Issues
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VR.edu
When I studied at the London Film School just over a decade ago, students originated all of our projects on 35 and 16mm film and cut them on Steenbecks and Avid Media Composer. What a difference a dozen years make: Now schools have moved beyond the digital video revolution and computer animation to whole new media and formats. Virtual, augmented and mixed reality are forming increasingly large components of university curricula, giving a shot of innovation to narrative filmmaking in the academy and bringing university computer science programs into the realm of traditional film schools. You might expect VR courses […]
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Dispatches from San Francisco, Visions du Réel and Big Ears
San Francisco International Film Festival Celebrating its 60th edition, the San Francisco International Film Festival — now rebranded as the hashtag-friendly SFFILM Festival — impressed this first-timer not as a hoary institution, recumbent upon its laureled legacy, but as a festival keen to stake out vibrant new tangents, mindful of its city’s history (cinematic and otherwise) and full of surprises. Both those qualities were abundant in the closing night spectacle: The Green Fog, which celebrated San Francisco’s indelible place in a century of movies in an appropriately twisted manner. The festival commission brought filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen […]
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Film Schools in a Time of Disruption
At YouVisit Studios in midtown Manhattan, Ben Leonberg, Scott Riehs and Alice Shindelar, three recent graduates of the film MFA program at Columbia, bring their education to bear in rather unexpected ways. They are still, in a sense, filmmakers — Leonberg a creative director, Shindelar a writer/director and Riehs a creative producer, each aspiring to one day make a feature. But as their day job they practice filmmaking of a very different type: together they conceive, write and shoot commercial content that YouVisit calls “interactive virtual experiences.” They work in 360-degree video and with virtual-reality headsets. They experiment with new […]
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From BTL to ATL: How I Went from Art Department Coordinator to Director
The production designer Kelly McGehee called me one afternoon. I had been a production PA on a film we had both worked on. She told me she was starting a new movie and asked if I knew any art department coordinators. I didn’t — in fact, I didn’t even know what one was. But like any ambitious young person I did what you do in that situation: I said, “I can do it.” Not knowing what Google was yet, I hung up and did what you used to do when facing questions such as this one: call an actual human […]
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Incoherent Cinema
In his 1986 book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, film theorist Robin Wood explored, in a chapter entitled “The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the ’70s,” just how and why so many seminal films of that era were — ideologically — incoherent, unable to maintain a sustained and coherent vision of their protagonists as well as their fictive worlds. Wood did not mean incoherent in a pejorative sense; he wasn’t referring to movies that “failed” or that were poorly made. And he wasn’t talking about films that were deliberately chaotic or incoherent, but rather films that subconsciously reflected and distorted larger […]
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Critical Review: Iyabo Boyd on Feedback Loop, a New Advisory Service for Filmmakers
“If filmmakers actually knew what industry people thought of their projects and were able to receive constructive criticism and what I call ‘productive honesty,’” says Iyabo Boyd, “they’d be able to improve at a much faster pace than just with that filmmaker peer-to-peer thing.” Boyd is speaking here of the realization that led to the creation of Feedback Loop, her new advisory service for filmmakers. Boyd — an independent film producer (the ’17 Berlin-premiere and Tribeca selection, For Ahkeem), writer/director and veteran of filmmaker support organizations (most recently Chicken & Egg, but also Tribeca Film Institute and IFP) — has […]
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The Trump Effect
When Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, writer-director Barry Jenkins and his team weren’t the only ones celebrating. For many filmmakers, the Moonlight triumph was both a victory for indies but also a rebuke against the racism, sexism and prejudice of Trump’s America. It was, perhaps, the entertainment industry’s biggest embrace of “the Resistance” yet. But the Trump regime isn’t just affecting awards shows and celebrity Twitter accounts. Financiers and producers speak about an uncertain marketplace, fueled by the wild vacillations of the Trump presidency, which has the ability to both hinder and bolster independent films. Yellow Bear […]
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Fest Circuit: Sundance, Berlin, Borscht and True/False
SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL By Ashley Clark At this year’s ceaselessly snow-pummelled Sundance Film Festival (Jan. 19-29), I hardly expected to experience my first slice of knockout formal invention while languishing at my laptop in my hotel room. But these are strange times and, having landed in Park City on Jan. 20, hours after the surreal presidential inauguration of a bit player from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, I found immediate succor in scrolling through my Twitter feed. It had been colonized by a panoply of speedily crafted user videos depicting white supremacist goon and Trump supporter Richard Spencer […]
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Super 8: Secret Signals in Dangerous Times
The Gatekeepers It may not make for comforting reading at this time, but context is always helpful: Chris Whipple’s new book is succinctly described by its subtitle, “How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.” Whipple — formerly a producer for 60 Minutes and ABC News — uses his years of access to interview all 17 of the living chiefs of staff plus a bonus two presidents. Explaining how the chief of staff can help make or break the implementation of policy, The Gatekeepers may help illuminate the role Reince Priebus will play (or hopefully fail to) in […]
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Surveying Inner Landscapes
In the current climate of conglomerate studio entertainment, the Holy Grail is no longer the summer tentpole or the once fabled franchise. It is now the “shared universe,” a property capable of infinite expansion across an ever-enlarging landscape of consumption platforms. No outfit has embraced this new paradigm more than Marvel, whose television and film empire spans multiple networks and studios. As a product of FX and Marvel Television, Legion belongs to that universe, yet the new series from Fargo creator Noah Hawley feels like its own creature — not an offshoot or a spinoff or a cog in a […]
