Among the many things SXSW is known for — barbecue, the Alamo Drafthouse and long lines, for example — one is breakout apps. Twitter and Foursquare both got enormous boosts from launches or promotions during previous editions of SXSW Interactive. Last year, the buzzword at the tech fest was contextual search and, indeed, you’re seeing that functionality being built into products this year from Apple, Google and others. In 2012, the buzzed-about app heading into the fest was Highlight, a sort of social version of Foursquare. Installed on your phone, it alerts you to other Highlight users nearby. “You can […]
The majestic chords of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet blasted through the doors of the New Frontiers exhibition space at Sundance this year, beckoning viewers into a dark room with a wall-size screen and, in a bin, those staples of the modern multiplex, 3D glasses. Donning the glasses, you were confronted with a looped, three-minute mash-up of history as seen through the lens of Hollywood cinema. Composited across the 3D canvas, like some kind of American Museum of Natural History diorama on acid, were the great characters who, by our repeated viewing, resonate as deeply in our consciousness as real historical […]
Originally appearing in our Spring, 2012 print issue, my short report on Zona, Geoff Dyer’s fascinating critical memoir on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is being reposted today timed to the film’s run at Lincoln Center and forthcoming release by Criterion. — SM My first Tarkovsky film, my gateway picture, was his penultimate, Nostalghia, at the Olympia Theater near Columbia University in Morningside Heights. The seats slanted one way, the screen slanted the other, and there was a leak in the ceiling. Water dripped from the roof into a bucket on the floor, blending into Tarkovsky’s typically excellent sound design of distant […]
The 2012 Whitney Biennial, on display until May 27, has received a significant amount of attention for being the first in the series’ 80-year history to prominently include large-scale dance, music and theater productions within the museum itself. Artists from these various disciplines are in residence at Whitney’s Madison Avenue digs for shows and performances that will be premiered alongside the art survey’s customary installations and gallery work. But there’s been another change at the Biennial this year. While film has long been part of the show, curators Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders enlarged the program and invited in programmers […]
There was an interesting exchange of views on the Filmmaker blog afew weeks back about documentaries and the changing nature of story. The posts had to do with Doug Tirola’s documentary All In – The Poker Movie, which won the Best Documentary prize at CineVegas a few years back but was then re-shot and re-edited for theatrical release just this year. The reason for all that extensive work was “Black Friday.” After the film’s premiere the Feds shut down multiple online poker sites, thus fundamentally altering (and dating) the world depicted in the movie. The blog posts had to do […]
For those of us excited by the advent of large-sensor motion picture cameras, this past year has been the Great Leap Forward. Signs are everywhere. ARRI’s ALEXA swept TV series production in the U.S. Canon harnessed Hollywood pomp for the November launch of its C300. RED placed an eight-page glossy fold-out to tout EPIC in April’s Vogue (“The camera that changed cinema is now changing fashion”). Sony shipped no less than 100 F65s, the first Super 35 camera with an 8K sensor. A year ago, in “Does Size Matter?” I surveyed the still-budding field of large-sensor cameras for Filmmaker and […]
Each year, Filmmaker sponsors Cinema Eye’s Heterodox Award, given to the fiction film that most compellingly illuminates the formal possibilities of nonfiction filmmaking while raising provocative questions about on-going documentary orthodoxy and the perceived boundaries between narrative and nonfiction filmmaking. The winner this year was Mike Mills’ Beginners, and below, juror Kimberly Reed (Prodigal Sons) takes you into the deliberation chamber. When asked to jury the Heterodox Award, I was eager to engage in a conversation about cross-genre filmmaking that was artist-led, the aim of the award. The panel — Alrick Brown, Shannon Kennedy, Natalia Almada, Sandi DuBowski and […]
“All you need for a movie is a gun and girl,” Jean-Luc Godard famously wrote in one of his journals. But, of course, to make a good movie, you need others things too. An observant, imaginative eye helps, as does fresh context and a director’s understanding of the community containing that gun, that girl and, inevitably, the guy who stands behind — or in front of — the trigger. Restless City, the exciting dramatic feature debut of Nigerian-born photographer and music-video director Andrew Dosunmu, has all of these elements, and it mixes them into a hauntingly sensual take on the […]
Earlier this year, The New Yorkermagazine hosted a panel discussion titled, “Is Television the New Cinema?” In his opening remarks, The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, posed the question, “Television is in the process, in many ways, of eclipsing cinema: True or false?” While the panelists didn’t give a definite answer, it was generally agreed that the TV medium — once considered a mainstream form of “junk storytelling” — has recently blossomed. Journalist Emily Nussbaum noted the rise, beginning in the late ’90s, “of a breed of irascible, aggressive and auteurist TV makers,” and the creation of shows like Buffy […]