Winter 2017
These Uncomfortably Exciting Times
I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I approach and pull away from objects. […] I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, maneuvering in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them […]
Features
The Terror of the Text: Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart on Personal Shopper
Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas’s latest feature, begins with a classic horror movie trope: an evening spent in a haunted house. Kristen Stewart plays expat Maureen — not a paranormalist or twentysomething thrill-seeker but a personal clothes buyer and stylist to Kyra, a celebrity socialite and member of the Davos set. Something of a savant, Maureen does this job with an instinctual certainty but little evident pleasure. Whether that’s due to her preternatural cool or an overlay of mourning is unclear. But several months earlier, her brother, with whom she shares a congenital heart condition, died in a drafty mansion somewhere […]
-
Hits & Misses: The Theatrical Performance of the Sundance Class of ’16
How do you measure success these days? When more than two million people vote for you over the other guy and you still lose? When you receive no endorsements from a single major newspaper, your party’s leadership practically ignores you, and you still win? Or, perhaps, when your heralded Sundance acquisition earns a whopping $15.8 million at the box office, but you spend more than twice that in acquisition fees and prints and advertising costs to release it? (i.e., The Birth of a Nation). How about if your film isn’t released in theaters at all, but Netflix paid $5 million […]
-
Meat is Murder: Julia Ducournau On Her Wildly Creative Female Cannibal Film, Raw
Julia Ducournau’s debut feature film Raw is an earnest, sincere work with a clean pop sensibility that also happens to be about cannibalism. When mild-mannered vegetarian college freshman Justine (Garance Marillier) joins her older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) at veterinary school, she discovers an appetite for human flesh that she didn’t know she had. Raw is first and foremost their story, and the plot hinges entirely on whether or not their relationship is tearing itself apart or stitching itself back together. Like all siblings, they understand each other better than anyone else, simultaneously totally devoted and flippantly cruel. Marillier and Rumpf’s […]
-
The Art of Walking: Eduardo Williams on The Human Surge
In Eduardo Williams’s shorts and, now, his debut feature The Human Surge, packs of young men and women wander without purpose but still with great persistence around the globe. 2012’s The Sound of the Stars Dazes Me and 2011’s Could See a Puma, were shot at home in Buenos Aires, 2013’s That I’m Falling? in Sierra Leone and 2014’s I Forgot! in Vietnam. Logically building on this peripatetic tendency, Surge moves from Argentina to Mozambique to the Philippines in three discrete but linked segments. No matter where the characters are, there’s often a basic MO: young people trekking reluctantly to […]
Hits & Misses: The Theatrical Performance of the Sundance Class of ’16
Meat is Murder: Julia Ducournau On Her Wildly Creative Female Cannibal Film, Raw
The Art of Walking: Eduardo Williams on The Human Surge
Other articles
-
Alone Inside: Kristi Jacobson on Her Penetrating Documentary about Solitary Confinement, Solitary
Kristi Jacobson was nominated for the Truer than Fiction Spirit Award for her artful and incisive documentary on solitary confinement, Solitary. The film plays this month on HBO, and filmmaker Alix Lambert interviewed Jacobson for our Winter issue. With Solitary, filmmaker Kristi Jacobson offers her audience an experience both visceral and intimate inside the notorious Red Onion supermax prison in Wise County, Virginia. Jacobson, who spent a year filming at the prison, examines the devastating effects of solitary confinement by introducing us to the men who are incarcerated as well as to the guards and others who work at the […]
-
Strategies for Sharing
“I’m the only one of these directors with a @twitter account. Am I doing it wrong?!” tweeted, tongue-in-cheek, Moonlight helmer Barry Jenkins last November. Good question: Jenkins had just been announced as one of the Best Director nominees for the Film Independent Spirit Awards (the others were Andrea Arnold, for American Honey; Pablo Larraín, for Jackie; Jeff Nichols, for Loving; and Kelly Reichardt, for Certain Women), and among such esteemed company he was the sole denizen of the Twittersphere. Was Jenkins boosting his chances during awards season by maintaining an active presence on Twitter? Or does a social media identity […]
-
Future Vision
Not long ago, I was lucky enough to be seated at lunch alongside Garrett Brown, the 74-year-old Oscar-winning inventor of the Steadicam. We were at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival, where Brown was being honored with the Vision Award. I’m not sure exactly how I ended up at the table, but also seated there was Fabrice Aragno, the young cinematographer responsible for the optical assault of Jean-Luc Godard’s 3-D punk masterpiece Goodbye to Language. It seemed appropriate to have the two side by side. Having operated the camera for Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Sidney Pollock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and […]
Alone Inside: Kristi Jacobson on Her Penetrating Documentary about Solitary Confinement, Solitary
Future Vision
