Back in the fall of 2021, still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had come to terms with the apparent fate of my film, The Automat, about the Horn & Hardart automats that operated in the United States from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries. The Automat had been accepted to the 2020 edition of the Telluride Film Festival—which was, of course, canceled. But I was alive, and none of my friends and family had perished of COVID. And, while a couple of other festivals I had been invited to chose to not program the film in […]
Tij D’oyen’s Lollygag—which received a Grand Jury Honorable Mention at its Outfest premiere this year—is a blackly comic reminiscence of a formative teen summer. In flatly enunciated Greek voiceover, a girl (Gaby Slape) recalls the season she spent spying from her bedroom window on the boy next door (Isaac Powell). Already aware that she wasn’t attracted to men, the anonymous narrator nonetheless found herself staring at her neighbor and his seemingly endless string of visiting lovers as he “lounged and drank and swam and smoked.” “Sometimes the way he acted gave me a funny feeling,” she recalls. “The feeling that […]
After 11 years of residence in Greenpoint, co-founders Ed Halter and Thomas Beard are moving their microcinema, Light Industry—dedicated to screening film and electronic art in Brooklyn since 2008—to Williamsburg. Ed and Thomas found inspiration for Light Industry in Amos Vogel, who founded the New York Film Festival, pioneered early alternative film spaces such as Cinema 16 and once wrote that “the avant-garde’s delight in the unpredictable, its insistence on the deconstruction of ossified codes, its probing of the unacceptable, signify gestures of freedom in an increasingly commercialized cinema.” I would repeat this remark, word for word, about the indispensable […]
This year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival – the “largest university-run film festival in the world,” which ran from October 23-30 – was a conveniently hybrid event that also marked my own return to the in-person festival circuit. Admittedly, as someone residing in a blue state with a strict mask mandate in place, traveling to the Deep South was a somewhat disorienting experience. And a stark reminder that the U.S.’s politicization of a global pandemic really is a war within – and specifically within the states themselves. On the one hand, Georgia’s Republican Governor Kemp issued an executive order back in […]
Not merely an addendum to Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground, Ed Lachman’s Songs For Drella is a ravishingly beautiful, sometimes thrilling audiovisual recording of a song cycle by Lou Reed and John Cale, the founders of the Velvet Underground. Cale and Reed’s early musical collaboration as the VU was inspired but unlikely – they had diametrically opposed musical roots and passions. Short lived as the band was, it became the source for punk, glam, and whatever followed from those fundamentally subversive pop genres. The VU began sliding toward death when Reed effectively fired Cale in 1968. (He had fired their first producer, Andy Warhol, […]
Peter Buck, the guitarist for R.E.M., is often quoted as saying, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band.” Now it seems, all those bands are the subjects of documentaries. Finally, even the Velvet Underground. The eponymous film is one that Todd Haynes appeared destined to make. Popular music, rock’n’roll mythology and the vagaries of self-invented personas are a core of the director’s filmography, going back to the Super-8 transgression of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a melodramatic biopic of the ‘70s pop singer cast with Barbie dolls. Velvet Goldmine (1998) […]
Welcome to Filmmaker’s 29th anniversary edition—and, as has been the case the past several years, the fall edition is also our 25 New Faces issue. Here, you’ll meet 25 filmmakers—or sets of filmmakers or, in one case, a production company—that have impressed, moved or surprised us, and who we are eager to track into the future. We started the list in 1998 and, looking back, it’s fascinating to see the trajectories of its first graduating class. Peter Sarsgaard, of course, is an in-demand actor. Jamie Babbitt’s But I’m a Cheerleader recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, was rereleased in a new […]
Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz first worked together on Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch’s very funny and infectiously playful 2016 documentary on The Stooges. The Velvet Underground is a different band, whose story places different demands on the filmmakers and audience, but Gonçalves and Kurnitz once again found the proper cinematic corollary for their subject with Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground. Gonçalves is a Haynes regular, having edited narrative features Carol and Dark Waters for the director, along with the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. Kurnitz is a first-time Haynes collaborator (but, as he notes below, longtime Haynes enthusiast) best known […]
Jane Campion, Joel Coen, Gaspar Noe, Joachim Trier, Mia Hansen-Love, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Todd Haynes and Pedro Almodovar are some of the heavy-hitting directors whose work will receive U.S. premieres at the 2021 New York Film Festival. Just announced is the main slate, which features many returning veterans as well as filmmakers appearing at the festival for the first time, including Rebecca Hall, Saul Williams and Alexandre Koberidze. Two filmmakers — Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Hong Sangsoo — are represented by two titles. The festival runs September 24 – October 10, and proof of vaccination will be required at all venues. Festival […]
Is there any document more compelling than a good syllabus? I have a collection of favorites in a folder on my desktop and often daydream about following a particular professor’s list of screenings, readings and writing prompts to create my own individual class, a kind of private self-improvement gambit or—even better—a venture into some fantastic cinematic territory still unknown to me. A good syllabus is a treasured resource; a great syllabus, though, with its hints and errant connections, exudes the magic of possibility and epiphany. As an example, I remember reading my colleague Priya Jaikumar’s syllabus for a graduate seminar […]