Art and film share an essential trait: They are both about what the artist, or filmmaker, chooses to put in the frame. There are multiple frames — literal but also metaphoric ones — in the latest feature from Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund, his deviously sardonic The Square. The literal one is a 4-by-4 meter white-chalked box drawn on the grounds of the public space outside the film’s barely fictional X-Royal Museum. Within the frame of the film, the general public is invited to enter this work of conceptual art whenever they are in need of help — aid that passersby […]
Amazon and Netflix are having a huge impact on the independent film business, and there are more players entering the subscription VOD space every day, both here in the United States and worldwide. I myself just had a great experience working with Netflix on Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet, which Green, Filmmaker’s own editor-in-chief Scott Macaulay and I produced. Opening day on Netflix was, though, a bit unsettling. The data driving the film’s marketing, and the measures for its success or failure, are closely held corporate secrets — even the sources and kinds of data the company uses to determine how […]
There isn’t much left that legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins hasn’t done behind a camera. He’s shot science fiction, war movies, biopics and westerns. He’s dabbled in gorgeous black and white and lensed a Bond film. He’s forged rewarding collaborations with the Coen Brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve and worked with Scorsese and Sayles. So, is there anything remaining on Deakins’s cinematic bucket list? “What I really like doing is small personal dramas,” said Deakins with a laugh. “I don’t really like action films. I like films about people. I would’ve loved to have done Ken Loach’s films or movies […]
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At 69, and with more than 90 movies on his CV, cinematographer Ed Lachman is on something of a roll this fall. He received recently the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, and will see his latest stunning collaboration with director Todd Haynes, Wonderstruck, released in theaters from Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions. Shot on Super 35mm color and black-and-white stock, Wonderstruck follows Lachman’s ravishing work on Haynes’s Carol with another film in which the image carries a seductive charge and an analytic weight. An avid historian of visual history, Lachman dives deep into a story’s period […]
Opening tomorrow at New York’s Metrograph and the Maysles Documentary Center is In Transit, about Amtrak’s long-distance passenger train, the Empire Builder. It was legendary Direct Cinema pioneer Albert Maysles’s final directing credit, a collaboration with young directors Lynn True, Nelson Walker, Ben Wu and David Isui. Below, from our Spring, 2015 print issue, is Paul Dallas’s report on the film. An attractive, middle-aged woman sits isolated against a snowy landscape that sweeps by. Her eyes are bright and sad. “I’ve always been a wife, a mother, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s something,” she explains. “But it didn’t matter. I was just […]
Late Fame In 1895, Arthur Schnitzler wrote Late Fame, a satirical novella about an obscure civil servant who arrives home one day to find an earnest young visitor informing him that Wanderings, a slim volume he published 30 years ago, is now a cult hit among the youth. In an ironic twist, the book itself disappeared for 100 years, only to be now rediscovered. Late Fame was written for the literary magazine Die Zeit, which wanted the manuscript cut down; after being laid aside for over a century, it was first published in Germany in 2014. The NYRB Classics original […]
“My credit isn’t what it used to be,” admits Fabian Euresti, who graduated from the film directing program at California Institute of the Arts in 2010. A child of farm laborers in the San Joaquin Valley, Euresti made shorts, including 2010’s Everybody’s Nuts, that have played at prestigious film festivals in Europe (Vienna, Oberhausen, Tampere) and the U.S. (Los Angeles, Full Frame), but he’s currently got more than $100,000 in student debt and remains without a steady job to pay it down. “Knowing what I know now,” says Euresti, “I would have been more diligent in procuring grants and scholarships […]
In recent memory, there’s been a never-ending deluge of bad news for the arts and humanities in the U.S.: government support, which is already low, may be cut entirely; universities, facing budget crises, have axed language and arts programs; prominent professors spend their time writing books defending the basic value of humanistic inquiry, while their pecuniary graduate students fight for poverty wages as adjuncts, and earn a little money on the side writing articles about their plight. In the midst of all this, I was struggling to put together a dissertation proposal — it was something on the history of […]
As the industry and media have increasingly placed a spotlight on the filmic achievements of female directors, the recent rush of celebrated genre films masterminded by women — Julia Ducournau’s Raw, Alice Lowe’s Prevenge, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, among them — has been cited as a welcome phenomenon, but it’s not an altogether new one. A network of female-driven genre film festivals that celebrate the activities and influence of women in the genre cinema community have been running for, in some cases, decades. Filmmaker and programmer Briony Kidd says, drily, “The idea that it might […]