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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are filled with the director’s usual suspects. Cinematographer Robert Richardson, editor Fred Raskin and assistant director William Paul Clark are among the consummate craftspeople who have spent at least a decade collaborating with the auteur. However, Hollywood also features a significant contribution from a new initiate to the Tarantino film family—production designer Barbara Ling.  While Ling doesn’t share any work history with the director, the two are connected in another way. Both grew up in the Hollywood milieu lovingly resurrected in Tarantino’s ninth—and, if you believe him, next […]

Supervising sound editor Donald Sylvester was working on James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari before shooting even started. “They had mocked up some of the races with visual effects and pre-viz,” Sylvester says, “proving that you can see the right scene, but if you don’t feel the cars, it’s hard to visualize.” The sound journey of Ford v Ferrari, from those early pre-visualizations to the Dolby Atmos-mixed period feature currently exciting audiences in theaters, is one involving the sound team’s intense collaboration with Mangold, careful consideration of POV and the interplay between internal and external space and perspicacious car collector detective […]