The following article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2020 print edition. We’re drowning in entertainment. Dozens of streamers, from mainstream catnip like Netflix and Disney+ to niche platforms like the Criterion Channel, each offer hundreds of feature films, limited series and TV shows. National theater chains like AMC and arthouse cinemas like the Alamo Drafthouse—at least before and hopefully after the pandemic—serve up fresh options every week on more than 40,000 screens. And legacy networks on basic cable, from NBC to TBS, continue to deliver a firehose of prerecorded content and live broadcasts every day. How to choose? Simple: […]
Screening on The Museum of Modern Art’s Virtual Cinema through January 21, Ernie Gehr’s Lower East Side Trilogy combines three of his recent pieces: Autumn (completed 2017), Aproposessexstreetmarket (2018), and Circling Essex Crossing (2018). MoMA describes the trilogy as a sequel to Gehr’s Essex Street Quartet, currently screening in an installation on the Museum’s fourth floor. For Essex Street Quartet, Gehr reshaped footage he had taken some 45 years earlier. The Trilogy comprises new material that documents a rapidly changing Lower East Side. Gehr spoke with Filmmaker by phone from his home in Brooklyn. Filmmaker: How have you weathered the […]
During last night’s Gotham Awards, Gotham Film & Media Institute Executive Director Jeffrey Sharp announced the creation of The Joel Schumacher Mentorship Award in partnership and endowed by MTV Entertainment Group. Honoring the legacy and social consciousness of the director of such films as Tigerland, Falling Down, Car Wash and St. Elmo’s Fire will be a scholarship enabling four undergraduate students to attend the The Gotham EDU summer program, according to the press release, “an eight-week curriculum which will offer workshops to hone career development and technical skills, master classes hosted by industry decision makers, and insight from mentors through one-on-one […]
Putting together the perfect soundtrack for a film is its own art form. It’s a task that most often makes use of existing tunes and can achieve an almost magical symbiosis with the images onscreen. Think of Leonard Cohen’s ballads floating over the snowbound romantic folly of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller or the way Simon & Garfunkel’s songs offer a suite-like metanarrative in The Graduate as two legendary examples. Filmmaker Haroula Rose mentions both in a recent conversation, which also touched on the way Paul Thomas Anderson drew on bespoke material in Magnolia, commissioning an original song cycle […]
The Gotham Awards — the long-running event by IFP, which used tonight’s ceremony to formally unveil the organization’s name change to The Gotham Film & Media Institute — has long occupied pole position in the year’s film awards ceremonies, followed by, among others, the SAG Awards, the Spirit Awards and, of course, the Oscars. So too this very different year, when live events are precluded because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tonight’s event was streamed live from The Gothams’ usual location — Cipriani Wall Street — with The Gotham Executive Director Jeff Sharp presiding over ceremonies that saw some presenters walk […]
Always a smartly edited exercise in graphic matches, David Ehrlich’s annual countdown of the year’s best films is here to connect the dots from Ema (#25) to Time (#1) in 15 minutes.
Amos Poe had already directed one homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (his 1976 debut feature Unmade Beds) when he began production on the 1984 thriller Alphabet City, but the latter film is the one that really earns the comparisons it invites to Godard and the French New Wave as a whole. A member of the East Village “No Wave” movement of the late ’70s and early ’80s that also included Abel Ferrara, Bette Gordon, Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver, Poe began his career with the seminal punk rock documentary The Blank Generation, and Alphabet City is a singular mash-up of […]
Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher), announced today that it is renaming itself The Gotham Film & Media Institute, or, simply, “The Gotham.” From the IFP’s email to members: For over forty years, IFP has worked to advance the groundbreaking, enduring, challenging culture of independent film. In that time, we’ve grown from a grassroots marketplace into a year-round organization with an annual conference, awards, labs, a membership community and a mandate to support storytellers across a wider range of media. Along the way, we’ve also outgrown our brand. So to better support our mission—and an expanding role in the film […]
The following interview with David Cronenberg about his film Crash originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1997 edition. With Crash having just been rereleased in a new restoration by Criterion, it is being republished online for the first time. Also regarding Crash: Joanne McNeil’s essay on the relation of the work to the source material, J.G. Ballard’s novel. Blood, semen and gasoline are the liquids that course through David Cronenberg’s compelling study of sexual fetishism, Crash. But far from being a, well, messy affair, Crash is startling for its cool precision and astute manner of intellectual provocation. […]
Follow the Strawn Greyhounds, a high school six-man football team under the direction of coach Dewaine Lee, as they attempt a three-peat for the 6-Man Football State Championship. Learn how cinematographer Jared Christopher captured this small town’s story with Canon Cinema Cameras and Lenses.