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Twilight of the Robots? Androids in Contemporary Cinema
In August 2021, Elon Musk announced that his company is prototyping a humanoid robot called the “Tesla Bot.” He shared the stage with an ecstatically dancing figure that was obviously a human in a robot costume. Musk assured the audience that eventually the robot “will be real” and will derive from the AI system used in Tesla vehicles. The cars are already “semi-sentient robots on wheels,” Musk said, in yet another of his grandiose claims intended to disguise their minimal autonomous driving capabilities. It all appeared like a desperate attempt to siphon some of the nervous excitement that Boston Dynamics […]
by Joanne McNeil on Oct 11, 2021 -
My Job During a Pandemic: Launching a Film Publishing House
We’d been planning the launch of the publishing house for two years before the pandemic made a joke of all timelines and schedules. Our original idea was to inaugurate Fireflies Press in 2020 with the art book Memoria, a chronicle of the making of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film that exemplifies the creative forms of commentary we’re interested in exploring with the press. What better launching pad, we thought, than the film’s much-anticipated premiere at Cannes in May? On February 27, 2020, our designer and art director James Geoffrey Nunn flew to Berlin for what was supposed to be the start […]
by Annabel Brady-Brown and Giovanni Marchini Camia on Oct 11, 2021 -
Kate Gondwe
Independent film’s history is entwined with the history of distribution. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and into the ’80s and ’90s, new voices arose alongside distribution ventures that enabled them to reach audiences underserved by the media monoliths. In more recent years, and with a few notable exceptions (one being Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY releasing), interest from filmmakers in being part of new distribution start-ups has waned—new filmmakers just want to make movies, not release them. Or, perhaps, they want to figure out how to game the algorithms that now determine so much of what we see online. One young filmmaker bucking […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Annalise Lockhart
In Annalise Lockhart’s unsettling Inheritance, no matter what land you own, you can never escape the white gaze. Set in her parents’ Vermont cabin that she grew up visiting every summer, Lockhart’s short centers around Norra (Victoria A. Villier), a young Black woman granted the deed to her father’s land on her 25th birthday. After the deed is officially handed over during a celebratory dinner with Norra’s dad (Ron Brice) and brother (DeLeon Dallas), she notices a pair of glowing eyes peering out from beyond the trees of the forest. The following morning, Norra notices even more eyes, possessed by […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Michelle Uranowitz & Daniel Jaffe
“It was the first day of shooting,” says writer, director and actor Michelle Uranowitz, “and our sound person came up to us and said, ’I just want you to know that the actors are talking over each other.’ ’Unfortunately,’” she remembers replying, “’that’s not going to change.’” Overlapping dialogue in all of its many cacophonous, funny and intense variations is a hallmark of the short films New York–based Uranowitz and creative partner Daniel Jaffe have made together. “I grew up within a neurotic Jewish family where everyone was constantly talking over each other,” Uranowitz explains. “I think my ears don’t […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Reflect What You Are: Jim O’Rourke Interviews Todd Haynes about The Velvet Underground
It’s 1963: High-minded Welsh musician John Cale participates in a concert of Erik Satie’s Vexations—per the composer’s intent, 840 piano performances of the same piece, totaling 18 hours—alongside experimental luminaries like John Cage, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. Later that year, Cale appears on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, where guests are grilled by a panel that tries to determine what their particular secret might be. Cale’s performance of the Satie piece is eventually established as his in front of a slightly disbelieving host and audience. The not-so-politely implicit question: Why would anyone do something so […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz on The Velvet Underground
Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz first worked together on Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch’s very funny and infectiously playful 2016 documentary on The Stooges. The Velvet Underground is a different band, whose story places different demands on the filmmakers and audience, but Gonçalves and Kurnitz once again found the proper cinematic corollary for their subject with Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground. Gonçalves is a Haynes regular, having edited narrative features Carol and Dark Waters for the director, along with the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. Kurnitz is a first-time Haynes collaborator (but, as he notes below, longtime Haynes enthusiast) best known […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 11, 2021 -
25 New Faces of Film 2021
Click here to read this year’s edition of the 25 New Faces of Film.
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 11, 2021 -
Fox Maxy
Fox Maxy’s work skitters along associative tracks. Testimony, interviews and activism often play for an extended length against digital backdrops and landscapes that Maxy creates themselves; other times, footage of friends and family are edited into rapid-fire cascades, their links often excitingly too fast to follow. Soundtracked by a jittery mix of Native artists and more ubiquitous figures (Tupac and Dolly Parton are in there, too), the results are a slipstream into Maxy’s consciousness, where cultural and political issues sit side-by-side with diaristic footage shot since 2011. “I realized I didn’t want to work in the white world at all,” […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Naz Riahi
The two shorts Naz Riahi released on Vimeo during the pandemic—Sincerely, Erik and Andros in the City—are in a boxy aspect ratio because the format reminded her of the tube TV she’d watch growing up in Iran. The sound mixes are basic and, she says, “not intentional”: “I literally didn’t have the money, but the films came out during the pandemic when everybody was just watching on their computer, and they work fine on that.” “Intentional,” however, was the barely graded color correct, which gives the films a relaxed, low-contrast vibe. “My DP, Alec [Cohen], was like, ’Please let me […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021
