornet lying around the lighthouse or maybe a bashed-up accordion. Rob felt strongly about a brass score because there was […]
