6300 Results for “Open ”
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The Past in the Present: Garrett Bradley on Time, Her Documentary about Activism and the Carceral State
Filmmaker‘s Summer 2020 cover story, Ashley Clark’s interview with Time director Garrett Bradley is being published online today for the first time to mark the film’s New York premiere this coming Sunday (with virtual screenings continuing until September 25th) at the New York Film Festival. For over half a decade, New York-born artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley has been steadily building an impressively diverse yet tonally and stylistically harmonious CV. Bradley’s work has encompassed film, television and the gallery space; short, longform and multi-channel ventures; and ambitious explorations of the porous boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. It has often focused […]
by Ashley Clark on Jul 7, 2020 -
Different Ways of Learning
Across U.S. film schools this spring, a similar scene played out. The novel coronavirus went from faraway topic to urgent local threat. As rolling stay-at-home orders were issued, administrators shut down campuses, students scrambled for transport home and film departments quickly improvised online teaching methods that would allow instruction to continue even as students couldn’t attend classes and screenings in theaters or crew each other’s shoots in person. Three months later, we know much more about the coronavirus: its asymptomatic transmission, resistance to warm weather and ability to target multiple organ systems in the body. And with early, erratically applied […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 7, 2020 -
The Long Goodbye
As filmmakers who love the word “serendipity” and pursue situations that allow them the freedom to respond to it, Bill and Turner Ross finally found the window to make Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets—fittingly enough—thanks to a strike of serendipitous scheduling. A delay in the production of friend Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy, for which the Ross brothers had planned a making-of documentary (the excellent, as-of-now unreleasable Second Star to the Right and Straight on ’Til Morning), finally gave them the chance to make Bloody Nose—a film full of images that had long gestated in their individual, albeit synergistic, brains. Such serendipity permeated […]
by Daniel Christian on Jul 7, 2020 -
Let the Future Tell the Truth: Tesla Writer/Director Michael Almereyda and Kelly Reichardt in Conversation
In Michael Almereyda’s pre-Katrina New Orleans–shot Happy Here and Now, David Arquette’s termite control specialist is preparing to shoot a film about Nikola Tesla in his off-hours. In a delirious rant, Arquette’s character muses about the Serbian-American scientist’s quest to slow the speed of light—enough so that you could go out for a coffee and return in time to see a beam complete its journey from one end of your apartment to another. In the climax of Happy Here and Now, one of Tesla’s signature inventions, the Tesla coil, is responsible for Arquette’s film-within-a-film experiencing the worst kind of production […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 7, 2020 -
Civic Youth: Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss on Boys State
One week each summer, a thousand-plus bright and accomplished U.S. teenage boys gather at their respective state capitals. Randomly divided into two parties (the Nationalists and the Federalists), they establish party platforms and select party leaders. At the end of the week, they go head-to-head in a mock election. The program they’re participating in, Boys State, was created in 1935 by the American Legion as a way of counteracting a burgeoning socialist movement (the American Legion Auxiliary launched Girls State in 1937). In the years since its inception, this nationwide initiative has introduced the concept of U.S. democracy to countless […]
by Chris Boeckmann on Jul 7, 2020 -
The Beautiful Stubborn Loneliness of the Filmmaker-Shooter
Folks who go to artist residencies fall into one of three categories. There are the artists for whom the time and space is more an experiential tool (we’re looking at you, social practitioners), those who strike a healthy balance between socializing and accomplishing an elevated amount of creative work, and those who disappear into an antisocial work bunker, popping up only for communal feedings, knowing upon exiting into the real world they’ll be back in the trenches of freelance gigs, copyediting, teaching work and the reply-all emails that accompany them. I fall into the latter category. Not long ago, I […]
by Mitch McCabe on Jul 7, 2020 -
Shadowplay: The Artistic Benefits and Technical Challenges of Ozark‘s HDR Workflow
Ozark is a “dark” show in every meaning of the word. The story of a criminal Missouri clan laundering Mexican cartel money through their riverboat casino is literally, metaphorically and photographically bleak. “Ozark is about what happens in the shadows of our society, in the underbelly, and the fear and anxiety that permeates that environment,” said cinematographer Armando Salas, ASC. “Everyone can relate to that feeling on some level—the feeling in the pit of your stomach that comes with knowing you’re doing something wrong. We try to embed that feeling in the look of the show.” Sunlight rarely reaches the […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jul 7, 2020 -
Lights Bouncing Off the Ceiling
COVID has made it so that new films, for the time being, can only be released via streaming platforms, not in movie theaters. We all know this is not optimal, but it’s the way it has to be for now. For most film critics, seeing films before they open is the main part of the job. These days, trying to see new movies before they come out has gotten weird. Not only do I not want to write about films I can only see on my laptop, I don’t want to watch movies on my laptop at all. A TV […]
by A.S. Hamrah on Jul 7, 2020 -
Quantum Entanglement: Creator Alex Garland on the Battle Between Determinism and Free Will in His Hulu Series, Devs
“I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.” These words were spoken by 62-year-old Ingmar Bergman to drama students at Southern Methodist University in 1981, but they’ve been true for artists throughout the ages. And it’s this timeless creative method—throw and retrieve—that writer/director Alex Garland deployed for his FX Hulu science fiction series, Devs. Garland—who began his career as a novelist with the bestselling The Beach and more recently has made his mark as a director with Ex Machina and Annihilation—doesn’t underestimate […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jul 7, 2020 -
Survival in Crisis
The challenges faced by a global film industry attempting to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic are often described, like so many things in this new reality, as “unprecedented.” Filmmakers must find approaches to working under conditions that can feel insurmountable—restricted movement, the digitization of film festivals and filmmaking communities and stunted distribution channels, among others. Strategies for staying productive, connected and solvent in a time of isolation and uncertainty are newly forming. But for a Chinese independent filmmaker like Zeng Jinyan, who works outside state systems of censorship and distribution, filmmaking under adverse circumstances is nothing new. The producer of […]
by Maya E. Rudolph on Jul 7, 2020
