Issues
-
What Can Happen in the Frame: Sasha Waters Freyer on Her Doc, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
Photography was all over the New York City art world of the late 1980s. There was the Pictures Generation—artists like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Laurie Simmons, who began in the mid ’70s and whose conceptual use of appropriated or staged photographs cast a critical and sometimes seductive eye at the way mass media imagery shaped consciousness. Jeff Wall, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and, later, Gregory Crewdson were bringing the staging techniques of film and theater to photographs charged with emotional and narrative possibility. And the work of photographers of an earlier generation, like Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, was still highly […]
-
Checkpoints: Independent Film’s Gatekeeper Problem
The good news: Film festivals and film-support organizations in the United States have never been more vocal in their support of underrepresented filmmakers. At Sundance 2018, the number of films made by women (37%) and people of color (more than 30 projects) was at an all-time high. And other events are following suit. But the bad news is that the independent film business’s gatekeepers—the programmers and critics who have the power to make or break these films in the marketplace—remain an #IndustrySoWhiteandMale. To be sure, there have been gains in these areas. This May, Sundance hired Kim Yutani as its […]
-
Moment of Conception
“All it takes is one good egg.” This refrain is uttered more than a few times throughout the course of Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, her first feature since 2007’s The Savages. A meditation on marriage, middle age and the haves and have-not’s of fertility, the film stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as an artist couple—she’s a writer, and he runs both a theater group and an artisanal pickle company—desperate to conceive in their 40s. While the pair loads up on IVF hormones and diminishing hopes, they must also make room in their realistically cozy East Village apartment for their […]
-
A Matter of Trust: Independent Film and the Blockchain
In his novel Enduring Love, Ian McEwan constructs a striking metaphor of the tension between individualism and cohesion that lies at the core of modern society: Five strangers rush to save a child stuck in the passenger basket of a hot air balloon being uplifted by the wind. As the balloon soars, the helpers find themselves in midair, hanging from its ropes. Their cumulative weight keeps the balloon hovering over the ground, but one person letting go would break this fragile pact and put the others in greater danger. This scene, which resembles a social psychology experiment, asks the question: […]
-
Reboot By The Sea
It might be hot. There are several quarries for swimming. It might be cold and rainy, and we’ll be in a non-heated, non-air conditioned barn. There will be mosquitoes. So began a long list of somewhat unsettling particulars describing conditions for the six-day DesignInquiry residency that took place at the end of June 2018 on Vinalhaven, an island halfway up the coast of Maine. I had applied six months earlier, intrigued by the year’s theme, “Rewrite,” and was delighted when I was accepted. I was stepping down from a decade-long leadership stint, having cocreated and chaired a new department in […]
-
Swimming With The Megalodons
When the media world’s most predatory shark realizes he’s about to be someone else’s lunch, you have to wonder whether we all might need a bigger boat. Only four years ago, Rupert Murdoch was circling the waters of Time Warner in the hope of hooking those prized assets and feeding them into his own 21st-century entertainment factory. Today, he is the one hocking most of the family jewels to the Walt Disney Company in a $71.3 billion deal that leaves his clan with a stripped-down entity focused on live news and sports, as well as a passive stake in a […]
-
“One of the Rules Was To Not Centralize Whiteness in Any Way”: On the Path Towards Terence Nance’s New HBO Show, Random Acts of Flyness
The following article appears in Filmmaker’s Summer, 2018 print edition and is being posted today to mark the premiere, this Friday, of Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness on HBO. When Brooklyn-based filmmaker and musician Terence Nance last appeared in this magazine’s print pages, it was in our 25 New Faces section — in 2012 — and he had been working on his debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, since 2006. A loose-limbed autobiographical drama detailing Nance’s own near-romantic relationship with an attractive friend (Namik Minter, who played herself in the film), the film unspools, I wrote, “like some […]
-
Committed to Paper: Writer/Director Paul Schrader on First Reformed
With Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which has topped many critics’ lists so far this year, on iTunes today, we’re unlocking from our paywall Darren Hughes’s interview with the writer/director from our Summer print edition. When discussing his latest film, First Reformed, Paul Schrader regularly recounts a conversation he had over dinner with the Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski. Schrader, who famously discovered cinema as a college student after coming of age in a strict Calvinist home, has very intentionally spent his career exploring darker, more transgressive aspects of the spiritual condition. He was intrigued, however, by Ida, Pawlikowksi’s quiet, black-and-white study […]
-
Back Page
Not too long ago, I watched Kevin Smith talk about having a near-fatal heart attack. It was from his hospital bed, streamed on Facebook Live, the day after doctors put a stent in his left anterior descending artery—the so-called widowmaker that felled writer John Gregory Dunne in the opening pages of Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. Smith’s a great storyteller, so his recounting was hilarious, full of dick jokes and such—his quick mind had already assembled the events of the previous 24 hours into the funniest PSA for cardio health ever made. And indeed, by the time […]
-
Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2018: More Pixels, Better Pixels
Alvin Toffler in his prescient 1970 bestseller, Future Shock, predicted that in a post-industrial society the design of goods would turn over frequently as they became quickly outdated and triggered their own replacement. They would grow disposable too, with the cost of repair exceeding cost of replacement. His emblem of discardability was the disposable lighter. (He also foresaw the rise of the freelance economy in which people would change career and workplace frequently—a fact of life for most of us in this industry.) At NAB in April, Blackmagic Design advertised a new “Professional Ultra HD broadcast camera for less than […]
