Issues
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Editor’s Letter
“Monsieur Godard, are you more interested in making films or social commentary?” the French director was asked at a 1968 symposium on his work. “I see no difference between the two,” he replied. This anecdote was recounted in a winter 2011 column for this magazine by director Zachary Wigon, who wrote about the outsized role cinema and politicized filmmakers had in the cultural conversations of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Where are today’s filmmakers in the dialogues of our moment? Three years later, it’s a question echoed by Anthony Kaufman in his Industry Beat column. Focused more broadly on […]
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The Limits of Quality Control: On Sticking with Mini-DV
There are many reasons why people get into making movies, but the fetishizing of gadgets might be my least favorite. Cheaper, higher-end video cameras make “quality” more attainable, but no matter how many pixels there might be in a high-definition image, it can’t make a story clearer. Yet, independent filmmakers are often drawn to the newest, hottest equipment, as if the barrier to making a decent movie can be scaled by stacking the latest and fanciest gear and climbing over. I’ve made four nonfiction features and, like a digital video Luddite, I’ve shot all of them with my trusty Panasonic […]
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Vanishing Act: David Fincher on Gone Girl
Marriage might be an attempt at a lifelong emotional bond, but it’s also a contract enforced through mutual brutality. Disappointments mount, responsibilities shift, a struggle for power inevitably ensues between the partners; control is hard won and often gained only through compromises at best, coercion at worst. In most marriages, that brutality is only psychological, and the loss of the unmarried self — the version of you that attracted your significant other in the first place — never brings out the knives when you or your spouse realize what a lousy existence you’ve traded in for. (And we haven’t even […]
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Not an Option: The Ins and Outs of Shopping Agreements
The motion picture and television industries have become increasingly informal in recent years. In the past, agents would sign actors and writers before trying to sell their services or material, members of producing teams would sign collaboration agreements with their partners before taking a project to a studio, and producers would enter into written option agreements with writers under which they would pay money to exclusively option the motion picture and television rights to a property. These days, however, many agents will “hip-pocket” new artists and promote them without a contract to avoid commitment; a collaborator will walk a project […]
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Dispatches from Toronto & Camden
Toronto Film Festival 2014 By Scott Macaulay Early in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s resolutely unsentimental Still Alice, the eponymous Columbia University linguistics professor (Julianne Moore) visits a neurologist to discuss the memory issues she’s been having. “I’m going to tell you a name and address, and I want you to remember it,” he says. “John Black, 42 Washington Street, Hoboken.” After a few basic cognitive tests, he asks Moore to repeat the address. She stumbles, apologizes; she just got distracted. The doctor smiles and nods. Moore is brilliant in this scene, as she is throughout the film capturing, Kübler-Ross- […]
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Great Expectations: Alex Ross Perry on Listen Up Philip
Alex Ross Perry’s first feature Impolex was an oblique gloss on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, while his higher-profile follow-up, The Color Wheel, stole the font of Philip Roth’s ’70s hardcovers for its credits, as well as that writer’s abrasive fearlessness and sexual disreputability. Literature hangs heavy over Listen Up Philip as well, not least in its subject: a young, New York novelist on the precipice of success being mentored by a Roth-like literary titan. That writer’s spirit is still present, but the major structural reference is William Gaddis’ behemoth debut The Recognitions, whose main through line is a pure-spirited and […]
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Editing Today: Beyond the NLE
David Lean once called editing the soul of filmmaking. Today it’s more like the Mission Control. You’ve got to understand pixel counts, bit rates, bit depth, color sampling, sampling frequencies, frame rates, codecs, RAW files, deBayering, audio channels, waveform displays, vectorscopes, audio levels, LUTs, proxies, file-wrappers, Log gammas, XML, titling, effects — need I go on? Arcane stuff that used to be the domain of video engineers with EE degrees. To ensure a smooth and efficient postproduction “workflow” (term borrowed from I.T.), you must know about cameras too: which frame sizes they capture, which codecs they employ, which gammas they […]
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Graphic Design: Jeff Soyk on Hollow
Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s award-winning interactive documentary Hollow employs a particularly bold use of graphics, using them to provide bursts of information quickly, to frame interview material and to even provoke calls to action. Of her approach, McMillion says, “I would provide photographs and quotes [to designer Jeff Soyk], and we would talk about what ways they would work in the piece. And then he’d do the graphic design. Below, Soyk talks about the above data visualization. Jeff Soyk, co-producer and lead designer: When reviewing the project assets, I came across Elaine’s photo of the abandoned police department in War, W. […]
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In the Eye of the Storm: Laura Poitras on CITIZENFOUR
Red tail lights glow in an inky black tunnel. In voiceover, a woman’s voice softly reads. “Laura,” the email begins. The sender writes of encryption, passwords, the government documents he intends to send and the reason he addressed this email to her. “You’ve been selected,” Laura speaks, as the sender goes on to explain that every phone call she makes, trip she embarks on, person she befriends will be observed, recorded, surveilled. “This is a story few but you can tell.” With this cool, measured voiceover, drawing us into her life at the moment it changed forever, documentary filmmaker Laura […]
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Graphic Design: Joshua Ligairi and Darin Anderson on Plan 241
Plan 241 is an in-production, feature-length documentary about the FBI investigation into Alaska militia leader Schaeffer Cox, who was convicted of stockpiling illegal weapons and conspiracy to murder federal agents. From filmmaker Joshua Ligairi, it tells a human story enriched by the copious documentation and statistics generated by a criminal case. Below, Ligairi discusses his decision to incorporate graphics in his documentary, and designer/animator Darin Anderson elaborates upon the specific approach. Joshua Ligairi, director: The people who make the most interesting characters aren’t always the best choice for delivering information in a clear and concise way. Text, when created with […]
