6300 Results for “Open ”
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The Next World
In his breakout 1994 feature Cold Water, Olivier Assayas turned his eye on the adolescent scene in a provincial town not far from Paris in the early ’70s, focusing on a young man named Gilles and his troubled girlfriend, Christine. That film, notable for containing some of the director’s most self-consciously bravura camerawork and a more or less complete absence of the political machinations that defined the era, is a cousin of sorts to the 58-year-old Assayas’ newest work, Something in the Air. Returning to similar environs during the same period, he once again focuses on a young pair named […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 23, 2013 -
Bring on the Major Leagues
Tim League is not as much of an oddball as Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and its distribution arm, Drafthouse Films, might suggest. For all the cultish, film-geek quirkiness of those companies, the man behind them seems to know exactly what he’s doing. Since 1997, League, who studied engineering and art history at Rice University, has been cultivating a highly profitable brand that’s now proving scalable far beyond the confines of his hometown of Austin, Texas. Alamo is in the middle of a massive expansion of both company-owned and franchise locations, with openings set for New York City (including a seven-screen complex […]
by John Daniel Davidson on Apr 23, 2013 -
SXSW 2013
Mars is a lonely, spiritually bereft place in Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction classic The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Colonists live inside, away from the planet’s harsh elements and unexpected predators, whiling away the hours by playing a hallucinatory role-playing game called Perky Pat. Using little figurines — avatars, really — and a psychoactive drug, they transport themselves into a consumer fantasy world back on Earth. I thought of Dick’s book as I walked past an exhibit at SXSW Interactive this year. A company was demonstrating its 3D-printing prowess by making little plastic figures based on your Facebook photo — […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2013 -
Handed Down: On Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
“A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician,” the 19th-century stage conjurer Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin once said. But if that’s true, then what about all those aspects of acting — such as figuring out character, backstory and motivation? Those are questions all professional magicians have to grapple with at some point early in their careers. Or, to put it another way: Where does a magician’s magic come from? A kid doing a magic trick can answer that question easily: it comes from a magic kit their father bought them. The amateur doesn’t need really need to answer […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2013 -
Look Your Customers in the Eye
Independent filmmaker Brian Paul is a man who lives his films. In that spirit, he has taken DIY film distribution to a whole new level. Street level, that is. For the past two years, Paul has made a comfortable living by selling his hybrid film Cure for the Crash…The Art of Train Hoppin’ directly from art market street stalls in New Orleans. His unique distribution strategy has proved remarkably successful. Paul claims to have sold thousands of DVDs of Cure for the Crash by personally engaging more than 100,000 people face-to-face. “When I was a teenager in West Philly,” Paul […]
by Pauldevlin on Apr 23, 2013 -
Should Documentary Filmmakers Learn to Code?
A decade ago, the question would have seemed outlandish, but today, interactive documentaries have established themselves as a small, but growing, genre. Born out of experimentation, interactive docs are at once hard to define and easy to recognize. Some look like films and some don’t, but all draw on the language of cinematic storytelling, even though they’re native to tablets, mobile phones and the Web. Inspired by the impact of emerging technologies on nonfiction storytelling, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department launched the Open Documentary Lab last March. As our team at the MIT OpenDocLab mapped the field and connected with […]
by Katie Edgerton on Apr 23, 2013 -
Frame of Reference
What does it mean, in 2013, to photograph — to reproduce — a painting? Does it, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” drain the painting of an essential “aura,” even as it makes the image itself accessible to a much larger audience? Does it, as John Berger elaborated in his 1972 book and television program, Ways of Seeing, alter the painting’s meaning, rendering the original a symbol of capitalist exchange? Or, in today’s image-sharing world of Tumblr, is reproduction nothing more than whimsical statement of affinity, of a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2013 -
Secrets of the Glam Squad: Inside the World of Film Hair and Makeup Departments
You’re the producer of a low-budget movie, and, as usual, there isn’t enough money. Each department is straining against their budgets, and you don’t want the production value of the film to falter. So you are forced to prioritize. More lights? Well, that’s hard to argue with — the movie has to look good. Another van? No way around that; you have to get people to the next location in time. But makeup and hair needs a space heater? Um … can’t they just put on sweaters? “If the electric department says they need two hours, no one questions it,” […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Apr 23, 2013 -
Caught On Film
In Medan, Indonesia, when the government was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar Congo was one of many small-time gangsters who hawked movie tickets and plotted petty crimes in front of cinemas showing American movies. He and his buddies, who translate “gangster” as meaning “free men,” were enlisted as death squads after Communists cut off imports of U. S. films, such as their beloved Elvis Presley musicals. More than a million intellectuals, ethnic Chinese and alleged Communists and leftists were murdered. The “movie theater gangsters” were always eager to dance across the road to garrote an alleged Communist or […]
by Ray Pride on Apr 23, 2013 -
Pod Wants to Know You
Cinematic innovation is often driven by creative needs. The desire to help viewers connect to stories has resulted in the development of new camera systems, visual effects processes and advancements in audio capture and presentation. Stanley Kubrick’s determination to shoot by candlelight, in order to be authentic to the 18th-century setting of Barry Lyndon, birthed the Zeiss high-speed prime lens. A frustration with the state of theatrical sound in the early 1980s inspired George Lucas to develop THX to ensure pristine audio playback in theaters. When James Cameron wanted a realistic look for Pandora in Avatar, he innovated “performance capture” […]
by Lance Weiler on Apr 23, 2013
