Sound & Visionaries
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A Matter of Balance
Kristan Sprague first heard of Shaka King when they were both in high school, long before either entered the film industry. Though they had friends in common, they only got to know each other when they attended Vassar College and started filmmaking in earnest. Since then, Sprague has edited most of King’s work, from his early shorts to his independent debut Newlyweeds, and now their first studio feature, Judas and the Black Messiah. The film follows the real-life story of car thief William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), who was hired by the FBI to infiltrate the Illinois chapter of the Black […]
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Dressing for the Extremes: Costume Designer Alexandra Byrne on Emma.
With their picturesque settings and unforgettable romances, Jane Austen adaptations have been cinematic staples for decades. The latest, Autumn de Wilde’s Emma, offers a colorful take on Austen’s 1815 tale of a young woman navigating relationships with the know-it-all confidence that goes with being, in Austen’s introductory description, “handsome, clever, and rich.” Much of the film’s distinctive sparkle comes from the costumes created by Oscar-winning designer Alexandra Byrne. Surprisingly, Byrne (one of whose first films was another Austen adaptation, 1995’s Persuasion) hadn’t read the novel before working on the film. “I really, really enjoyed it,” she says. “Sometimes, when you’ve […]
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Moving Through the Frame
Like The Searchers, Nomadland is bookended by a pair of doorways: on one side, the post-Baby Boom American Dream of domesticity and stability; on the other, the siren’s call of the wanderer, beckoning toward the unknown. In the film’s opening frame, Fern (Frances McDormand) stands in the doorway of a storage unit in Empire, Nevada. The Great Recession has swallowed the mining town whole; the 60-something widow takes one last glance at the remnants of her life, packed away in boxes, and climbs into her Ford Econoline van, headed toward the horizon. A year passes before Fern darkens another symbolic […]
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On the Beat
Chicago in 1927 was a fascinating, volatile place. The Great Migration, which saw an estimated six million African Americans leave the rural southern states for the urban north, was in full effect, and the Windy City was an important destination. By the mid 1920s, an estimated 100,000 Black people had settled in Chicago, making the city a hotbed for new cultural developments, especially in music—Chicago is widely regarded as the second stop in the evolution of jazz after New Orleans. The August Wilson play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom tells one chapter of that evolution through a dramatic imagining of a single recording session […]
