Filmmaker

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Spring 2015

I’ll Come Running: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and Jesse Andrews on Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Those are people who died, died! They were all my friends, and they died! — Jim Carroll Do you remember your first experience with death? Most likely it was a grandparent passing. Or maybe a parent? Or, quite possibly, someone you knew at school, whether or not that person was a close friend. I remember mine — the younger brother of an elementary school classmate. He’d always prank on his older brother in the line to get into school each day, sneaking up on him from behind and then grabbing his lunch bag. A tug of war would ensue, the […]

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Features

A Band Apart: Crystal Moselle on The Wolfpack

It’s a stretch of the Lower East Side like any other, with public housing towers looming unostentatiously overhead. One of these is the home of the Angulo brothers — six siblings confined for years (save sporadic supervised walks) to their apartment by their father, Oscar. Crystal Moselle’s first feature The Wolfpack — winner of the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — is the result of an accidental street meeting between the documentarian and her future subjects just as they were starting to regularly go outside in defiance of their dad. There are obvious questions of […]

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  • The Silent Treatment: Director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky on The Tribe

    The word “bravura” gets thrown around all too often in the realm of ambitious filmmaking (perhaps in arts criticism in general?), but there is seemingly no other word to describe the colossal craft on display in Ukrainian helmer Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s Cannes 2014-premiering debut feature, The Tribe. The film’s narrative — which hews somewhat to the genre obligations of a Western, as Slaboshpitsky points out — concerns a young man, Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), who is a newcomer at a deaf boarding school in Ukraine. No sooner has Sergey arrived than he realizes that the school is run by its administration in […]

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  • Lose Yourself to Dance: Mia Hansen-Løve on Eden

    French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve makes movies about walking and not talking. About the unsaid stuff that underpins everyday life, that tacitly ferries us toward and away from life’s big dramas: love, first love, broken love, careers as they peak and wane, reunions and ennui, death, family. Hers is a world where the moving image, like life, is animated not by the noise that accompanies celebration and turbulent times, but by time itself. So much so that Hansen-Løve’s four features, All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love and her most recent, Eden, span years, sometimes decades — […]

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  • I Want to Take You Higher: Josh and Ben Safdie on Heaven Knows What

    New York these days: There’s a chain store on every corner, Times Square is a paved-over pedestrian mall with $6 hot dogs and, if you want voyeuristic thrills, you peer into the bedrooms of the luxury condos flush against the beautifully manicured, elevated High Line that’s transformed the West Side. No one wants to reflexively cling to a misplaced nostalgia, but given the blanding of the city’s physical landscape it’s not hard to imagine that the number of urgently jaw-dropping stories in the Naked City is decreasing daily. Fortunately, for those of us who associate New York with subcultural energies, […]

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Other articles

  • Getting Strong Now: Andrew Bujalski on Results

    Andrew Bujalski’s first three features — Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax — were all more or less of a piece: illusorily casual 16mm portraits of young people in ambiguously comfortable stasis in, respectively, Boston, Brooklyn and Austin. Computer Chess, released in 2013, was a total UFO both in relation to his work and in relation to just about everything else. Film was out, but instead of clean digital, Bujalski shot on three 1969 SONY AVC-3260 cameras, its unfamiliar type of black-and-white grain making even denser a complicated comedy about a computer chess conference happening sometime in the late […]

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  • Act Naturally

    “Giving the movie its comic and poignant dimension is Brennan’s performance as Brennan.” In the wake of Albert Maysles’ death in March, I returned to this intriguing reference to “performance” in Vincent Canby’s 1969 review of Salesman, Albert and David Maysles’ landmark work of direct cinema. Canby was, of course, referring to Paul Brennan, affectionately known as “The Badger.” Brennan’s performance — if we can call it that — is indeed astonishing. A man of unremarkable looks, he holds the screen with an enthralling intensity. Of course, Brennan isn’t an actor but rather a “real person,” a documentary subject of […]

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  • Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2015: The Dust Settles

    Have you heard? The United Nations designated 2015 the “International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies,” and cinematography made the cut. But is IYL 2015 finally the year in which the dam burst of innovation subsides, and new digital cameras and techniques no longer threaten to drown us? Surveying the latest advances in large-sensor digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker’s fifth annual round-up — written, as always, on the eve of NAB — gives me pause to consider how far we’ve come in the five years since Sony’s F3 and FS100 were cutting-edge… since Panasonic’s AF100 stirred passions, ARRI’s Alexa represented a bold choice, and RED’s hand-assembled Epic-M […]

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Also: Kick Out the Jams Talk, Write, Kill Haunted Houses and Hidden Spaces Parting Shot Editor’s Letter

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