There’s an elephant at a circus in Manzhouli that sits and won’t move.“Perhaps some people keep stabbing it with forks,” Yu Cheng muses to his close friend’s wife, but the elephant still won’t budge. This is one of four characters whose lives eventually intersect en route to the seated behemoth. In the bleak mining city of the late writer/director Hu Bo’s slow epic An Elephant Sitting Still, people tend to linger as they’re being hurt too, in spite of the obvious exits that beckon them. Somewhere in the time it takes to endure this 230 minute trial of misanthropy, you […]
While trying to explain a reality that is shifting in front of him, a surveyor looks into the past in Qiu Sheng’s feature debut Suburban Birds. A moody, seductive drama that stubbornly refuses explication, the story takes place in Qiu’s hometown of Hangzhou. Loosely based on a real-life 2009 building collapse, Suburban Birds is also a coming-of-age story about school friends whose lives are disrupted by urban renewal. Filmmaker spoke with Qiu Sheng during this year’s annual New Directors/New Films series. Suburban Birds screened without incident at the 2018 Locarno Film Festival, but when Qiu was faced with new regulations, […]
“I drifted into PRC and couldn’t get out.” — Edgar G. Ulmer In the early 1930s, a wave of prominent directors fleeing Germany had found success at the major or second-tier studios; only rarely were they forced to make films at the low-budget studios found on the so-called Poverty Row. The next generation was too late—if Fritz Lang thought RKO was squalid, it was because he had little idea of the depredations suffered by, for instance, an István Székely (later Steve Sekely, emigrated to the US in 1938-39), a Franz Wysbar (later Frank Wisbar, emigrated in November 1938), or, briefly, […]
The sound of ocean waves links the first two images of Dora García’s Segunda Vez: a crowd of people, standing and watching something unseen in interior darkness, then an ocean cliffside—a “reverse shot” of a totally different space. The waves dissolve into room tone as the third shot cuts to a young man and woman silently regarding each other in a waiting room, then an elderly hand firmly gripping a cane and, finally, an enormous wall clock. None of these seem to share a common space or time; I assumed all would be clarified sooner or later and didn’t worry about it […]
Following her vibrant and raucous concert doc, Gogol Bordello Nonstop, Colombia-born, New York-based filmmaker Margarita Jimeno makes her dramatic feature debut with the Cinequest-premiering Grind Reset Shine, another story about an art and artmaking but one that unfolds in a very different way. From the press release: When the worlds of a struggling artist and a nun entangle, how will they break free? Peter is a struggling artist who moves from New York to Berlin to explore his luck and join an art collaborative. Alicia, preparing for nunhood in a remote Polish village, tries to decipher the existence of Satan […]
For several years Christopher Doyle has been a fixture at Camerimage, the annual festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland, devoted to cinematography. This past November he was especially busy, hosting two panels called “The Language of Cinema Is Images” with his friend and colleague Ed Lachman. Extending over six hours, these were a chance for Doyle, Lachman, and their guests to share stories, give advice, and question each other about style and technique. The panels were also an opportunity for Doyle to screen some examples of his work. Leslie Cheung dancing to “Perfidia” in Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild. A […]
Editor’s note: with The Plagiarists opening at Lincoln Center this Friday, we’re reposting Vadim Rizov’s interview with its creative team. Note that since the Berlinale premiere, it’s been confirmed that Peter Parlow is a fictitious person. On one level, The Plagiarists is a two-part comedy about a ceaselessly fighting couple, the first half of which takes place in winter. Anna (Lucy Kaminsky) is a novelist, at least aspirationally—completion of her first novel is a ways off, so she pays the bills as a copy writer. Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) is a filmmaker, but doesn’t think he can call himself that—he’s written a script, but that’s […]
The following guest essay on the making of Ham on Rye is from cinematographer Carson Lund. The film premieres at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this week, and the official site is here. For independent filmmakers, Los Angeles is a city of contradictions: it’s both an ideal place to congregate with likeminded artists and craftspeople, and a truly daunting place to actualize on-location productions if you’re low on cash. Between inflated permitting fees, hefty fines for unlawful shooting, and a police force with plenty of experience enforcing these standards, there’s no shortage of ways in which the city formally discourages guerrilla […]
Getting off of a bus on Main Street early in the morning, I saw two men preparing a display car/advertisement for the day; one, melting ice off the hood with a giant blowdryer, the other buffing the surface for maximum shine. The minute production details of Sundance are a tacit thing that touches every piece of the experience. It’s as though each moment is a fully produced film set ready for action. After wandering through the desolate streets, I finally found the address I was looking for, High West Distillery, a space whose wooden interiors feel like the backdrop for […]
Tracking “economic nationalist” and Deplorables-rouser Stephen Bannon from summer 2017 to fall of last year, The Brink follows Bannon as he tries to rebrand himself, post-White House, as a unifier of the European alt-right, culminating in the defeat of his preferred candidates on Election Night 2018. Director Alison Klayman shot the film and edited alongside Marina Katz and Brian Goetz. Via email, the latter two editors spoke about the challenges of assembling the documentary on a tight turnaround. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your […]