Issues
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Pod Wants to Know You
Cinematic innovation is often driven by creative needs. The desire to help viewers connect to stories has resulted in the development of new camera systems, visual effects processes and advancements in audio capture and presentation. Stanley Kubrick’s determination to shoot by candlelight, in order to be authentic to the 18th-century setting of Barry Lyndon, birthed the Zeiss high-speed prime lens. A frustration with the state of theatrical sound in the early 1980s inspired George Lucas to develop THX to ensure pristine audio playback in theaters. When James Cameron wanted a realistic look for Pandora in Avatar, he innovated “performance capture” […]
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Berlin International Film Festival 2013
It was the festival of bear traps, digital ghosts and love battles. The 63rd Berlinale featured a strong competition lineup bolstered by great new films from Jafar Panahi, Denis Côté, Hong Sang-soo and Steven Soderbergh, none of which received major awards. However, Côté’s Vic+Flo Saw a Bear picked up a Silver Bear, known as the Alfred Bauer Prize, which, if you examine its history, has a better track record than the more questionable Golden Bear. Last year, this prize “for a feature film that opens new perspectives” went to Miguel Gomes’ Tabu. One of the best Canadian films in recent […]
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Load & Play
Side Effects Open Road – May 21 Perhaps Steven Soderbergh’s swan song as a theatrically distributed director (his Liberace biopic with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon will premiere on HBO this spring), Side Effects is a masterfully made noir thriller, although one that, at least initially, obscures its genre coding by deploying a setup that has “mental illness TV movie of the week” written all over it. Rooney Mara is a depressed, downwardly mobile young woman whose formerly high-rolling financier husband (Channing Tatum) went to jail for insider trading. When she goes on some new antipsychotic for her clinical depression […]
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Relative Truths
Over the course of two narrative features, and now a documentary, Sarah Polley has made a habit of taking on unexpected subjects, all the while managing to produce a remarkably consistent body of work. Polley’s films explore the vagaries of relationships and intimacy, and in particular, the challenges of marriage. Filled with tonal shifts and narrative reveals, Polley’s naturalism is always accompanied by flights of fancy and spontaneous moments of romance that may twist against the viewer’s sympathies. Her 2006 debut, Away from Her, stars two aging icons of cinema, Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent and the ever-radiant Julie Christie, as […]
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Super 8
1 This Long Century Tucked away in a remote corner of the Internet is THIS LONG CENTURY, a remarkable collection of artistic contributions from some of the great creative minds of our time. Founded by New Yorkers Stefan Pietsch and Jason Evans, the website gives its mission statement as: “Bringing together such intimate work as sketchbooks, personal memorabilia, annotated typescripts, short essays, home movies and near impossible to find archival work.” The more than 200 luminaries who have shared their work include Luc Sante, Vivienne Westwood, Richard Hell, Albert Maysles, Kelly Reichardt and Miklós Jancsó. 2 Drag City books Drag […]
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Back to the Future with 4K: Large-Sensor Motion Picture Cameras in 2013
A motion picture camera used to be a light-sealed box with a strip of film running through it. Was it easy to thread? Did it run quiet? How bright was the viewfinder? Today’s cameras are exponentially more complex. They are literal bundles of separate technologies, each lurching forward at a different rate. To understand today’s cameras, you must understand the parts to understand the whole. This is my third annual overview of digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker, and it is being written in the run-up to NAB 2013 in Las Vegas, the world’s largest trade show devoted to digital video […]
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Letter From the Editor
Our worst Filmmaker cover was Spring 2003. We decided to break with our tradition of director or actor portraits in favor of an iconic image illustrating that issue’s major article, a piece by Anthony Kaufman on filmmakers embracing DIY distribution. It would be something like a New York Times Magazine cover, we thought — a stark shot that would act as an instantly recognizable visual metaphor for the serious journalism inside. That art, however, was a generic and uninteresting picture of a padlock. (Filmmakers are locked out of the system — get it?) As soon as we sent it to […]
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VOD: Where are the Numbers?
Alicia Van Couvering on the mysteries of VOD reporting.
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Story as Software
We are swimming in a sea of data. In 2012, Facebook passed the one billion-user mark, 48 hours worth of new video was uploaded to YouTube every minute and Apple received their one-millionth app submission while the Android store listed more than 600,000 apps with more than 20 billion installs. These stats represent an incredible amount of online activity with a decent percentage attributed to a rise in smartphone and tablet usage. Fame and riches await those who can effectively capture and monetize even a small percentage of this activity. In April, Facebook announced that they were acquiring Instagram, a […]
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Long and Winding Road
Long atop the list of the best unfilmed novels, Jack Kerouac’s totemic Beat text On the Road has, after 55 years, made it to the big screen, directed by Walter Salles and with a cast led by Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst. The film’s executive producer, Francis Ford Coppola, originally optioned the book in 1980 and had previously hired such writers as Russell Banks and Michael Herr to adapt it. In 2004, he saw Salles’ biopic about the young Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries — a period road movie about idealistic, politicized young men — and […]
