L.A.-based Alma Har’el was making a Beirut music video with the band’s Zach Condon at the Coachella festival when she decided to find a less distracting location. A friend told her about Bombay Beach, the spare, sun-blasted community in California’s Salton Sea, so she hopped in a car with a $600 Canon Vixia camera and shot footage that made it into the video. Then, rather than return to L.A., she stayed by herself in the economically-distressed, end-of-the-world-seeming town, using her DV camera to go a level deeper into not only the lives but the imaginations of the people she met […]
Trained as a cinematographer in Italy, Brooklyn-based Mark Jackson says he doesn’t watch many movies. “My grandfather is the reason I make films. He introduced me to the magic of observation and that’s where the vast majority of my inspiration comes from. People watching, followed by embellishment,” says Jackson, whose feature debut Without is currently making the festival rounds. “The other bits come from reading the news.” Comprised of shots that make you feel as if you’re glimpsing the most private of moments, a fly on the wall for one young woman’s haunting meltdown, Without may suggest some of the […]
When asked who his professional role models are, L.A.-based d.p. Rob Hauer, who has lensed some of the best shorts of recent memory, cites some obviously inspirational folks, including Robert Richardson, Emmanuel Lubezki and Robert Elswit. “They show a wonderful range and their work elevates their stories, which I’d like to do as well. And none of them had overnight success — they had to work hard to get where they are, like all of us do.” But he cites other artistic influences too, harkening back to his early study as a still photographer at California State Polytechnic University, San […]
Anyone who reads literature in translation probably has some inkling of the effort it takes a specialist to mold foreign masterworks into readable prose that feels alive and inviting. Some translators have earned renown for their impeccable renditions of the classics — Lydia Davis comes to mind — but such formidably intelligent people are accustomed to working, for the most part, in complete obscurity, unknown except to the book publishers who commission their interpretive labors and those who bother to notice bylines. Until her death last year at age 87, Svetlana Geier was the most distinguished translator of Dostoyevsky in […]
The URL for Los Angeles-based filmmaker Sheldon Candis’s website is cinephileacademy.com, speaking to not only the USC grad’s artistic interests but also his fusion of film and life. As a child born in Baltimore, “I was one of those kids who loved movies,” he says, “and would watch them on my grandfather’s old VHS player.” Then, he’d spend time with one of his uncles, and those hours too, “even for a nine-year-old, felt like a movie.” Learning Uncle Vincent is the film arising from those childhood memories — spiked with a healthy amount of imagination. “‘It’s about a young child […]
When asked to cite their influences, many filmmakers reference icons. Brent Bonacorso avoids that tendency. True to his spectacularly distinctive style, Bonacorso suggests his sensibility is innate. “I’ve always been interested in telling visual stories,” says the Los Angeles-based filmmaker, whose surreal short film West of the Moon supports that claim. “As far back as I can remember, I’ve been creating narratives, whether they were drawings, photographs or films. Honestly, I think it’s just something I was born with.” Bonacorso has been directing commercials and other short projects for nearly a decade, but West of the Moon is unquestionably his […]
When Panos Cosmatos was growing up on Vancouver Island, his parents wouldn’t let him watch scary movies. He’d go to his local video store and, he says, “spend hours looking at the box covers of the horror and science fiction films, just imagining my own versions of them.” One of the first R-rated films he was able to see was Alien. “My parents were watching it in the living room,” he explains, “and I was supposed to be in bed. But I snuck into this other room where I could see the film reflected on a framed print that was […]
It’s hard to create something original about the remix. Okay, that would seem to go without saying, but I’m not referring to the subject of the remix — I’m talking about the discourse surrounding it. From Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix to Brett Gaylor’s feature doc, RIP: A Remix Manifesto, the creative, social and political issues surrounding the rise of remix culture have been debated with brio. Paradoxically, then, the familiarity we have with the issue of remixing is precisely what makes Kirby Ferguson’s four-part Web series, Everything is a Remix, so compelling. Rather than push a copy-left agenda or hype […]
By the time Andrew S Allen and Jason Sondhi posted their latest short, The Thomas Beale Cipher, on the Internet, they had it all figured out. “There’s a myth about online video that you can just put it up and the masses will discover it, that it’s a meritocracy,” Allen says. “But that doesn’t always happen. There are great films online that only have 200 views.” Allen wrote and directed the animated film, Sondhi produced, and they both knew to do things like post it on multiple platforms at once and to immediately mobilize a community of video bloggers to […]