Issues
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Bring on the Major Leagues
Tim League is not as much of an oddball as Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and its distribution arm, Drafthouse Films, might suggest. For all the cultish, film-geek quirkiness of those companies, the man behind them seems to know exactly what he’s doing. Since 1997, League, who studied engineering and art history at Rice University, has been cultivating a highly profitable brand that’s now proving scalable far beyond the confines of his hometown of Austin, Texas. Alamo is in the middle of a massive expansion of both company-owned and franchise locations, with openings set for New York City (including a seven-screen complex […]
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SXSW 2013
Mars is a lonely, spiritually bereft place in Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction classic The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Colonists live inside, away from the planet’s harsh elements and unexpected predators, whiling away the hours by playing a hallucinatory role-playing game called Perky Pat. Using little figurines — avatars, really — and a psychoactive drug, they transport themselves into a consumer fantasy world back on Earth. I thought of Dick’s book as I walked past an exhibit at SXSW Interactive this year. A company was demonstrating its 3D-printing prowess by making little plastic figures based on your Facebook photo — […]
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Handed Down: On Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
“A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician,” the 19th-century stage conjurer Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin once said. But if that’s true, then what about all those aspects of acting — such as figuring out character, backstory and motivation? Those are questions all professional magicians have to grapple with at some point early in their careers. Or, to put it another way: Where does a magician’s magic come from? A kid doing a magic trick can answer that question easily: it comes from a magic kit their father bought them. The amateur doesn’t need really need to answer […]
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Look Your Customers in the Eye
Independent filmmaker Brian Paul is a man who lives his films. In that spirit, he has taken DIY film distribution to a whole new level. Street level, that is. For the past two years, Paul has made a comfortable living by selling his hybrid film Cure for the Crash…The Art of Train Hoppin’ directly from art market street stalls in New Orleans. His unique distribution strategy has proved remarkably successful. Paul claims to have sold thousands of DVDs of Cure for the Crash by personally engaging more than 100,000 people face-to-face. “When I was a teenager in West Philly,” Paul […]
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Better Living Through Cinema
It’s a Friday morning, and David Gatten is very tired, having taught both Wednesday and Thursday evenings. Like many filmmakers, in addition to making movies, Gatten also teaches. Indeed, the experimental filmmaker boasts the title “Lecturing Fellow and Artist in Residence” at Duke University’s Arts of the Moving Image program, where he lectures during the spring semester, before returning to the old mining cabin in Colorado’s Four Mile Canyon where he lives with his wife — filmmaker, writer and editor Erin Espelie — for the rest of the year. His courses? AMI 101: Introduction to the Arts of the Moving […]
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The Invisible Filmmakers
Black films don’t travel. It’s one of the oldest clichés in the movie business. And it may be as true today as it was 20 years ago when producer Andrew Vajna famously declared, “There are no black actors today [who] mean anything to the foreign marketplace.” Hollywood may have made some headway in overcoming the racial road-blocks that exist in overseas markets; the foreign box-office for Quentin Tarantino’s Jamie Foxx-starring Django Unchained, for example, has well surpassed domestic sales, as did, surprisingly, Martin Lawrence’s 2011 comedy Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son. But those films remain the exception, not the […]
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Should Documentary Filmmakers Learn to Code?
A decade ago, the question would have seemed outlandish, but today, interactive documentaries have established themselves as a small, but growing, genre. Born out of experimentation, interactive docs are at once hard to define and easy to recognize. Some look like films and some don’t, but all draw on the language of cinematic storytelling, even though they’re native to tablets, mobile phones and the Web. Inspired by the impact of emerging technologies on nonfiction storytelling, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department launched the Open Documentary Lab last March. As our team at the MIT OpenDocLab mapped the field and connected with […]
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Frame of Reference
What does it mean, in 2013, to photograph — to reproduce — a painting? Does it, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” drain the painting of an essential “aura,” even as it makes the image itself accessible to a much larger audience? Does it, as John Berger elaborated in his 1972 book and television program, Ways of Seeing, alter the painting’s meaning, rendering the original a symbol of capitalist exchange? Or, in today’s image-sharing world of Tumblr, is reproduction nothing more than whimsical statement of affinity, of a […]
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Secrets of the Glam Squad: Inside the World of Film Hair and Makeup Departments
You’re the producer of a low-budget movie, and, as usual, there isn’t enough money. Each department is straining against their budgets, and you don’t want the production value of the film to falter. So you are forced to prioritize. More lights? Well, that’s hard to argue with — the movie has to look good. Another van? No way around that; you have to get people to the next location in time. But makeup and hair needs a space heater? Um … can’t they just put on sweaters? “If the electric department says they need two hours, no one questions it,” […]
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Caught On Film
In Medan, Indonesia, when the government was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar Congo was one of many small-time gangsters who hawked movie tickets and plotted petty crimes in front of cinemas showing American movies. He and his buddies, who translate “gangster” as meaning “free men,” were enlisted as death squads after Communists cut off imports of U. S. films, such as their beloved Elvis Presley musicals. More than a million intellectuals, ethnic Chinese and alleged Communists and leftists were murdered. The “movie theater gangsters” were always eager to dance across the road to garrote an alleged Communist or […]
