Documentary innovator Brett Morgen once again pushes the boundaries of creative non-fiction filmmaking with his latest doc, Moonage Daydream. Morgen was given access by the artist’s estate to over five million works in the archive — music, film clips, artwork, musings, interviews, photographs and recordings, some of which have never before been seen or heard. The resulting two hour and 20 minute-long film is a kinetic, sometimes euphoric tribute to Bowie and his multitude of stage personalities, career offshoots, and personal reflections. As with his other archive-based work (Jane, Cobain: Montage of Heck), Morgen’s approach is unconventional. Utilizing some of the alternative forms […]
Two European families—one Danish, one Dutch—meet during a picturesque Italian vacation in Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil. Their bond is immediate, and soon enough the Dutch couple enthusiastically invite the Danes to visit them in Holland. The gesture is friendly enough, but the sincerity of the statement isn’t necessarily taken at face value. Shortly after the Danes—Bjørn (Morten Burian), Louisa (Sidsel Siem Koch) and their daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg)—return to their well-kept abode, they receive a postcard in the mail. As it turns out, the Dutch family was completely serious about their offer, inviting them to visit their home in […]
I read Confess, Fletch for the first time in high school and, ever since, it’s remained a personal favorite. That often surprises people when I tell them that, not least because the name “Fletch” is less associated with Gregory Mcdonald’s genuinely funny novels than Chevy Chase’s considerably goofier incarnation of the journalist-sleuth in 1985’s Fletch and 1988’s Fletch Lives. The original Fletch adaptation essentially retains the structure and basics of Mcdonald’s original but changes the tone to better suit Chase. For better and worse, Mcdonald’s books string together often hilarious dialogue exchanges with aspirationally Hemingway-esque connective prose; they work better when the emphasis is on […]
One argument for the eternally vexed question “Why film festivals?” might be “To watch Netflix movies in a theater.” The streamer does, of course, theatrically release some of its prestige titles but, because of its refusal to accommodate 90-day windows, has effectively barred itself from wide releases. Since I live in New York City, I can go see all of Netflix’s big titles when they come out with ease thanks to their acquisition of the Paris Theater, which isn’t all bad: while some of the programming is grimly reserved for week-long runs of titles like Red Notice, there’s room for pleasant […]
In Spring of 1994, as Filmmaker began its third year of publication, we received a call: would we be interested in interviewing Jean-Luc Godard? Yes, we excitedly said, and when Hal Hartley agreed to be the interviewer, and the interview was a go, we made the film our cover. (In Filmmaker’s history, it’s sandwiched between Rose Troche’s Go Fish and Rick Linklater’s Before Sunrise.) Rereading the interview today, I’m struck — although I shouldn’t be! — by the prescience of Godard’s musings on the future histories of cinema, the ways that it will be mediated by technology and its changing […]
Daniel Goldhaber’s second feature, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, takes its title and broader inspiration from Andreas Malm’s non-fiction manifesto, published by Verso. Malm’s book is heavy on the language of comrades and cadres, an exhortation to ecoterrorism to the already sympathetically inclined—and, as a friend pointed out, it’d be more accurately titled Why to Blow Up a Pipeline, as instructions aren’t provided. While Goldhaber’s version of How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t a manual as such, its commitment to depicting the means by which one might achieve its title goes much further than most. Eight protagonists from all over the country […]
Filmmaker is proud to announce that we have moved our quarterly digital edition and archive going back to 2005 to Exact Editions, a London-based company that specializes in digitizing content, selling subscriptions and providing streaming solutions across web, iOS and Android platforms. Our digital edition, which replicates our print edition, is now available to read via Exact Editions across browsers and mobile devices, the latter through a browser or the company’s Exactly app, found in the App and Google Play stores. As a long-time reader of other publications using Exact Editions, I’ve admired the company’s elegant, easy-to-use platform. Issues download quickly, can […]
As someone who never understood (okay, downright loathed) the conformist culture of so-called Greek-letter organizations, I didn’t bother to catch Byron Hurt’s (Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Soul Food Junkies) latest doc Hazing when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival back in the spring. But fortunately, the film—which takes a deep historical, as well as personal, dive into what Wikipedia defines as “any activity expected of someone in joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them regardless of a person’s willingness to participate”—will now be launching the new season of PBS’s Independent Lens, which […]
I got out of a jam-packed P&I screening of Jafar Panahi’s No Bears literally two minutes after the Venice Film Festival announced a special jury prize for the film. It’s probably not overly cynical to attribute at least part of both my screening’s high attendance and the festival’s award to the sad news that the director is back in jail—his status as a high-profile Iranian dissident is inextricable from his work since 2011 when, under house arrest and banned from making movies, he started making features with him front and center as the lead protagonist. That on-screen character is by now […]
It seemed fitting to enter Toronto by a new route for my first in-person TIFF in three years. Rather than going straight from the airport to the downtown core where the festival unfolds, I took a streetcar further afield to one end of the line, Bathurst Station. The Ed and Anne Mirvish Parkette is just outside, with a plaque dating itself to 2008 that gives a mini-bio of the couple (“Humanitarians, Retail Innovators, Arts Advocates”). A few meters over, a conspicuously newer plaque memorializes Beverly Mascoll as “a community advocate and the founder of the Mascoll Beauty Supply Ltd., a […]