Issues
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Why Too Many Movies Aren’t Necessarily a Problem
There are too many movies, so says The New York Times, Salon.com and The Wrap. And that’s a bad thing. It’s that old law of supply and demand at work, they argue, with an abundance of titles over-saturating the marketplace and sabotaging the sustainability of the art film business. But some distribution professionals respond with a contrary and more nuanced view. There may be a lot of movies being made in the new millennium, but the ever-expanding entertainment universe is here to sort things out. “It’s like saying there are too many books or too many paintings or too much […]
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Ecstatic Truth: 15 Years Of Hybrids Rising
Speaking April 30, 1999, at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, Werzog Herzog laid down 12 edicts on the pursuit of “ecstatic truth” in the documentary. “The so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité,” Herzog proclaimed in his “Minnesota Declaration,” announcing instead his devotion to “poetic, ecstatic truth” accessible “only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” He was speaking specifically about his 1992 masterwork Lessons Of Darkness: unfaked, awe-inspiring footage of Kuwait’s oil fields on fire after the Iraq War, framed by a made-up Pascal epigraph and narration from the perspective of an alien intelligence baffled by what it’s seeing. Herzog unrepentantly […]
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Medium Matters
At the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference, held in late March in Seattle, many of the conversations and panel discussions revolved around the disciplinary status of cinema, film, media, and screen studies. The cluster of terms jostling for territory in the conference’s program guide points to the crisis of identity sparked by the sweeping expansion of digital media, the emergence of the digital humanities, and the waning of actual film materials – 16mm film stock, film cameras, film editing systems – in “film” schools. “Film has died,” asserts the New School’s McKenzie Wark. “It’s decomposing. But […]
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The New Americans
I have found myself disconcerted in writing about James Gray’s The Immigrant. I was immediately moved by the film and couldn’t fail to appreciate its elegantly controlled cinematic style, but I also felt there was something elusive and hard-to-pin-down about the many levels on which it attempts to address the audience. The film is consistently surprising in how traditional it is in some ways, how unabashed it is in its tenderness toward its characters, the milieu and historical period. Yet the film never succumbs to the twin dangers of stereotypical downbeatness or sugar-coated wish-fulfillment; it has an unusually complex level […]
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Josh Wiggins
Starting in fourth grade, Houston native Josh Wiggins acted, edited, written and generally pitched in small, goofy YouTube shorts with his friend Tommy Hohl. He didn’t perform professionally until last year, but since then Wiggins has quickly gone from low-budget filmmaking to big studio work in near-record time. One day before the world premiere at Sundance of Kat Candler’s third feature Hellion, Wiggins signed with UTA and Leverage Management. Hellion began as a short film in 2012 starring Hohl. Wiggins inherited his friend’s part as Jacob, a troubled 13-year-old whose mother is dead. While grieving father Hollis (Aaron Paul) turns […]
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Instant History: Fukushima and Tahrir Square On-screen
The 24-hour news culture of immediate reaction, Internet-enabled connectivity (from emails to Twitter) and the so-called “now generation” have impacted the way the filmmaking community reacts to real-life disasters, not always positively. After 9/11, the question was asked: How much time must pass before filmmakers can deal with such a destructive event? Films featuring terrorist activity, such as Collateral Damage, had their releases postponed to avoid offending sensibilities, while Sam Raimi deleted a Spider-Man shot of the Twin Towers. But other filmmakers raced to include, not exclude, 9/11. Spike Lee altered David Benioff’s script for 25th Hour to include a […]
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Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW & True/False
Sundance By Scott Macaulay “Can’t we just try to have a good time?” The plea so often heard when going on a family trip — or an evening out with a couple you don’t like so much, or when indulging your partner on a trip back home — is terrible advice for a journalist attending a film festival, especially Sundance. You see, as long as your tickets are in order, you can quite easily have a good time at the Park City festival. By “good time,” I’m speaking in film festival terms, which means “see good movies.” The destination for […]
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Sharing The Grief of Others
One of 2011’s best independent films, Patrick Wang’s debut In the Family almost didn’t get discovered. After being rejected by the top festivals, Wang premiered regionally, at the Hawaii Film Festival and San Diego Asian Film Festival, before four-walling New York City’s Quad Cinema, where sterling reviews from everyone from Filmmaker to The New York Times jumpstarted a 30-plus-city DIY theatrical tour. If In the Family was one of those “out of nowhere” films, Wang is determined that not be the case for his follow-up feature. For The Grief of Others, based on the novel by Leah Hager Cohen and […]
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A Collective Will
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead “You are cordially invited to the first installment of Film Fatales — a monthly get together of amazingly talented female filmmakers,” began the email I received from Leah Meyerhoff soon after I moved to New York. “We are reaching out to you because you have written or directed a feature film and we hope to share in each other’s talent, stories and laughter.” This email came after several conversations Meyerhoff had with veteran filmmakers she […]
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Cash Poor, Creativity Rich: The No-Money Manifesto
These days, anybody with a film production blog is calling for a revolution. The call to arms takes many forms. Some strident, some prescriptive. All are calling for big, big change. But to my mind, a revolution can be pretty simple. It can start with just a simple change of perspective — or even a mantra. Here’s mine: There’s No Money. I know, I know, this is not news. Thanks to blogs, Twitter feeds, and other social media, we’re inundated with musings about the independent film apocalypse and the poverty of our filmmaking class. But clearly, the individual’s lack of […]
