The Rider, Chloé Zhao’s miraculous second feature, possesses a narrative that feels both as old as time and riveting in its newness: A young rodeo star has a tragic accident and must battle adversity on his way to recovery. You know this story. Except, through Zhao’s eyes, “redemption” looks different from what we’ve been conditioned to expect in a culture built on stories of success and celebrity. Every character on screen in The Rider is a real person, playing a version of themselves. But this is not a documentary. The performances in The Rider are exhilarating and deep and true. […]
Missouri-based filmmaker Kamau Bilal chronicles his brother’s move back home to his parents’ house in Baby Brother, a documentary short that premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. A documentary DP, editor and director, Bilal’s recent work includes shooting Abortion: Stories Women Tell for HBO. Below, Bilal discusses the traits of a “cinematic film,” the influence of Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop and his concerns on exploiting a documentary subject. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Bilal: For this film I operated […]
Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983) is the kind of final film any director would kill to have on his or her resume, a beautifully distilled summation of Bresson’s preoccupations and techniques that nevertheless strikes out in fascinating new directions. It’s simultaneously the director’s most empathetic film and his bleakest, a wrenching study of how a series of slight moral lapses creates a snowball effect of tragedy that leads to imprisonment and mass murder. Using a late Tolstoy novella as his source material, Bresson depicts the path of a counterfeit bill as it changes hands and inexorably alters the lives of those […]
James Quandt analyzes Robert Bresson’s themes and motifs in this video essay on L’argent, which just joined the Criterion Collection last month.
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry Running from Oct. 25 to Jan. 29 at the Met Breuer — the Metropolitan’s new space for contemporary art, in the building formerly occupied by the Whitney — this is the largest museum exhibition to date of Kerry James Marshall. Marshall, whose work since the early ’80s has encompassed painting and sculpture, has returned repeatedly to questions of African-American representation and identity. This exhibition will predominantly focus on his paintings (72 in all) and is complemented by a sidebar exhibition curated by Marshall from the Met’s holdings rounding up his many and varied influences. Belle Époque in Upper Volta […]
We shot most of Channel B over a weekend, but it was only two weeks later, during an evening of pickups, that the aesthetic of the movie really started to come together. This probably happens a lot, especially on little rinky-dink shoots like ours. We were about to do a third take of one of our last setups, shooting in a public park, a few benches down from some drunks. I asked Cory Popp, our director of photography, to shift the first part of a camera movement just a little bit, and when I watched the playback on our one […]
As much as I love Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men and Twin Peaks, as great and as groundbreaking as those shows were, they still are not cinema. The recent explosion of quality long-form cable series has taken the TV form to a new level of artistry and craftsmanship. A show like Mad Men is not only thrilling because of its commentary on its era, but because of the zeitgeist energy created by everyone watching the show, talking about it and sharing opinions on social media. Today, perhaps more than ever, a new season of a quality show becomes a […]
As part of our screening of short films by the 2014 25 New Faces at the IFC Center tonight will be two works by :: kogonada, the somewhat mysterious, Nashville-based film essayist whose works have scored hundreds of thousands of views on Vimeo and other platforms. Whether he’s assessing hand gestures in the work of Robert Bresson, one-point perspective in the films of Stanley Kubrick or pinpointing the salient characteristics of neorealism, :: kogonada brings a precision, delicacy and poetry to film studies. At the IFC Center tonight he’ll be screening his essay on narrative in the work of Steven […]
Sometimes, we recently realized, a new face is right under your nose. At Filmmaker this year, we’ve posted several astutely seductive and visually elegant video essays that transcend the supercut genre. While many online supercuts work via brute force, mashing together clip after clip to a booming Hans Zimmer score, the short films by elusive creator :: kogonada (that is not a typo) are delicate and precise. Whether identifying “one-point perspective” in the work of Stanley Kubrick or the attention Robert Bresson pays to hand gestures, a :: kogonada film revels in a sense of discovery — freezing, forwarding and […]
Perhaps my favorite festival of the year, The Film Society’s New Directors/New Films has just announced its first seven titles for the 2014 edition. Immediate notables include Richard Ayoade’s The Double, which bows at Sundance this week following its well-received Toronto premiere, and Albert Serra’s Locarno Golden Leopard prize winner, Story of My Death. (Death was recently the cover story in a strongly recommended issue of Cinema-Scope.) As ever, there are still obscure debuts to be found in Of Horses and Men and Trap Street, ensuring the festival’s spirit of discovery is alive and well. This year’s ND/NF is set for March 19-30 at Lincoln Center, and […]