6300 Results for “Open ”
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THE GLOBAL HIGH-CONCEPT GROUP FILM
New technology is increasingly opening up filmmaking options to people all around the world, and that’s no more evident than in the upcoming The Owner. The movie is first project of CollabFeature, which is described on its website as “a group of independent filmmakers from all over the world who have come together to create multi-director feature films. Each filmmaker writes and directs a segment of the bigger story in his or her own country. By pooling our talents and resources, we are creating something bigger than the sum of its parts — a kind of film that has never been […]
by Nick Dawson on May 14, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #113
Second #5311, 88:31 1. This frame is from around twelve seconds into a thirteen-second shot, just before the screen goes black. Jeffrey sobs. The unflinching, unmoving camera eye does not look away. There is no soundtrack. There is nothing ironic or postmodern about this moment. 2. Paul Virilio, from his book Open Sky: ‘If anyone thinks I paint too fast, they are watching me too fast,’ Van Gogh wrote. Already, the classic photograph is no more than a freeze frame. With the decline in volumes and in the expanse of landscapes, reality becomes sequential and cinematic unfolding finally gets the […]
by Nicholas Rombes on May 14, 2012 -
Photos and Notes from the Maryland Film Festival
The Maryland Film Festival, which wrapped its 2012 edition on Sunday, is one of the East Coast’s most intimate and engaging film events. With 40 features, over 70 shorts and an amazingly healthy contingent of loyal filmmakers annually making the trip to Baltimore, Maryland functions as both a discovery festival and friendly pit stop for directors on the independent circuit. John Waters hosts a movie — this year Barbara Loden’s seminal and still influential Wanda — and takes the audience out partying afterwards; the Opening Night consists of shorts, not some star-bloated, sub-standard mini-major feature; and, for the second year […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 11, 2012 -
Five Questions with Think of Me Director Bryan Wizemann
Bryan Wizemann’s recommended Think of Me, which boasts an amazing performance by Lauren Ambrose, is tomorrow night’s opening feature for the Rooftop Films 2012 season. The following interview was originally published on the eve of its Toronto Film Festival premiere. One of the more sobering and even painful short films of recent years is Bryan Wizemann’s Film Makes Us Happy. In the 12-minute documentary, Wizemann argues with his wife about his obsession with filmmaking, with her challenging him to give up on his dreams in order to focus on his family — including his new baby. Wizemann’s synopsis simply states, […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 11, 2012 -
Marks Elijah Rosenberg Talks Rooftop Films
As a writer and filmmaker just beginning to branch out into indie festival programming, I’ve been looking for an excuse to chat with Mark Elijah Rosenberg for quite some time. The man behind the granddaddy of open-air cinema (hard to believe Rooftop Films is now in its 16th year!) has seen his DIY endeavor expand from avant-garde shorts shown on a roof above his humble apartment to Academy Awards-destined features screened in diverse outdoor venues throughout NYC’s boroughs (and beyond). But what’s most impressive to me is that he’s managed to accomplish all this while staying firmly grounded in his […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 10, 2012 -
Grant Gee, Patience (After Sebald)
One of the great European literary figures of the past half century was the German writer W.G. “Max” Sebald (1944-2001), a late bloomer who fused essay, history, memoir, and meditative fiction into an unclassifiable weld of eloquently bewitching prose in four major works (Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz), all written over the last decade of his too-abbreviated life. Sebald’s solitary narrators, given lightly autobiographical shadings, wander landscapes as far-flung as the Suffolk coast or the Slovakian countryside like melancholic revenants dwelling on the fate of individuals lost to war or time, the operation of memory, and other […]
by Damon Smith on May 9, 2012 -
Alex Holdridge: “I’ll Never Go to Los Angeles Again”
I fell in love with Alex Holdridge’s gorgeous, smart black-and-white LA-set romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss when I saw it on the film festival circuit in 2007, and later interviewed Holdridge for Filmmaker when Kiss was released theatrically in 2008. In the intervening years, Holdridge and I were in occasional contact, and through Facebook I was aware that he had left L.A. and decamped to Berlin. But little more than that. When I read earlier this spring that he was in postproduction on his follow-up feature, Meet Me in Montenegro – a film co-written by and co-starring Holdridge […]
by Nick Dawson on May 7, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #111
Second 5217, 86:57 I wondered when, or if, this would happen: a Blue Velvet frame that depicts nothing. This comes from the time-space between the beating that leaves Jeffrey unconscious and waking up the next morning in the dirt. For around six seconds between these scenes, the screen is filled with a close-up of a candle flame holding its own against a roar of wind, only to be extinguished, followed by a black screen, from which this frame is taken. Jeffrey’s mind going black. Blank. The black screen, haunted with psychopaths and monsters. Of all of Blue Velvet’s uncharted associations, […]
by Nicholas Rombes on May 7, 2012 -
SAM GREEN’S LOVE SONG AT SFIFF
One of the highlights of the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival, which boasted a great lineup of films and filmmakers, was the new “live documentary” by Sam Green, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, featuring Green and Yo La Tengo live on stage. The notion of the live documentary is exciting as a new film movement, a far more powerful one than the overrated reemergence of 3-D. As part of their Buckminster Fuller exhibit, SFMOMA commissioned Green to create a live documentary on Fuller in the spirit of the filmmaker’s previous work Utopia in Four Movements. Fuller is […]
by Mike Plante on May 7, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #110
Second #5170, 86:12 In the spirit of the humor of the scene from which this frame is taken (and because it’s Friday) this is a post of a different stripe. Part of what constitutes Blue Velvet’s weird chemistry is its humor, the humor that lies at the end of despair and that arises out of a confrontation with the absurdity of evil. Frank is terrifying in this scene—having just wiped some lipstick from Jeffrey’s face with that talismanic swatch of blue velvet—but also oddly funny. He is a monster, but also pathetic, and the aura of theatrical performance he has […]
by Nicholas Rombes on May 4, 2012
