The first rule of Film Week is that if you have time to blog during Film Week, you’re probably not doing it right. The second rule of Film Week is that if you attend, the best part is that you will meet all kinds of awesome people making awesome films. This may intimidate you. It’s okay. Be cool. I guess that’s the third rule of Film Week, bro: just be cool. When the good folks at Filmmaker Magazine asked me to blog about Film Week again this year, I knew I wanted to write about some of the awesome people making awesome […]
“Open-air cinema as a means to an end,” is how Caspar Sonnen, the driving force behind IDFA DocLab summed up the vision for the Open Air Film Festival Amsterdam (a.k.a. Pluk de Nacht), the summertime tradition he co-founded back in 2003, when I last chatted with him over coffee at Two For Joy in Frederiksplein. He went on to explain that all the film schools and Netflix DVDs in the world can’t capture the magic of cinema like a single collective movie experience can. “Our organizational structure is that of a block party,” he added. Interestingly, this indie movie evangelist […]
New Large-Sensor Camera From Sony Sony has announced another new camera, the Sony NEX-EA50, which fits somewhere between the very consumer-ish NEX-VG20 and the semi-professional NEX-FS100. The common design element of NEX cameras is the use of Sony’s E-mount, which has a very shallow flange depth – the distance from the mount to the sensor – making it possible to use a variety of lens mounts with an appropriate adapter. The NEX-EA50 is clearly aimed at the event and documentary shooter. It has a new body shape with an integrated shoulder pad (which can be adjusted), XLR audio inputs, and comes […]
A few days ago, Scott posted on the blog about Julia Pott, one of our new crop of “25 New Faces,” putting her wonderful, latest short, Belly, online. (On that subject, you should also check out a really excellent article on Pott and Belly over at Motionographer.) Also now showcasing work online is another of this year’s “New Faces,” Ian Clark. Until August 13, you can watch Clark’s gorgeous 25-minute film Searching for Yellow (which I described in his “25 New Faces” profile as “hauntingly lovely, simultaneously intimate and expansive”) and his naturalistic 64-minute portrait of small-town life, Country Story. […]
Christian Marclay’s The Clock returns to New York beginning tomorrow, July 13, through August 1 at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center. For details click here, and note that on the weekends the installation will run 24 hours. At special Twitter account, @LCClock, will post wait times. The following piece appeared in our Fall, 2011 issue. Christian Marclay’s The Clock video installation is many things. Structurally it is a 24-hour video installation in which film clips from across the history of cinema are meticulously edited together so that the fictional time inside each clip matches exactly the time at […]
It’s the Greek moment. Again. Still. Thousands of years of civilization, and we’re still anxiously awaiting an epistle from Hellas! In the first hours after Sunday’s fraught second Parliamentary election of the year, few analysts are confident there won’t be a third election or that even the successful formation of a coalition government would last, or be able to withstand the growing force of the Euro-wide economic crisis. The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, also known as “Images of the 21st Century,” in its fourteenth year, took place in mid-March 2012, before the inconclusive May 6 elections had even been set. Here […]
Second #5781, 96:21 Sandy and Jeffrey, on their way to the dance in the basement of a house. Jeffrey tends to arrive and depart the Williams house at night. The car creaks as it moves. What space does the car drive though? The space of streets at night, the insides of stores illuminated like enormous aquariums behind Sandy. But also the space of a mind, the mind of the film, with its own series of codes that reference other films, other images. Carl Jung: The collective unconscious—so far as we can say anything about it at all—appears to consist of […]
“Where is Cooky Puss at?!?” I still remember breaking up over that line from “Cooky Puss,” the single from the Beastie Boy’s second EP. A recorded prank phone call to Carvel Ice Cream about their inexplicable dessert treat set to sleazy electro-funk and streaming over my college dorm room speakers via WNYU’s New Afternoon Show, it was my introduction to a group that swiftly went from novelty item to cultural force. “Cooky Puss” may not be the group’s highest moment, but it made me laugh then and it makes me laugh now even as it throws me back in time. […]
In just under eight hours, the first hackathon dedicated exclusively to narrative transmedia gets underway at Lincoln Center; here’s Part 1 about what it is and who’s sponsoring it. There are seven teams of four, so 28 participants total, and if the other groups are anything like my team U.S. Maple, they’re all already feeling tired and well worked. I’ve written sample bibles and transmedia proposals before, as evidence of my versatility as a writer and ability to work in transmedia, but I’ve never finished an actual project. So this Story Hack is my first chance to develop something cross-platform beyond […]
Peter Broderick’s http://www.itstartshear.com is as sprawling, heartfelt, and lovingly-rendered a collection of songs as you’re likely to hear this year; sixty-five minutes of controlled chaos running the gamut between bombastic and hushed, often times within the same track. And no, you didn’t read that wrong, Broderick, a 25-year old classically trained multi-instrumentalist living in Berlin (and definitely not the distribution guru who shares his name), has indeed titled his new record after a web domain. In the album’s press materials, Broderick explains his reasoning for this title, arguing: “http://www.itstartshear.com serves the music well by automatically becoming a link any time […]