Issues
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Future Vision
Not long ago, I was lucky enough to be seated at lunch alongside Garrett Brown, the 74-year-old Oscar-winning inventor of the Steadicam. We were at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival, where Brown was being honored with the Vision Award. I’m not sure exactly how I ended up at the table, but also seated there was Fabrice Aragno, the young cinematographer responsible for the optical assault of Jean-Luc Godard’s 3-D punk masterpiece Goodbye to Language. It seemed appropriate to have the two side by side. Having operated the camera for Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Sidney Pollock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and […]
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Super 8
The Verso Book of Dissent Some readers may find useful — for contemplation, inspiration and action — this anthology just out from Verso. Edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim, it’s a collection of manifestoes, poems, songs and screeds from the history of opposition to authority. (Verso Books, $14.95, out now). 50 Song Memoir Writing songs for The Magnetic Fields, Stephin Merritt has generally had some kind of thematic guideline for each album: 69 Love Songs (self-explanatory), Distortion (ditto), et al. 50 Song Memoir, his first Fields album since 2012, may seem to be well in keeping with his previous […]
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Parting Shot: Tim Sutton
Over the course of three features, Brooklyn-based writer/director Tim Sutton has excelled in creating visually gorgeous, tonally mysterious works that find intriguing new atmospheric territories by drifting away from conventional narrative structures and character arcs. His debut feature, Pavilion, is a diptych about a teenage son shuttled cross-country between divorced parents. Follow-up Memphis exploded the “artist battling creative block” storyline into a tale of spiritual crisis set in that city’s streets, recording studios and forest parks. His latest film, Dark Night, released this February by Cinelicious, is his strongest and certainly most challenging work. In a world where the value […]
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The Art of Walking: Eduardo Williams on The Human Surge
In Eduardo Williams’s shorts and, now, his debut feature The Human Surge, packs of young men and women wander without purpose but still with great persistence around the globe. 2012’s The Sound of the Stars Dazes Me and 2011’s Could See a Puma, were shot at home in Buenos Aires, 2013’s That I’m Falling? in Sierra Leone and 2014’s I Forgot! in Vietnam. Logically building on this peripatetic tendency, Surge moves from Argentina to Mozambique to the Philippines in three discrete but linked segments. No matter where the characters are, there’s often a basic MO: young people trekking reluctantly to […]
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Lab Experiments
When Steve Cossman founded Mono No Aware 10 years ago, he was literally the entire organization. Operating out of his apartment, Cossman — who’d attended Albright College and had just returned from a two-year program at Prague’s FAMU film school — wanted to engage with and assist the expanded cinema community. “Expanded cinema” goes far beyond traditional notions of the avant-garde: Cossman cites a recent piece by Julie Dumas as a good example of the kind of work his organization supports, in which RGB lasers pointed at a single surface created a piercing white light. “There were two buckets with […]
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Keystone Cop: Why 1.66 and 1.78 Aspect Ratios Are Often Misprojected (And How to Fix That)
Jackie, Fox Searchlight’s best hope for 2016 Oscar glory, will be improperly projected throughout the world. There will be the usual projection mistakes and corporate carelessness that have become the norm in today’s multiplexes, but Jackie’s 1.66 aspect ratio will be presented keystoned more often than not: instead of a narrow rectangle that is 1.66 times longer than tall, the tops of the image will either curve inward or outward in relation to the screen. It’s an easily corrected mistake that is being ignored because of laziness. Since most projection booths are devoid of projectionists who can fix the problem, […]
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Episodic and In Your Ears
While the migration of independent filmmakers to the small screen is a much remarked about phenomenon, another entertainment platform, one growing even faster than television, is opening its loving arms to independent directors, screenwriters and producers. Podcasting, for its first decade or so, has consisted primarily of interview shows, like Marc Maron’s WTF, and the occasional fresh approach to journalism, like Serial. But now it’s moving more and more into the fiction world and creating alluring creative opportunities for independent storytellers. Founded in 2014, Gimlet Media has been making a name for itself producing shows like StartUp (about starting a […]
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Ruptures and Disturbances
The Killing of America The recent Severin Films Blu-ray/DVD release of the 1981 documentary The Killing of America marks the first time this notorious cult item has ever been commercially distributed in the U.S. in any form — ironic, given that it’s a film about a particularly American issue made by two American filmmakers, but it apparently hit too close to home at the time. So despite being a top 10 box-office hit that year in the country that actually produced it (Japan), the film never saw the light of day in the U.S. other than an extended run at New […]
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Editor’s Letter
A year ago in this space I introduced my story on the STARZ show The Girlfriend Experience. It was our first-ever TV cover, and it kicked off a year in which the cultural conversation flowed from Moonlight to Atlanta, from Cameraperson to OJ: Made in America. I guess the Winter is our future issue, then, because, a year later, illustrated by artist Kim Dong-kyu’s witty update of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” here is our first virtual reality, or VR, cover. This time the writer is Google’s principal filmmaker for VR, Jessica Brillhart, and her […]
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The Terror of the Text: Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart on Personal Shopper
Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas’s latest feature, begins with a classic horror movie trope: an evening spent in a haunted house. Kristen Stewart plays expat Maureen — not a paranormalist or twentysomething thrill-seeker but a personal clothes buyer and stylist to Kyra, a celebrity socialite and member of the Davos set. Something of a savant, Maureen does this job with an instinctual certainty but little evident pleasure. Whether that’s due to her preternatural cool or an overlay of mourning is unclear. But several months earlier, her brother, with whom she shares a congenital heart condition, died in a drafty mansion somewhere […]
