Issues
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The Forever War
Alejandro Landes’s Monos parachutes viewers atop a hillside in an undefined part of South America, where a group of child soldiers live a cult-like existence—playing, observing various ritualistic rites of passage and waiting for radio orders that will send them fighting into the guerrilla war occurring in the land below. Their identities are already reduced to one-name labels (Rambo, Smurf, Bigfoot et al.), and their training is chaotic—and that’s before they are given orders relating to the hostage they are overseeing, Sara Watson, an American engineer played by Julianne Nicholson. Descending from the mountaintop and along the river, their tenuous […]
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Also Sprach Kubrick: Sayings, Maxims and Aphorisms of Chairman Stanley
It was 1966, a year into the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the MGM Studios in Borehamwood, northwest of London, when I suddenly realized I had been quoting some of Stanley Kubrick’s sayings over the preceding months. One of the props men had complained to me about the difficulty in buying something, and I replied, “Well, you know what Stanley says: ’In England, it is easier to sell something than to buy something.’” Up until then, I’d had an arsenal of quotes from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (a work Kubrick much admired, see below—and right) and one […]
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Emotional Exploration: Cinematographer Natasha Braier on Shooting Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy
Knowing that Alma Har’el worked in a fluid, in-the-moment fashion, and that dancing with the actors in the scene was key to the story, DP Natasha Braier started prep by going through the script and asking the director for each scene, “Describe the scene with a feeling.” During prep and while shooting, Braier always wanted to root the camera in the emotions of each scene. In her previous work on films like The Neon Demon and The Milk of Sorrow, Braier tapped into her ability to capture human experience with stylized camera work and expressive lighting. We discussed how she […]
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Nostalgia For the Too-Well-Remembered ’90s
Filmdom’s current fixation on the 1990s was, of course, inevitable. Just enough time has passed for the nostalgia to fully kick in among Gen X-and-older producers and consumers, and the results are everywhere, from Captain Marvel down. Plus, it is the last era that plausibly reads as “present day” (by 1994, hip-hop, Tarantino, CGI and Starbucks were all mainstream) without the plot-ruining omnipresence of smartphones. It makes sense that the same mechanisms would be at work all over the world. The most curious iteration of the ’90s revival, however, must be taking place in Russia, where more and more films […]
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The Soul that Remains: Paul Harrill on Light from Light
Paul Harrill’s Tennessee-set Light from Light, which premiered this year at Sundance, stars Marin Ireland as a paranormal investigator who may or may not believe in ghosts and Jim Gaffigan as a recent widower who still feels his wife’s presence in their house. Harrill is quick to point out that it is definitely not a horror film, and anyone expecting scares will be disappointed. Instead, Harrill investigates seemingly more mundane day-to-day Southern living (as he did in his previous effort, Something, Anything), and in it finds a delicate balance between reality and spirituality. I saw Light from Light at the […]
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Aesthetic Confidences: On Andrzej Zulawski and Meeting Possession Screenwriter Frederic Tuten
In April 1980, actor Sam Neill and screenwriter Frederic Tuten were sitting next to each other on a flight from Paris to New York. The two were about to embark on the making of a film and had been spending time with its director in France. Tuten was new to screenwriting but had already picked up on the hierarchy of above-the-line talent and was amazed the producers had sprung for him to sit in first class with the lead actor. He offhandedly asked Neill, “Isn’t this whole film world just about money?” Neill corrected him, “It’s not about money, it’s […]
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Raiders of the Lost Screens
When investment firm 1091 Media bought The Orchard’s film operation earlier this year, few in the biz seemed as alarmed as I was. Variety initially reported the sale in January and surmised that the new outfit would be “on the prowl” for titles at Sundance. They bought one title in Park City and then waited several months to buy a couple more that had been passed over by everyone else. By the time their acquisition team bought a creationism doc at Cannes, 1091 had nuked The Orchard’s theatrical arm, laying off 25% of its staff and downsizing its theatrical output […]
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Inside Out Planets: NASA’s Influence on Cinema’s Visions of Outer Space
In 1975, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, artists, physicists, architects and urban planners convened for 10 weeks at Stanford University and the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The group assembled to design complete and convincing systems for sustained life in outer space. Fred Scharmen—author of Space Settlements, a new book that considers the cultural impact of the 1975 Summer Study’s proposals—notes the most “influential outcomes” were the trippy paintings made to illustrate these ideas. These paintings, in watercolor, acrylic and gouache, depict bright bubbles of life and majestic rings—appearing like cornucopias in cutaway view—with tranquil landscapes and […]
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Creating Community Through Cinema: The Echo Park Film Center and MONO NO AWARE
I love the way Paolo Davanzo jazzes up his emails with exclamation points! He almost never uses just one; instead, he lines up two, three, sometimes four in a row, and if his ardor is not evident through prolific punctuation, he’ll apply all caps: “SO GLAD to reconnect!!!!” or “The kids created a BEAUTIFUL FILM!!!!” This cheery trait is pure Paolo, and it completely infuses the Echo Park Film Center, a small nonprofit space at the corner of Sunset and Alvarado in Los Angeles that he cofounded in 2001. EPFC packs a microcinema, filmmaking classroom and equipment rental house all […]
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I Say What I Mean
Though popularly acclaimed for its thrillingly choreographed action scenes and the convergence of two of America’s great film stars, Heat (1995) endures because of its layered psychological matrix. Michael Mann interrogates masculinity, as performance and as ideology, across a cat-and-mouse genre template, crafting a diffuse portrait of ethical codes. This modus operandi, combined with Mann’s trademark urban hyperaesthetic—neon cityscapes; dark, empty roads; abandoned lots; dingy warehouses; underpopulated diners, all shot on locations off the beaten path—has elevated the material to classic status. It’s a basic-cable staple that’s also a richly studied, endlessly probed auteurist text. In other words, the perfect […]
