Issues
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The Masked Woman: Todd Haynes on Carol
A key movie to first understanding Todd Haynes is his Karen Carpenter “biopic” cast entirely with Barbie dolls, Superstar. This 1987 short that, due to Karen’s brother, Richard, and music rights problems will never be released, seems to define not only Haynes’s subsequent cinema, but also how much he understands the ways in which popular culture, music and memories interweave with the struggles of being a woman, the struggles of sexuality and the struggles of controlling ourselves in a world that won’t really allow it. Superstar goes beyond Karen Carpenter, digging into our own memories and insecurities. For those who first […]
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Click and Release
Back in 2011, around 50 percent of the films that played the Sundance Film Festival went on to receive distribution. “That was an unacceptable violation of our mission as a nonprofit to connect audiences and artists,” recalls Chris Horton, director of Sundance’s Artist Services, which was founded that same January in an effort to help filmmakers navigate the changing landscapes in funding, marketing and distribution. For the subsequent three years, Artist Services partnered with content aggregator New Video to distribute over 100 Sundance pictures, working with the filmmakers to determine the best possible release and windowing strategies. When Sundance’s deal […]
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Man Down: Ira Sachs Interviews Writer/Director Oren Moverman about Time Out of Mind
The following interview was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2015 issue. It is appearing online today for the first time. Time Out of Mind opens today via IFC Films. Alongside his biggest professional success as a screenwriter — he co-wrote Bill Pohlad’s hit Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy — Oren Moverman returns to theaters this summer as a director with an equally striking yet very different film. Time Out of Mind, which premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, joins Moverman’s previous features — The Messenger and Rampart — in its politically aware depiction of compromised masculinity, […]
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Stealing Thunder: How to Fight Piracy While Remaining Cool
If you’re like most young-ish filmmakers, you grew up and matured in an open source world of Napster, YouTube and BitTorrent. Whether it was making mixtapes for your college girlfriend, or ripping CDs and DVDs with your film school pals, “appropriating media” might have been a way of life for you to consume and share your favorite songs, films and TV. You scoffed at FBI warnings on VHS tapes and mocked MPAA PSAs. You’ve mashed up, mixed up and just plain stolen your way through the early 21st century with nary a tinge of regret. Hell, we’re living in an […]
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Load and Play: Killers, Wage Slaves and Varda in the Sun
Agnès Varda in California Several directors of or related to the French New Wave flirted with Hollywood, from those who actually completed studio pictures (François Truffaut, Jacques Demy) to those whose efforts crashed and burned (most famously Jean-Luc Godard, whose proposed gangster picture with Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton remains one of the most tantalizing unmade films of all time). None of them managed to turn their detours in Los Angeles into as singular a cycle of films as Agnès Varda, whose two periods in the city (in the late ’60s and early ’80s) yielded five highly personal works […]
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Learning from Experience
Digital cameras have made it possible for more first-time documentary directors than ever to realize their visions, but there aren’t yet enough experienced producers ready to help those directors translate their talents into viable careers. “If you’re a director with an ambitious vision, you’re going to need help,” producer Amanda Branson Gill says. “In the narrative world, there are huge, built-in teams of people to support you. In documentary, we have this idea of the lone wolf. But you’re going to need a good partner, someone with whom you share the burden and who makes it possible.” A creative producer […]
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Streaming for Dollars
Since the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, filmmakers have rolled the dice, releasing their shorts online for free in the hopes that their work will court the right set of eyeballs. Nowadays, even at banner institutions like The New York Times and The New Yorker, more and more curated short-form distribution opportunities are cropping up online that hint toward visibility and prestige for the films, along with, sometimes, financial returns for the filmmakers. Last December, The New Yorker introduced “The Screening Room,” a streaming platform where they rolled out three shorts acquired at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival: Person to […]
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Editor’s Letter
“Call me crazy, but I don’t think distribution is the greatest problem facing independent cinema right now,” wrote producer Mike Ryan in these pages back in 2010. In an opinion piece titled “Straight Talk,” Ryan railed against what he saw as an overemphasis in our community on business plans and online marketing at the expense of innovative filmmaking. “Developing content and nurturing auteurs should be our top concern, not figuring out distribution models or revenue schemes,” he continued. “The whole purpose of independent film is to make films that aren’t pre-fabricated to hit a target audience of someone else’s devising. […]
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Parting Shot
Kentucky-born Michael Shannon has been appearing regularly in television, independent film and studio pictures since the mid-’90s, but it was his Oscar-nominated turn as a bracingly honest, if perhaps mentally unstable, mathematician in Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road that made directors see him as a potential leading man. In the years since, Shannon has fulfilled that promise, most notably as another unbalanced seer in Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter. But it’s in the next 12 months that Shannon will truly explode onscreen in a succession of notable lead and supporting parts. First up is his turn in theaters as a rapacious repo […]
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Picture Lock
As the pioneering Wexner Center for the Arts celebrates the 25th anniversary of its Film/Video Studio Program, we invited curator Jennifer Lange to pen this guest essay on the program’s history and upcoming retrospective. When Spalding Gray called the Wexner Center for the Arts “the spaceship that crash-landed on the prairies,” he was referring to the building itself, an icon of deconstructivist architecture designed by Peter Eisenman. As radical and unconventional as the building may have seemed at the time, the plans for what would take place inside its labyrinthine walls make Grey’s characterization all the more fitting, even prescient. […]
