6300 Results for “Open ”
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Jason Park
A decade ago, Jason Park had taken a year off from Andrews University, the Michigan Christian college he was attending as an undergraduate, to work as a “missionary/teacher” on the island of Palau. As a freshman he studied theology, but cinema was always a draw. Growing up, his mother, a first-generation Korean American, would often take Park to the theater. But Andrews didn’t have a film department, and, regardless, Park never thought filmmaking could be an actual profession. But, during that missionary year, he saw David Fincher’s The Social Network, “projected off a DVD on a crappy projector. To this […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Bong Joon-ho Interviews Edgar Wright about Wright’s Exhilarating, ’60s-Set Psychological Thriller, Last Night in Soho
“A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever,” J. G. Ballard said in an interview contained within the 1983 reissue of his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. In Ballard’s view, the decade’s political and cultural jolts, coupled with the rise of mass media, produced what he called in another interview “a peculiar psychological climate…” a “landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic novel; we were living more and more inside a strange, enormous work of fiction.” Eloise, the 18-year-old heroine of […]
by Scott Macaulay 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 -
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 -
Nate Dorr & Nathan Kensinger
As climate change’s effects grow in potency, documentaries about their impending wrath multiply. And while most of these nonfiction works are well-meaning but artistically lacking issue docs, a few aim to educate and engage the viewer. The short films of Nate Dorr and Nathan Kensinger fit that bill, offering documentaries that put a piece of land’s past in conversation with its present, while knowing that its future can’t be guaranteed. Sharing a passion for photographing hidden spaces in New York City, the two filmmakers randomly met over 15 years ago in the Freedom Tunnel, a dilapidated enclave located underneath Riverside […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Andrew Norman Wilson
One of experimental cinema’s foremost wordsmiths, Andrew Norman Wilson has brought a unique sense of narrative to the world of video art, new media and installation. For more than a decade, the California-born artist has continually foregrounded storytelling in ways that suggest a future beyond the gallery. With In the Air Tonight, a 2021 Sundance shorts selection that reimagines an apocryphal origin story behind Phil Collins’s 1980s synth-pop hit, and his forthcoming first feature, Impersonator, about a Hollywood street performer who drifts into the fantasy life of their invented persona, Wilson seems set to enter a new stage in his career. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Out in the World: The Vital Role of the Social Impact Producer
Often I read the news and feel jaded about what I find there, desensitized to very real issues. Then, as a viewer, I’ll watch a film, or see a moving play or artwork, and feel the urge to do something—to learn more, to do my part. As a filmmaker, have you ever developed the concept for a film, or been in the middle of production, and thought more specifically about the change your film could spark in the world? Have you ever watched and thought to yourself, “What can I do?” Answering these questions with concrete initiatives that go beyond […]
by Cecilia R. Mejia on Oct 11, 2021 -
The COVID Challenge: Arthouses Adjust to a Reconfigured Landscape
In the Heights, Black Widow, Respect and Candyman—not typical indie-film fare, but because of the pressures of the ongoing pandemic on theatrical moviegoing, these are just some of the films arthouses have booked over the past several months. Granted, the supply of new available films was massively down, and theaters have been desperate to get audiences back into seats, but COVID-related shifts in arthouse exhibition have been significant, myriad and potentially long-lasting. And none of it is good for indie filmmakers. For example, here’s something you probably don’t want to hear from your neighborhood indie venue: “We’re seriously considering playing […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Oct 11, 2021 -
Breaking Bodies: Julia Ducournau on Titane
Following her breakout film, the high school cannibal romp Raw (2016), filmmaker Julia Ducournau doubles down on her predilections for freely reconstructed human flesh. The Palme d’Or–winning Titane strays even further from traditional narrative logic, emerging as a baroque investigation of the power of bodies to morph in response to the desires and violence of both people and machines. Taking its title from the metal plate installed in a young girl’s head after her father (Bertrand Bonello, in a fun bit of casting) crashes their car amid her aggressive fury, it is, yes, the movie where a woman fucks a […]
by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Oct 11, 2021
