6300 Results for “Open ”
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“It Ended Up Being Therapeutic for Everyone”: Eric Hynes, Jeff Reichert and Damon Smith on the Now-Streaming Room H.264: Quarantine
Do any of us remember a time when the film industry was not in crisis? At the time of Wim Wenders’s 1982 documentary, Room 666, the on-screen directors who considered his prompt (“Is cinema becoming a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?”) grappled with the kinds of issues (film vs. TV, the rise of blockbusters, the struggles of art cinema) that would go on to preoccupy filmmakers and film critics for many years — up to and through the production of Jeff Reichert, Damon Smith and Eric Hynes’s 2018 Brooklyn-set reply to Wenders, Room […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 30, 2020 -
“Take Control Over the Color and Build That Into the Sets”: DP Frederick Elmes on Hunters
Early on in his career cinematographer Frederick Elmes worked as a camera operator for John Cassavetes and was a director of photography on David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead, laying the groundwork for a career that would absorb and expand upon both those influences. Like Cassavetes, Elmes is a filmmaker who knows how to frame and showcase great performances; his multiple collaborations with Ang Lee, Jim Jarmusch and Tim Hunter have yielded career best work from Kevin Kline, Bill Murray, Joan Allen, Matt Dillon and many others. Yet like Lynch, Elmes is also supremely attuned to the visual properties of cinema […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 30, 2020 -
Reflections from Quarantine: Six Cinematographers on Their Lives During Lockdown
Over the last several weeks, since the middle of March, Daniel Eagan reached out to a number of cinematographers all over the world to check in on their personal responses to the novel coronavirus pandemic and the resulting quarantine. From Los Angeles to Hong Kong, Copenhagen to a Poland lakeside, they respond with reactions encompassing their own personal coping strategies, their current professional activities (or lack of them) and the thoughts the lockdown has stimulated about not only their profession but filmmaking in general. Find the links below, and stay tuned for future roundups of more cinematographers as well as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 29, 2020 -
“There is a Lot of Necessary Nurturing to Be Found in the ‘Not Doing'”: DP Natasha Braier On Productivity Culture During Lockdown
Natasha Braier has worked on a wide variety of films, from Claudia Llosa’s intense 2009 drama The Milk of Sorrow / La Teta Asustada to Nicolas Winding Refn’s ice-cold 2016 feature The Neon Demon. In 2018 she shot Gloria Bell, Sebastián Lelio’s English-language remake of his earlier movie Gloria. Last year she was director of cinematography on Alma Har’el’s feature debut Honey Boy. Braier’s work is distinguished not only by her vivid imagery but also by her acute psychological insight into characters and narrative. Braier was in preproduction on Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to Booksmart, when the […]
by Daniel Eagan on Apr 29, 2020 -
“Using a Camera to Talk About Emotions That are Too Complex to Put into Words”: DP Jasper Spanning on Facing Sorrow During Lockdown
Cinematographer Jasper Spanning’s debut feature, Den skyldige / The Guilty, won several awards during its international run. Directed and co-written by Gustav Möller, the movie followed one character, primarily on a single set, as he deals with a mounting crisis. Spanning spoke about it in a Filmmaker interview with Chris Doyle. He followed it with the May el-Toukhy’s controversial drama Queen of Hearts, about a charged relationship between a wife and her stepson. It was a World Cinema audience award-winner at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, with Director of Programming Kim Yutani called it the most provocative film she had […]
by Daniel Eagan on Apr 29, 2020 -
Visions du Réel 2020 (1): Intimate Distances, On a Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here, An Ordinary Country
Visions du Réel’s pivot to online-only festival has given me an unexpected new pool of films to sift through. Nearly everything that was supposed to be on the ground at a fest I’d normally never have the resources to attend is accessible online, and the streaming technology is holding up excellently. (AirDropping from laptop to TV, if you have that option, eliminates the watermark, so it’s about as good as online streaming gets.) On the public-facing side (I have no idea how that’s going), the festival went “live” on Saturday the 25th and wraps up on May 2nd. For those […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2020 -
“A Time-Traveling Conquistador Confronting Modern Mexicans”: Rodrigo Reyes on His Tribeca and Hot Docs Selected 499
499, the fourth feature film from “25 New Face” alum Rodrigo Reyes, is an epic, enchanting road movie that travels seamlessly through time (a 500-year-old journey reenacted in the present day) and space (across Mexico, from coastal Veracruz to the nation’s capital — or what used to be called Tenochtitlán back when the Aztecs claimed it as their own). Cemented by Eduardo San Juan Breña’s gripping performance as a Spanish conquistador who finds himself washed up into the future and onto modern day Mexico’s shores, the film recreates the path taken by Hernán Cortez in his 1621 quest to conquer the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 25, 2020 -
“Our Criminal Justice System is Broken, and the Sooner Folks See that the Sooner We Can Begin to Fix It”: Roger Ross Williams on the Netflix docuseries The Innocence Files
Executive produced and directed by Liz Garbus, Alex Gibney and Roger Ross Williams, with episodes also helmed by Jed Rothstein, Andy Grieve and Sarah Dowland, The Innocence Files is a riveting, nine-part docuseries that dives deep into eight wrongful convictions that The Innocence Project and its affiliated Innocence Network fought tooth and nail to overturn. The Netflix series gets off to a binge-worthy start with its first three installments — “The Evidence: Indeed and Without Doubt,” “The Evidence: The Truth Will Defend Me,” and “The Evidence: The Duty to Correct” — all directed by Academy Award-winner Roger Ross Williams. (And if your time […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 24, 2020 -
The Hardest Working Cat in Show Biz
My favorite cat in the cinema is whichever cat I’m currently watching, but my official favorite cat in the cinema is the orange tabby who lives in the sheriff’s office in Jacques Tourneur’s 1955 Western Stranger on Horseback. Part of the cat’s appeal is that the sheriff is played by tough-guy character actor Emile Meyer, and that the filmmakers opt for contrapuntal characterization by having Meyer cuddle the mellow cat in nearly all of his scenes. But the punctum is a shot from inside the office at nighttime, in which the villain’s henchmen force the front door and enter. The […]
by Dan Sallitt on Apr 23, 2020 -
Quarantine Reading: John Gregory Dunne’s The Studio
As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we’ve reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. Today: Eric Marsh on John Gregory Dunne’s all-access portrait of 20th Century Fox in 1967, The Studio. In 1967, […]
by Eric Marsh on Apr 22, 2020
