Issues
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Moonshot: Todd Douglas Miller on Apollo 11
Todd Douglas Miller’s Apollo 11, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, originated from the simple idea of using archival footage to revisit, in time for its 50th anniversary, the first moon landing. For those who’ve grown up watching the same images trotted out over and over—Neil Armstrong bouncing on the moon, a burning ring of fire propelling itself backwards toward Earth as Apollo leaves the planet—the premise seems tedious and redundant, an ossified staple of Baby Boomer montages regularly intercut alongside clips of Woodstock and the Vietnam War, now freshly recharged by nationalistic rumblings about a space force. And as […]
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Audiences in the Sky: How to Sell Your Film to the Airlines
In 1996, flying home from Slamdance, I was stuck on the tarmac at the Salt Lake City airport in a blizzard. After an hour and a half, a Sundance actor and I tried to talk the flight attendants into playing a VHS tape of my film Omaha (The Movie) in the cabin. They were happy to but said we had to clear it with the pilot and led us into the cockpit. The pilot thought it was a cool idea, too, but ultimately wondered whether the corporate office might object and decided he probably shouldn’t play the film. To this […]
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Breathe Deep
“I prefer placing the perceptual, intuitive, emotional and spiritual growth of the student at the center.” That’s the succinct teaching statement of Pablo Frasconi, a soft-spoken, thoroughly grounded filmmaker and faculty colleague of mine in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has developed a three-course sequence that helps students engage in a form of creativity based on quieting the mind. “Mindfulness and meditation are central,” Frasconi explains. “It is where these classes begin: by looking inward to discover the ’moving visual thinking’ and ’song of the cells’—as Stan Brakhage called these experiences—that is our […]
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No Money, No Problem?
They’re the two most beautiful words in the cinematic language: tax credits. Almost no one who practices the seventh art got into it to learn about business; if anything, they got into it to avoid it altogether. Alas, it’s almost impossible to participate in the most expensive art form without being at least semi-fluent in business jargon. State film tax incentives are a crucial part of most American films’ financing these days, be they giant Marvel productions filming in incentive-rich Atlanta or a tiny indie shooting in Albuquerque, mere miles from the set of Better Call Saul. As of this […]
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Memories of Jamaica
Black Mother, Khalik Allah’s follow-up to Field Niggas, finds the photographer/filmmaker in Jamaica, examining his family’s story and his relationship to the island as a whole. Structured as three “trimesters,” the film takes root in Allah’s complex relationship to Jamaica and his love for the land and its people, which unavoidably meets concerns over its colonial past and neocolonial present. A mixture of Super 8, 16mm, old family films and shiny new digital, Black Mother is a first-person stream-of-visual-consciousness tone poem, drawing intuitive connections across an entire country’s history and culture. While shooting, Allah didn’t take any photos, but his […]
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Troubling the Desktop
In an age when digital screens mediate hours of daily existence, it seems logical to turn that experience into the basis for a movie. Low-budget narrative features like Unfriended and Searching are widely known examples of desktop cinema, but the approach flourishes in a range of other practices, from YouTube videos (Klaire fait grr…) to experimental media art (Nick Briz, Foundland Collective). Our own desktop cinema practice deals with it specifically as documentary, starting with Kevin’s 2014 video Transformers: The Premake and leading into our current project, Bottled Songs, a feature-length investigation of online terrorist media. Leading a workshop with […]
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Distant Locations
Deciding where to shoot a movie can be one of the most consequential decisions a filmmaker can make. There are numerous and obvious reasons, but when deciding how to allocate resources, location is one of the most pressing riddles to solve. “Put your money on the screen” is a mantra producers mutter in their sleep; the meaning, of course, is to prioritize expenses that will discernibly make the final film better, avoiding big spends that are invisible to the eye of the audience. Despite where a script takes place on the page, it’s no secret that artful filmmaking can often […]
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Lookbook Case Study: The Evening Hour
For Braden King, the lookbook process is an iterative one that doesn’t even stop with a film’s production. “In the case of my last feature film, Here, the lookbooks were very close to the final film, both tonally and imagewise,” he writes in an email. “But they were also completely comprised of my own photographs and functioned as a part of the larger, multiplatform project. We created a three-screen installation with live soundtrack accompaniment and several gallery exhibitions, [and] the lookbook for that film was also featured in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.” King’s […]
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Women-Only Space
The teaser for Kali Kahn’s film, Fairchild, is a murky thing, dark but patchy with light, too, because this is Florida. A young girl, pale and denim-shorted, digs a hole in the dirt, uprooting the tendriled root of a tree in the Everglades. She chews the ends of her hair and her fingers, the way children do, the way teenagers do (she’s both or somewhere in-between). The clearing is saw palmetto green; her nails are blue, bluer still in the soil, on her own shoulder, on her lips. There is neither antecedent nor aftermath for the scene—it’s the film’s trailer, […]
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Elementary Force: Claire Denis on High Life
No one expected Claire Denis to soften with age. At 72, the French auteur has been a daring and unpredictable force in cinema for three decades now. After delivering last year’s talky romantic comedy Let the Sunshine In, which offered the unexpected sight of Gérard Depardieu as a lovesick psychic, Denis has returned with a certified leap into the unknown. High Life is the filmmaker’s first English-language film, her first science fiction foray, and her first featuring eye-popping CGI. Boasting an international cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth and André Benjamin, and set to be released by […]
