Issues
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Editor’s Letter
As we shake off what has been a wretched New York winter, we’re delighted to have Jenny Slate, the brilliant actress, comedian and — for fans of subversive squeaky-voiced animation — the co-creator of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On grace our Spring cover. We picked Slate for our list in 2011, and at that time, one of her accomplishments was starring in a high-wire-act of a short, Obvious Child, by the young director Gillian Robespierre. Now that short has been expanded — brilliantly — into a feature that makes fantastic use of Slate’s ferocious stand-up chops. Made independently, produced […]
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You Have To Laugh
The first words of Obvious Child are heard over black. Effervescent stand-up comedian Donna Stern (the pitch-perfect Jenny Slate) appears in flashes, lording over her audience as she addresses the myth of clean underwear in graphic detail. If it wasn’t already apparent from the mere premise of her Sundance breakout, director Gillian Robespierre knows how to make a first impression. A romantic comedy that upends all that the genre holds dear, Obvious Child, based on Robespierre’s 2009 short, is an irreverent, hilarious and touching examination of a woman’s brash misstep and her hesitant navigation through its domino-like ramifications. Impregnated during […]
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Let There Be Natural Light
“Fuck it, I’m going for it.” That, says cinematographer Yves Bélanger, was his response when presented with the challenge of shooting Dallas Buyers Club using only natural light. But aided by the ALEXA digital camera and his freewheeling director Jean-Marc Vallée, Bélanger handily shot the entire film without the heavy equipment usually associated with movies starring the likes of Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner. No tripods, no lighting kits. His only artificial source of illumination: a small Kino Flo he used at the beginning of each day to shoot his color charts to make sure the color balance was correct. […]
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Load & Play
Caveh Zahedi In One Fell Swoop By Peter Rinaldi DVD is not dead. It’s the new vinyl. Unconvinced? Perhaps a six DVD set of an important and influential American director’s films, most of which have never been released on video, will change your mind. Factory 25’s “Digging My Own Grave: The Films of Caveh Zahedi” might be the most comprehensive collection of an independent filmmaker’s work available in one set: five feature films, over two dozen shorts, a feature-length series of video letters, and a plethora of extras, all housed in a handsome 100-plus page hardcover book … oh, not […]
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Super 8
1. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace A former associate editor at n+1 whose politicized beat has included everything from localized Occupy movements to contemporary classical music, Nikil Saval turns his attention to office life in his first book. From the origins of corporate discontent in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” through Frederick “Speedy” Taylor’s turn-of-the-century efficiency innovations up to (inevitably) “The Office,” Saval takes on the white-collar workplace from a variety of angles: the changing workspaces themselves, the demographic makeup of the people within them and their pop culture representations. 2. Kimono Kimono scrapes selected information from websites directly, […]
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Five Questions for Twenty Feet from Stardom Cinematographer Nicola Marsh
Nicola Marsh was one of two cinematographers for Twenty Feet from Stardom, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Documentary. She’s worked with director Morgan Neville on a number of projects, including Troubadours and The Night James Brown Saved Boston as well as other directors including Cameron Crowe on Pearl Jam Twenty and The Union. Marsh, who has just finished shooting a reality show in the Caribbean, spoke to us about shooting Twenty Feet from Stardom, the different cameras used on the project and the hidden strengths of older lenses. Filmmaker: For Twenty Feet from Stardom you were shooting with […]
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Gun Crazy
Revenge is a dish best served cold. That famous proverb has provided the template for many a revenge thriller, as steely protagonists emotionlessly hunt and mow down the enemies that have caused them pain and suffering. With a slight eyebrow raise or lip quiver, ’60s and ’70s icons Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin meted out their justice with a hypnotic intensity. Later, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal and Robert Englund (as Freddy Krueger) added touches of black humor in the form of sardonic, post-killing one-liners. But by the early aughts, the revenge thriller would seem to have run its […]
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UT3D
While Hollywood continues to generate three-dimensional spectacles, directors, industry pundits and audiences all continue to question the technology’s validity. In a recent story in The Hollywood Reporter highlighting the DVD release of The Wolverine, which includes a 3D Blu-ray, director James Mangold said, “The question is whether 3D will survive or not,” adding, “Is it more than a gimmick and can we make it more than a gimmick?” And after ESPN announced last June that it would shut down its three-year-old 3D sports channel by the end of 2013, Variety’s David S. Cohen explored both the predictions of total demise […]
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Downstream Color
Calling video on demand the emerging wave of film distribution no longer seems accurate: with YouTube, iTunes and Netflix all into or fast approaching their second decade, digital streaming and downloads are arguably already the primary means of independent film distribution. But what is still emerging is the vast array of VOD and download services available to independent filmmakers seeking to reach audiences of paying, online movie viewers. The companies composing today’s field, discussed here, roughly fall into three permeable categories: the established players; the large cadre of new start-ups, many of which offer tools for filmmakers beyond simply hosting […]
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Editor’s Letter
I’m often surprised to meet filmmakers who ask about some so-called Golden Age of independent film, a time in the ‘90s or ‘80s or maybe even ‘70s when, they believe, financing was more plentiful, budgets were larger and the movies themselves maybe even felt a bit more meaningful. As a thought exercise, I ask, would you take a time machine back to those days? When pressed, people answer no for one simple reason: they don’t want to give up today’s tools. Desktop editing, cheap cameras, crowdfunding, social media and now, as Randy Astle exhaustively catalogues in this issue, we have […]
