Summer 2015
Corrective Lens
While promoting The Act Of Killing — his punchy, audacious, madly performative, deeply troubling masterpiece about the legacy of genocide in Indonesia 50 years later — Joshua Oppenheimer didn’t much let on that there was a second, complementary feature in the works. While editing the first film, and before his secondary subjects in the government and paramilitaries knew what a bold, damning document he had fashioned, Oppenheimer shot a round of elegant, formally restrained interviews with his earlier subjects through the offices of his collaborator, Adi Rukun, an optometrist whose older brother had been murdered. Among a range of substantial […]
Features
The Anxiety of Influence: Director James Ponsoldt on The End of the Tour
“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?” – David Foster Wallace The new tagline for the James Ponsoldt movie The End of the Tour is, “Imagine the greatest conversation you’ve ever had.” I initially took issue with this tagline. Ponsoldt’s film is based on a book arranged around a transcript of an unpublished interview […]
-
Survivor’s Song: Christian Petzold on Phoenix
The more you consider the nuances of German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s latest feature, Phoenix, the more difficult it is to articulate exactly what this mysterious and allusive drama is really about. It’s the director’s seventh feature for cinema (discounting the five he has made for television), and the fifth he has made in collaboration with actress and avowed muse Nina Hoss. While not quite stripped down to Bressonian levels of formal curtness, Petzold’s style is without fuss. As he explains below, his mode of storytelling is generally more reflective and assiduously built through alternating perspectives than it is literal or […]
-
Man Down: Ira Sachs Interviews Writer/Director Oren Moverman about Time Out of Mind
The following interview was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2015 issue. It is appearing online today for the first time. Time Out of Mind opens today via IFC Films. Alongside his biggest professional success as a screenwriter — he co-wrote Bill Pohlad’s hit Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy — Oren Moverman returns to theaters this summer as a director with an equally striking yet very different film. Time Out of Mind, which premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, joins Moverman’s previous features — The Messenger and Rampart — in its politically aware depiction of compromised masculinity, […]
-
TV is Not the New Film
As much as I love Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men and Twin Peaks, as great and as groundbreaking as those shows were, they still are not cinema. The recent explosion of quality long-form cable series has taken the TV form to a new level of artistry and craftsmanship. A show like Mad Men is not only thrilling because of its commentary on its era, but because of the zeitgeist energy created by everyone watching the show, talking about it and sharing opinions on social media. Today, perhaps more than ever, a new season of a quality show becomes a […]
Survivor’s Song: Christian Petzold on Phoenix
Man Down: Ira Sachs Interviews Writer/Director Oren Moverman about Time Out of Mind
TV is Not the New Film
Other articles
-
Streaming for Dollars
Since the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, filmmakers have rolled the dice, releasing their shorts online for free in the hopes that their work will court the right set of eyeballs. Nowadays, even at banner institutions like The New York Times and The New Yorker, more and more curated short-form distribution opportunities are cropping up online that hint toward visibility and prestige for the films, along with, sometimes, financial returns for the filmmakers. Last December, The New Yorker introduced “The Screening Room,” a streaming platform where they rolled out three shorts acquired at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival: Person to […]
-
Stealing Thunder: How to Fight Piracy While Remaining Cool
If you’re like most young-ish filmmakers, you grew up and matured in an open source world of Napster, YouTube and BitTorrent. Whether it was making mixtapes for your college girlfriend, or ripping CDs and DVDs with your film school pals, “appropriating media” might have been a way of life for you to consume and share your favorite songs, films and TV. You scoffed at FBI warnings on VHS tapes and mocked MPAA PSAs. You’ve mashed up, mixed up and just plain stolen your way through the early 21st century with nary a tinge of regret. Hell, we’re living in an […]
-
Creeping Time
There is nothing new about Slow Cinema. From the very beginning of projected motion pictures in the late 19th century, the Lumière brothers utilized the single take, allowing for the temporal flow in the frame to coincide roughly with the audience’s experience of time. The fracturing of time through editing — borrowing from and keeping with the realist conventions of the novel — put cinema on the path of montage: the art of visual storytelling became equated with rapid movement across time (flashbacks and the implied “meanwhile…”) and space (multiple locations). Even cross-cutting — shifting back and forth between two […]
Streaming for Dollars
Stealing Thunder: How to Fight Piracy While Remaining Cool
Creeping Time
Also: Parting Shot Editor’s Letter
