Issues
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Editor’s Letter
It’s fall, and time for new things, so let’s get right into it. I like this issue. I know, I like every issue, but this issue has an especially good vibe to it. We’ll see what you think. In some ways it’s classic Filmmaker, and, as we do every fall, there’s a special focus on postproduction. But there are new contributors throughout, and we’ve shaken up the way we’ve covered certain topics. For example, in the fall we usually do some sort of NLE roundup, cataloguing the new features in the workstation space. But — the perils of publishing a […]
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Parting Shot: Chantal Akerman
In early October, the film world lost a great, challenging voice when director Chantal Akerman passed away at 65. Forty years earlier the young Belgian had altered the course of film history with her second feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-hour, 20-minute portrait of a middle-aged, widowed mother and sometime prostitute. Dielman’s daily chores are captured with a fixed camera in near real time, offering both a historical critique of domestic routine — “women’s work” — as well as the representational strategies of mainstream cinema. But Jeanne Dielman was only one of Akerman’s remarkable films. […]
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Bizarre Love Triangle: Gaspar Noé on Love
A threesome in 3-D and unsimulated sex in a simulated cinematic hyper-reality: that’s what Gaspar Noé’s latest film Love has been promising for months. At Cannes in 2014, producer Vincent Maraval teased audiences with explicit promo materials, pledging plenty of penis, nipple and onscreen ejaculate. While the film has all three in abundance, it turns out Love is more about loss than sex. The surprisingly sentimental tale begins with Murphy (Karl Glusman) receiving a desperate voicemail message from an ex’s mother. Murphy’s an American in Paris with a French girlfriend, crying baby and New Year’s Day hangover — a trifecta about […]
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Come to the Sound of My Voice: Laurie Anderson Talks Heart of a Dog
I remember when you started hearing that voice everywhere. Melodious, precisely phrased yet awkward in its pauses, the electronic approximation of the human voice, whether sampled, altered, or pitch-shifted, and triggered by the pound sign, or, now, simply a “Hey, Siri,” has lured human dialogue into an uncanny valley of meaning since the 1970s. And, after Kraftwerk, certainly, but long before AutoTune, 808s & Heartbreak and the Gregory Brothers there was Laurie Anderson, whose vocoderized voice forced us to try and make sense of it all. Anderson, a performance artist and composer whose early work included a piece where she played […]
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Golden Years
In his review of Andrew Haigh’s 2011 drama Weekend, in which two men meet and fall in love over the span of three days, New York Times critic A. O. Scott writes, “Each one, without quite saying so, is grappling with basic questions about love and identity. What can I mean to another person? Whom do I want to be with? Who do I want to be?” In Haigh’s new film, 45 Years, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay are a couple about to celebrate their 45th anniversary for whom these same questions prove as necessary — and the answers as […]
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Scoped Out
When filmmaker Laura Poitras joined journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill to form the online news site The Intercept, it didn’t seem a certainty that she’d bring film to the site’s reporting on domestic spying, national security and foreign policy issues. After all, even before her Academy Award for documentary CITIZENFOUR, Poitras had shared a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award for print reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post. And, after the awards, Poitras continued covering these stories in print and online — not just for The Intercept, a site owned by […]
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Silver Anniversary: The IFP Gotham Awards at 25
The IFP Gotham Awards celebrate their 25th anniversary this November with a ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street. Along with awards going to the top independent films of the year, the Gothams will present Tribute Awards to Robert Redford, Helen Mirren, Todd Haynes and Steve Golin. Here, Peter Bowen culls the archives of IFP, Filmmaker’s publisher and parent organization, to find 25 memorable moments from the Gotham’s history of celebrating New York and independent filmmaking. 1991 The Cost of Film In 1991, IFP executive director Catherine Tait stood before a seated crowd of some 400 people at Roseland to explain what […]
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The Union Between DPs and Operators
“And that’s when he started yelling into the phone. No, no, no!” My agent laughed a little bit as he retold the story. The union rep was on the other end of the line, and he wasn’t very happy. “Apparently I was the third person to call him about it,” he said. It was three days before principal photography was slated to begin on my current project, and IA600 had made it painfully clear that there was no way they were letting me touch the camera. For many of us indie DPs, there has never been a delineation between shooting […]
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Super 8: Class Action
Fox 100th By the time you read this, Fox will be well underway with its “Fox 100th” initiative. To commemorate its 100 years, 20th Century Fox is making 100 of its films available for digital rental (and, in many cases, purchase) in HD. Taking a deep approach to its catalogue rather than focusing on the most obvious titles, the Fox 100 body of titles is overwhelmingly slanted to films made before 1950. Some of these have never been available on home video before, like Raoul Walsh’s vibrantly racist, rowdy and essential 1933 pre-Code drama The Bowery; classic film buffs will […]
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Teaching Virtual Reality
Last year’s New Frontier section of the Sundance Film Festival included 11 virtual reality projects, helping sanction a technology that, like 3-D, has come and gone several times in the past but suddenly seems to be everywhere. Filmmakers, game designers, media artists and storytellers of all kinds are exploring a new language of story experience, while culturally, pundits are pondering the benefits, and problems, of VR, as evidenced in Maria Konnikova’s “Virtual Reality Gets Real” piece in the October 2015 issue of The Atlantic. Last April, The New York Times Magazine took things a step further with a cover for […]
