6294 Results for “Open ”
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Behind Closed Doors: Production Designer Kevin Thompson on Maestro
In making Maestro, his magisterial portrait of Leonard Bernstein, Bradley Cooper set out to explore the life of the legendary American conductor and composer through the lens of his complicated relationship with wife Felicia Montealegre, which lasted from the 1940s until her death in 1978. Depicting their love story across four decades, two engagements and three children, Cooper—who directed, co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the biopic—often approached Maestro “as if he was conducting a musical symphony,” according to production designer Kevin Thompson. Envisioning its story in movements, Cooper opted for period shifts in color and black-and-white (both in a 1.33 […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 15, 2023 -
Tone and Rhythm: Editor Hilda Rasula on American Fiction
Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, a satire of the publishing world and modern race relations, stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an English professor and novelist frustrated by what he sees as the literary establishment’s exploitation of Black stereotypes for profit. To prove a point, Monk adopts a pseudonym, writes a book steeped in tired and offensive tropes and jokingly sends it off to publishers. Much to his chagrin, the book becomes a massive hit. But before Monk can unmask himself, a family tragedy leads him home, where the financial needs of his ailing mother (Leslie Uggams) compel him to […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 15, 2023 -
Progress in Small Steps: Camera and Lighting Technology Trends in 2023
Commercial theatrical projection for most folks is an afterthought. A DCP gets loaded into a playout server, sound levels checked, curtains adjusted, and everything is good to go. This testifies to the efficacy of the two-decade old DCP (Digital Cinema Package) container format. However, DCP adoption was not always smooth sailing. In 2009, a necessary DCP revamp complicated the industry’s transition away from 35mm. The original “Interop” specification, which had only been provisional, was superseded by a set of standardized specifications from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). Interop supported only one frame rate, 24 fps, but […]
by David Leitner on Dec 15, 2023 -
The Art of Angling: The Making of Rose Troche’s Classic Microbudget Lesbian Love Story, Go Fish
1994’s Go Fish, Rose Troche’s smart, punked-out work of guerilla filmmaking, combined a playful take on lesbian dating with discursive dialogues around gender politics and the cultural history of gay female representation. Part of the late ’80s and early ’90s low-budget boom of what critic B. Ruby Rich dubbed New Queer Cinema—films such as Poison, Swoon, The Hours and Times, Born in Flames and The Watermelon Woman—the Chicago-set Go Fish finds hip college student Max (Guinevere Turner, also the film’s screenwriter and producer) in a romantic rut and set up by friends with a hippie-ish older lesbian, Ely (V.S. Brodie). […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 15, 2023 -
The Future is Unwritten: Mark Asch on 2023 in Film
For what, and for whom, do workers work? One way to conceptualize the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes is as a fight for the right to refuse the demands of shareholder capitalists maximizing return on investment and tech-world futurists devising new forms of extraction, notably via a disrupted exhibition environment that siphons away profits once reserved for residuals and AI that treats words and likenesses as royalty-free intellectual property. As I embark on this year-in-review exercise, I am also conscious of the past few months of policed speech—on campuses, within political parties, at newspapers and in the film world. At […]
by Mark Asch on Dec 15, 2023 -
Hits & Misses: How Six Sundance 2023 Titles Performed in Distribution
After nearly flatlining during the pandemic years, American independent film saw some signs of life in 2023. While optimists might call it a year of transition as the industry looks for new audiences and a new equilibrium, cynics see an unsustainable and contracting arthouse marketplace, with most producers and distributors increasingly unable to recoup. But, if you look at the fates of last year’s Sundance titles, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. For all the doom and gloom about the acquisitions market (“No one is buying films!”), 10 out of 12 films in this year’s Dramatic Competition […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Dec 15, 2023 -
Committing to the Vision
“What would you need from this event?” That was among the first questions Paul Harrill and I asked when we were invited to meet with Visit Knoxville in December 2022 to discuss the possibility of launching a new film festival. Keith McDaniel, founder and longtime organizer of the Knoxville Film Festival, had announced that he was stepping away from the fest after leading it for nearly two decades, bringing it to an end. If all of us on the Zoom meeting agreed this was a project worth taking on, then we needed to plant our flag by issuing a press […]
by Darren Hughes on Dec 15, 2023 -
At Home With His Memories
In The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes about a simple psychological test used on children, “the house test.” He quotes the critic Anne Balif: “Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house, which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations.” If he is sad, however, writes Bachelard, “The house bears traces of his distress.” For Bachelard, the home, and particularly the childhood home, is a place where “a great many […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 15, 2023 -
“Let’s Make It Feel Like You’re Watching TV During Y2K”: Directors Brian Becker and Marley McDonald on Time Bomb Y2K
Where were you on December 31, 1999? Despite years of hearing Prince’s pleas to party, many Americans spent the evening at home, bewitched by a bizarre mix of sentimental reverie and fear. The end of the century, it turned out, was a time for reflection and mild panic. Media coverage warned that computers might register the year 2000 as the year 1900. Chaos could ensue, and you did not want to be caught in the club when the “millennium bug” caused the lights to go out and nuclear warheads to whirl mid-air. As Lisa de Moraes wrote in the Washington […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 15, 2023 -
In an Instance
During the pandemic, while I was stuck at home in Maryland, a friend from California suggested that we catch up in virtual reality. This had been their favorite pandemic activity. We set a time and decided to meet at a specific room in VRChat. When the time came, we were both in our headsets, logged into the same space. The virtual room was crowded, and we couldn’t find each other. I called my friend, and we tried to coordinate our locations over the phone. We went to the same corner of the same room but still couldn’t see each other. […]
by Deniz Tortum on Dec 15, 2023
