Spring 2020
Her Decision: Eliza Hittman on Her Observational, Intimate and Necessarily Political Never Rarely Sometimes Always
“It’s so important for me to be thinking about a movie all the time,” says writer-director Eliza Hittman, reflecting on her creative process. “I don’t spend so much time sitting at a computer. I want to walk around, be in locations, spend my Saturday on a handball court or in a park or in Port Authority and respond to the environment.” Evidenced by the authenticity and truthful immediacy—laced with deeply neorealist touches—of her films, there must be something to this observational method of writing the burgeoning American auteur calls “experiential.” It births a singular high-stakes quality that guides It Felt […]
Features
Air Rights: Shooting with Drones, the Fine Print
In 2010, Eric Austin made a bold choice. The Texas-based father of three quit his day job as a sales rep to focus solely on his side hustle, flying unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)—commonly known as drones. He had a three-month job lined up on a Disney-produced show in Hawaii piloting his single-rotor helicopter adorned with a Canon 7D. In those few months, he would earn more than in a year at his old job. But before Austin ever spun his blades, he was grounded. Inundated by aerial permit requests and unable to get definitive guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration […]
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Two or Three Things They Know About You: Marketing Independent Film with Behavioral Data
Dear filmmakers, surveillance capitalism is your friend. Like every other thing we purchase nowadays, movies have been subsumed into the new digital economy, where behavioral data, influence campaigns and social media marketing are an integral part of doing business. Morally, you might have a problem with Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate practices, but there’s no getting around the fact that Facebook and Instagram hold some of the most powerful tools to reach people and manipulate their decision-making—including their choice of which movie to see on a given weekend. “It’s definitely been a help for smaller filmmakers,” says Stephen Metzger, director of marketing […]
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The Low Down: Is Microbudget Production the Response to the Industry’s Devaluation of the Dramatic Feature Film?
There are conflicting opinions regarding the budget cutoff for the category commonly referred to as “microbudget filmmaking.” Sometimes referred to as “no-budget,” “ultra-low-budget” or “nano-budget,” the term refers to an increasingly popular level of filmmaking below “low-budget” that emerging filmmakers as well as, in some cases, veterans engage in. When Venice’s Biennale College Cinema was started eight years ago, the budgets of €150,000 (about $162,000) awarded to each filmmaker seemed low. And indeed, while makers of films—ambitious pictures such as The Fits, H., Memphis and This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection—produced through that program struggled with the budget […]
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Considering Microbudget: Six Filmmakers on The Reasons Behind Their Cinema Povera
During its early years in the mid-1990s, Filmmaker was noteworthy for its coverage of microbudget, or “no budget,” production. In articles by Peter Broderick, we printed the budgets of films like Clerks, El Mariachi and Clean, Shaven, as well as—later in a cover story I wrote—Pi. Microbudget filmmaking has continued as a Filmmaker focus, although the degree to which our articles have focused on budget numbers has varied. To accompany Mike S. Ryan’s article on microbudget productions, we asked several filmmakers whose work has been made in ultra-low-budget conditions to articulate for us their reasons for working in this model […]
Two or Three Things They Know About You: Marketing Independent Film with Behavioral Data
The Low Down: Is Microbudget Production the Response to the Industry’s Devaluation of the Dramatic Feature Film?
Considering Microbudget: Six Filmmakers on The Reasons Behind Their Cinema Povera
Other articles
- Milk Money: Director Kelly Reichardt on the New World and Nascent Capitalism of First Cow
- Incendiary: Director Alexander Nanau on His Explosive Investigative Documentary, Collective
- There’s Something in the Air: With The Vast of Night, Director Andrew Patterson Reinvents the UFO Movie
- Out of the Spotlight: A 2020 Update on Film Tax Incentives in the U.S.
- Location Shooting and Independent Production: A History of Necessity and Innovation
- The Right Time to Sell? Pinpointing Trends in Independent Film Sales
- Messing With the Medium: On the Textured Pleasures of the Handmade Film
- Team Building: On Wanda Bershen and Film Safety Nets
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This Sweet Sickness: Frank Beauvais On His Obsessive, Archival-Based Memoir, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream
In 2016, filmmaker Frank Beauvais was rudderless, living in a remote village in the French countryside without a driver’s license and riding out the wake of a breakup in rural isolation. Over the course of a few difficult months, he watched more than 400 movies at home, a torrential—and torrented—flood of film that both sustained and corroded him. Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is a portrait of that time told through silent excerpts from Beauvais’s cinematic compendium. The films wildly span genre, nationality and time period, and are paired with a spoken first-person memoir narration track from Beauvais. The pairings […]
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Conceiving the Future: The Prescient Lynn Hershman Leeson
There’s no question that Lynn Hershman Leeson is a prescient artist and filmmaker. Prescience is even a theme in her work, one she grapples with as a double-edged sword. Impossible to measure except in retrospect, it is a lonely quality to have in the present. After Leeson rocketed to art stardom following a 2014 career retrospective at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, her success was widely praised as “overdue”—another word that culture’s Cassandras are used to hearing. It seems unwise to disentangle her originality and influence from her tenacity and patience. Her 2019 interactive installation “Shadow […]
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Which Way is Up? On Aspect Ratio Diversity and Quibi’s Turnstyle Technology
Of all the gimmicks announced during the interminable two-year runup to the launch of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s billion-dollar video startup Quibi—from a short-form reboot of Punk’d to a Spielberg-helmed horror series that can only be watched after sundown—perhaps the most striking is Turnstyle, the platform’s unique new approach to aspect ratio. Turnstyle will allow users to rotate their phones while viewing Quibi content, triggering a real-time shift between horizontal and vertical framing. The idea was met with awe by tech evangelists and revulsion by cinephiles when it was announced in January, but more than anything it reveals Quibi’s intentions as markedly […]
This Sweet Sickness: Frank Beauvais On His Obsessive, Archival-Based Memoir, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream
Conceiving the Future: The Prescient Lynn Hershman Leeson
