Consider the physical closeness necessary to feel air pass out of the lungs and through the nose of a Black man, the spatial distance needed for your nose to touch his sigh. Face to almost blurry face — so much that when the corners of his mouth dart up, down and around, when talking or gesturing or from involuntary conduct, you notice the landscape between his corresponding cheek and chin bow like the warping of a shimmering trampoline. The pinhole pores of this brown-laden terrain become another optical reveal that transpires only after your mind’s eye adjusts to the formerly […]

There’s a wealth of taboo subjects in our industry, but family life especially manages to stay pretty deep in the shadows, even more so than the rare public discourses on sexism, racism and ageism. It’s a topic most filmmakers don’t venture into for a variety of reasons, but maybe most of all because the success rate of keeping a family together in this industry is scarily low. Sometimes it seems like families and filmmaking are at direct odds with each other. Coming up on two years of this column, I thought maybe it was time to get other DPs to […]

“It’s going be called ‘Indie Film is Dead,’” I remember Ted Hope saying to me back in 1995. He was referring to an article he was submitting for that fall’s magazine, a many-thousand-word takedown of the business practices and internalized logic of the specialty film business. Hope, a prolific producer who had worked with Ang Lee and Hal Hartley, was a frequent contributor to Filmmaker in our early days, writing pieces like one on how to interview a production designer or another on the job of the production manager. But this piece would be different. Here’s the lede: “The marketplace […]