Issues
-
Learning Not to Share: The Benefits and Pitfalls of Social Media for Independent Films
Mynette Louie, president of Gamechanger Films, recently had a problem. She caught a stand-in on set not only taking photos of her film’s star, whose contract had specific photo approvals in place, but posting the photos to Facebook. “I told him to delete them from his Facebook, then I went through his phone and deleted all the photos he took on set.” Traditionally, producers, marketing departments and publicists labor over key stills and publicity images, methodically crafting a film’s identity in careful, strategic installments. This practice continues today, but can quickly be subverted by a tweet, post or status update. […]
-
Underground Desires
Probably like a lot of people, I loved underground cinema before I knew there was a name for it. My first encounter with the term was in a book that only used the word once, and not in relation to a certain category of films but a specific film: Underground U.S.A. (1980) directed by Eric Mitchell, who had acted in several Amos Poe films, most notably The Foreigner (1978). The book was Midnight Movies (1983) by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose sharp, knife-like prose and generous, half- and full-page black-and-white frame enlargements worked to construct — if this is […]
-
Seeking Arrangements: Lodge Kerrigan, Amy Seimetz and Steven Soderbergh on The Girlfriend Experience
Shot in New York City during the 2008 financial crisis, Steven Soderbergh’s feature The Girlfriend Experience was a cool movie about a hot topic. Ostensibly about a “new” kind of prostitution, where escorts would simulate the casual intimacy of a real relationship, it starred real-life porn star Sasha Grey even as it contained virtually no sex. But what began as a look at how the Internet enabled a new kind of solo entrepreneur sex worker — “As we were making the film, I didn’t consider [prostitution] as a metaphor for anything,“ Soderbergh said then — wound up a trenchantly austere […]
-
Now It’s Dark: Robert Eggers on The Witch
Read about Robert Eggers’s staggeringly accomplished first feature, The Witch, winner of the 2015 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Best Director Prize, and the first thing you’ll learn about is the writer/director’s obsession with authentic detail. As he has explained in articles like the one Filmmaker published when selecting him for our 2014 25 New Faces list, the writer/director developed his 1630s-set story of a Puritan family under attack by a witch living in a nearby forest from not just period fairy tales but diaries, court records and other primary source materials. He wrote his dialogue in the Caroline-era English of the […]
-
The Pre-Fight: Arnaud Desplechin on My Golden Days
Arnaud Desplechin invigorates through assault tactics: aggressive camera movement, even more aggressively fragmented editing, seemingly irreconcilable musical cues that butt chromatic classical cues up against golden age hip-hop, a university library’s worth of citations and allusions. His films are scarcely less restless than their characters, who chafe against themselves and others. In his 1996 breakthrough My Sex Life…or How I Got Into an Argument, Desplechin promoted Mathieu Amalric from supporting bit player (in 1992’s La Sentinelle) to his regular onscreen alter-ego. A philosophy graduate student adept at tormenting both himself and girlfriend Esther (Emmanuelle Devos) while putting off completing his […]
-
Long-Term Care: How to Archive Your Film
Your film is done. Audiences have laughed and cried while watching it. You got a week-long run in New York and Los Angeles. Soon your aunt in Springfield will be able to watch it on Netflix and have a strained telephone conversation about how “interesting” it is. On to the next project! Not so fast. You need to archive your film now. Put down your storyboard for your next picture and help preserve your old one first. The Film Foundation estimates that “one half of all films made before 1950, and over 80 percent made before 1929 are lost forever.” […]
-
Editor’s Letter
I met with a director recently, and as I sat down I asked him about the small book he was reading, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. It’s a philosophical book about climate change, and the thesis is that we’ve passed a tipping point in terms of our relationship with our planet. We’re on the other side — we’re screwed — and we must not only learn to adapt but also to reorganize within new political, social and cultural institutions. We will have to do this in purely practical ways, author Roy Scranton argues, but also in terms of storytelling. We […]
-
Reality, Boxed and “The New China”
Dropkick.sh Our lives are becoming a game of measures and countermeasures, our daily journeys an assortment of micro-decisions as we alternately dispense and protect our most private information. But while some of us may consent to Internet tracking in order to improve our “advertising experience,” none of us wants to be recorded taking a shower or having sex in an Airbnb. Linux and Mac users can download Dropkick.sh, a script that disables the webcams some hosts have installed to keep tabs on their apartment renters. (https://julianoliver.com/output/log_2015-12-18_14-39) Google Cardboard With Oculus Rift slower to take hold in the consumer world and […]
-
Family Plot: David Lowery Interviews Krisha Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults
One of the most impressive debuts of this year, Trey Edward Shults’s Krisha — the story of a recovering alcoholic thoroughly derailed by the pressure-cooker of her sister’s Thanksgiving Day dinner — is a work of astonishing performances, formal control, filmmaking ambition and, finally, deep emotional wisdom. It’s a movie that has all the dramatic pyrotechnics one expects from the “home for the holidays” sub-genre, but, loosely based on a true story about one of Shults’s actual relatives, is suffused with a real understanding about issues of addiction and recovery, regret, and the difficulties of being and feeling accepted. Winner […]
-
Indie Housewarming
When IFP Minnesota was deciding whose name to place above the exhibition galleries in its new space in St. Paul’s Vandalia Tower, executive director Andrew Peterson and its board of directors didn’t go the obvious route. There’s not a corporate sponsor logo in sight. Instead, the organization named the gallery after two local photographers, Ann Marsden and Gus Gustafson, both of whom were avid chroniclers of the Minneapolis/St. Paul arts community before they each passed away in recent years. Along with IFP Minnesota’s offices, four classrooms and two editing suites, the Marsden/Gustafson gallery opened to the public and members this […]
