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“There’s So Much Darkness, So Much Room to Dream”: David Lynch on Lost Highway
The following interview with David Lynch appeared in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1997 issue, and is being reposted online today as a newly restored Lost Highway opens at New York’s IFC Center before the release of a 4K UHD edition from Criterion in October. An audacious return to feature filmmaking after his underrated Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway is pure Lynch. Alternately seductive, mysterious, and terrifying, the film’s narrative unfolds with the chaos of a waking nightmare. Bill Pullman plays an avant-jazz musician whose fear of intimacy with his wife, Patricia Arquette, propels him into a series of schizophrenic states. Or […]
by Stuart Swezey on Jul 22, 2021 -
“If Something Gives Me the Chills, or If I Ever Think, ‘Is This Too Much?’, Then I Know I Have to Use It”: Michelle Handelman on the 25th Anniversary Rerelease of BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes And Sadomasochism
Filmmaker/video artist/photographer/performance artist/writer/professor Michelle Handelman is a 2011 Guggenheim fellow and 2019 Creative Capital awardee whose work is featured in collections from Napa, California to Paris to Moscow. But back in the early 90s Handelman was simply an explorer with a video camera, diving headlong into a San Francisco Leatherdyke scene that would pave the way for today’s gender nonconformity movement as we know it. Her resulting film, 1995’s BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes And Sadomasochism – just rereleased last month with bonus extras by Kino Lorber – is an artistic amalgam both of its time and surprisingly timely. Scenes from leather […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 21, 2021 -
Jellyfish Flares, Malick Homages and “Igor, the Possession Lens”: DP Caleb Heymann on the Fear Street trilogy
“A Film Trilogy Event.” That’s how Netflix heralded the arrival earlier this month of Fear Street, a trio of interconnected horror movies based on R.L. Stine’s popular book series that debuted on the streamer in one-week intervals. That wasn’t exactly the plan when cinematographer Caleb Heymann stepped onto the Georgia set in March of 2019 for the first of 106 days of shooting. As production began, Fear Street was a 20th Century Fox endeavor with a theatrical release planned. However, Heymann says he wouldn’t have altered the films’ style regardless of the distribution method. “I don’t think [the viewing platform] […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jul 20, 2021 -
Parody Pilgrimmage: Five Notes on Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity Hallway
1. After 15 months in pandemic NYC, with no trip out of town longer than six hours during that time, it was imperative to leave and go elsewhere—anywhere—as soon as possible. The easiest way to do this was to pay a visit to James Hansen, a friend who teaches experimental film at Alfred University, logically located in the previously-unknown-to-me town of Alfred, NY. Getting to Alfred, however, is not super simple, so I needed a ride to get from the halfway point of Binghamton to my final destination. Because I try to maximize the value of every visit I take, it […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 19, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 5: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Information, context and mystery have been on my mind quite a bit since seeing the two new films that Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought to this year’s Cannes: his feature-length, Tilda Swinton-starring, Colombia-set Memoria, and the 13-minute “Night Colonies,” the segment that concludes The Year of the Everlasting Storm omnibus project, which collects seven short films about creativity in the time of COVID-19 from global arthouse heavyweights such as Jafar Panahi, Dominga Sotomayor and David Lowery. This is partly because Weerasethakul’s new films, like the rest of his cinema, negotiate the divide between our sensory and cognitive functions better than […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 18, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 4: The Tsugua Diaries, Titane
Films in this year’s Cannes (especially the better ones) have been prone to metafiction—demonstrating and examining the process of making movies, creating images, writing and rehearsing scenes, or editing sound, putting the creative process on full display. It’s hardly a new trend in art cinema—make what you know, love and experience, and your livelihood is bound to bleed in some way or another—but self-reflexity is clearly in style, and Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro’s structural, faux making-of puzzle film The Tsugua Diaries may be the most exemplary case. True to its title, the diaristic Tsugua fictitiously dramatizes its own production, which disintegrates […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 16, 2021 -
“My Ideal is for the Music to Seem Accidental, Like It Just Happened to Be There and Be Perfect”: T. Griffin on Scoring Jill Magid’s The Proposal
With over 50 credits to his name, including Life Animated, A Walk into the Sea and the Emmy-nominated Boy’s State, composer T. Griffin brings sure melodies, inventive arrangements and a clever blending (and treatment of) of acoustic instruments with electronics to his film scoring work. Both an omnivorous listener and a performing musician — he’s a former member of Vic Chestnutt’s band and has performed for live film/media events by artists such as Sam Green — Griffin is invigoratingly thoughtful about the role of music in film, and his scores benefit from that inquisitive process. They buzz with musical ideas while […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 14, 2021 -
“I Could Only Shoot When I Had Increments of $200 to Spend”: Lizzie Borden on Working Girls, Harvey Weinstein and Changing Perceptions of Sex Work
Highly respected but rarely screened, Working Girls, Lizzie Borden’s 1986 feature about a group of women working an extended shift in a Manhattan brothel, finally makes its way to home video this week thanks to the Criterion Collection. Presented in a new 4K digital restoration, the film is long overdue for reappraisal, and not merely due to the struggles currently faced by sex workers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Borden’s previous feature, Born in Flames, was defiantly scrappy and overtly political. Working Girls represents an upgrade in production value while retaining Borden’s unwavering interest in feminist politics, race relations, workers’ rights […]
by Erik Luers on Jul 14, 2021 -
Shooting on a Moving Period Russian Train: Juho Kuosmanen on Cannes 2021 Competition Premiere Compartment No. 6
In Juho Kuosmanen’s debut feature The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, a Finnish boxer (and baker) gets a title shot at Helsinki Olympic Stadium against the American featherweight champion. At their joint press conference, the Finnish media is desperate to hear from their distinguished foreign guest: “What do you think of our country?” The real Olli Mäki lost by second-round TKO, but this movie about a small nation jostling for recognition on the world stage took top honors at Un Certain Regard in 2016. Kuosmanen is back at Cannes this year and he’s gone up a class: […]
by Mark Asch on Jul 13, 2021 -
“We Had No Idea about the LSD, or that Napa Had a Farm….”: Mike Plante and Jason Willis on Their Cramps/Mutants Punk Doc, We Were There To Be There
One of the most storied shows of the punk era was seen by just a tiny audience at an unlikely venue — a California mental hospital. The punk rockabilly band The Cramps and theatrical art-punk band The Mutants played the Napa State Hospital on June 13, 1978, one of a series of concerts programmed at the institution for its residents during that era. What made this concert different was its documentation — it was recorded on old Sony equipment by Bay Area documentarian Joe Rees and his Target Video crew. “Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I’m not […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 13, 2021
