17729 Results for “”
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Conversations Between: Sky Hopinka and Theo Anthony Discuss maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore
There’s a moment in Sky Hopinka’s 2017 short film, Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary, where for just a few frames, a layer of video floats on top of the subtitles. Blink and you’ll miss it, but in those frames something deeper winks back at you. Subtitles often float like oil on top of water; they are in the image but not of the image. But in Sky’s films, language is not a metatext. It’s organic, dynamic, always in the process of becoming something else. Language shapes and is shaped, carries and is carried, by the specificity of the […]
by Theo Anthony on Apr 8, 2021 -
Choose Your Own Future: Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head
While Adam Curtis has been making films since 1983, he first gained a kind of international recognition that once might have been termed “cult” with The Century of the Self (2002) and The Power of Nightmares (2004). These films source-coded the psychological and political terrains of the neoliberal landscape, deftly flaying away the already-decaying narratives of the Bush/Blair era. Deploying a voiceover pitched somewhere between Marxian don and MI-5 briefing, the twisting, layered narratives of Century and Nightmares articulated answers that were neither easy nor comforting, but answers all the same. Contemporary society was a managed “dreamworld,” and the stories […]
by Brendan Byrne on Apr 8, 2021 -
Mask Mandate: Writer/Director Tim Sutton on Funny Face
Every major city goes through extended periods of change. Since the turn of the century, New York City has been engaged in perhaps the most detestable metamorphosis. It’s increasingly become an unaffordable playground for wealthy elites, where longtime residents get bought out and relocated to satisfy greedy land developers’ dreams of additional luxury apartments. It’s in the brewing frustration (if not outright rage) of those displaced that New York–based writer-director Tim Sutton’s fifth feature, Funny Face, finds its inspiration. Set in Coney Island, Brooklyn, in the early months of 2019, the film follows Saul (Cosmo Jarvis), a socially awkward loner […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 8, 2021 -
Talking about Film
While filmmakers attend festivals to show their work, network and see old friends, film scholars have their own, similar venues; namely, academic conferences. Instead of submitting films, scholars submit proposals to present papers or host workshops; these are either accepted or rejected. Scholars whose proposals are selected not only have more impetus to attend the conference, they also will be able to add the presentation to their CV and activities list for the year. More significantly, though, these presentations often serve as early drafts of book chapters or essays to be published later. As a result, conferences play a vital […]
by Holly Willis on Apr 8, 2021 -
The Reopening Hunt: Resuming Production in a Time of COVID
Friday, March 13, 2020, two days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Jamin O’Brien had a check in his hand. The producer was headed to christen a new venture, an adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace to be directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor. “I was literally going to deliver the deposit check for our production offices, which were going to open Monday, when we were shut down,” says O’Brien. Now, a little more than a year later, O’Brien is preparing to navigate the world of post-COVID film production for the first […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Apr 8, 2021 -
“Stupid Questions are the Best Questions, and Mistakes are What People Call ‘Style'”: Christopher Doyle on Pandemic Production, Creativity and Shooting Gus Van Sant’s Gucci Series
The seven-episode Ouverture of Something That Never Ended has garnered millions of views since it was posted on YouTube in November. Sponsored by Gucci, the series marks the latest collaboration between director Gus van Sant and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, HKSC, following the features Paranoid Park and Psycho. (Overture is co-directed by Van Sant and Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele,) Shot on location over a three-week period in the fall, the series was Doyle’s first chance to work under new Covid-19 protocols. Extensive testing and social distancing were among the steps taken during the production. With over 100 films to his […]
by Daniel Eagan on Apr 8, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Iva Radivojević’s Aleph
A world premiere I’m highly anticipating out of the upcoming 2021 edition of New Directors/New Films is the second feature from Iva Radivojević, Aleph. From New Directors: In her magical, unpredictable second feature, Belgrade-born, globe-hopping artist Iva Radivojević has created a labyrinthine vision inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Using a variety of visual styles that miraculously cohere into one unified and unique aesthetic, the multihyphenate filmmaker and her collaborators offer an episodic structure bending time and space, in which one character seems to unwittingly pass the narrative baton to the next, fashioning a film whose scope extends […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 7, 2021 -
Back to One, Episode 149: Danny Deferrari
In this epic episode, we really get to know the talented actor Danny Deferrari, who plays Max in Emma Seligman’s brilliant and hilarious new film Shiva Baby, and I’m eternally grateful for it. He talks about appreciating the “emotional language” that Seligman speaks and the heavy life situation that was weighing on him during that movie. He takes us through his early training as an actor, his formative and important seasons at the Williamstown Theater Festival, and the trials and tribulations that brought him to his “Holy Trinity of Artistic Safety.” I break down how a small performance of his […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Apr 6, 2021 -
“Fish is Expensive to Keep Purchasing and Replacing”: Emma Seligman on Shiva Baby
From its double-entendre title to the hilarious sightgag of a closing scene, Emma Seligman’s debut feature, Shiva Baby, is universal in its uncomfortable awkwardness and specific in how it chooses to bathe in it. Adapted and expanded from her NYU thesis short, Seligman’s film follows Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a young Jewish New Yorker who has taken to sex work to solidify her funds. After concluding a session with a client, Max (Danny Deferrari), Danielle heads to Flatbush to meet up with her parents (Polly Draper and Fred Melamed) and attend the shiva of a family friend. Faced with unending nagging […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 5, 2021 -
“Every Image is Goodbye”: Cam Archer on Grief, Walks Home and His MoMA-Premiering Short, His Image
“Dreamy visuals of teenhood — cool hair, telephones, starkly lit bedrooms, troubled outsiders — are laid over structured soundtracks that blend distinctive background ambiences with catchy songs,” is how Mike Plante described the early short films of Cam Archer for Filmmaker in 2006. The occasion was the release of Archer’s first feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known, which joined an emerging body of work that Plante called “art films for teens.” But when we next caught up with Archer, it was just after the Cannes Directors Fortnight premiere of his second feature, Shit Year, starring Ellen Barkin, and his focus had […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 2, 2021
