With Marie Losier’s retrospective, Just a Million Dreams, now running at New York’s MoMA through November 11, we’re reposting our interview with Losier from our Winter, 2012 print issue. The film discussed here, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, screens tomorrow, November 3. What should one expect when one artist turns their camera on another? Although the “portrait of the artist” doc is one of nonfiction filmmaking’s most durable sub-genres, audiences often expect the least from it. In the presence of a great painter, musician or author, directors are frequently expected to sublimate their own styles in favor of […]

“I think we have really broken a new genre. It is the next evolution of factual storytelling.” So says Christine Connor, the creator and producer of ABC’s forthcoming drama-documentary hybrid series Final Witness, which begins its debut season in early 2012. In fall 2009, independent producer Connor pitched ABC’s Rudy Bednar the idea of a show that would present “true-crime murder stories told with an emphasis on narrative storytelling, narrated by the character of the victim.” A further hook was that Final Witness, in an attempt to move away from the look and feel of conventional true-crime re-enactment shows, would […]

As a child growing up in Scituate, Mass., Nick Flynn was often left to explore on his own, and he got into varying degrees of trouble. Flynn’s parents were divorced and he had no contact with his father, living instead with his mother, who worked in a bakery. She remarried to a 21-year-old Vietnam vet, and, after their divorce, Flynn wound up living with her and a new boyfriend — a member of one of the largest drug smuggling rings in New England. Around the age of 18, Flynn started working for the smuggler — unloading fishing boats and as […]

While the title of Eve Sussman’s (and her collaborative team Rufus Corporation’s) whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir –– shown as part of New Frontiers at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival –– refers to a seminal abstract artwork dealing with space, the video itself is all about time. In fact, this experimental piece’s apparent story about an American geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood) working in a post-Soviet industrial metropolis called City-A has no fixed time at all. That’s because the sum of the video’s parts aren’t just greater than the whole –– there is no whole. Through an algorithm, which Sussman has dubbed “the Serenity […]

The first thing I did after finally reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids this past summer was to get on YouTube to find the earliest clips of her I could. I wanted to sense the charisma she must have put out when she was young. It’s not like she’s not still charismatic, but it’s just that, like with every famous person, her charisma is now congealed with the aura of her fame. I wanted to see what she seemed like before she was “Patti Smith,” the woman who made Horses and Easter. Before she was that rock-and roll-icon, Smith was, as […]

When asked in a 1970 interview about the future of music, Jim Morrison said, “I can envision one person with a lot of machines singing or speaking.” And though the disc jockey has been around for over a century (the first DJ is thought to be a college student in 1909), it’s currently in something of a golden age. The person once known for spinning records to keep partygoers entertained at functions, or dead air from occurring on the radio, is now the main attraction at sold-out stadium shows. In a stroke of genius (or pure insanity, depending how you […]

Without a doubt, this is an amazing time to be a storyteller. We have moved beyond the simple democratization of storytelling and production tools. Funding, marketing and distribution solutions are commoditized, providing filmmakers numerous opportunities to bring their work to an audience. And now a new phase is arriving, one that merges technology with the creative process. Filmmakers will soon be able to take advantage of a world of connected objects in what has been termed the “Internet of things.” And in this environment, as always, there will be a need for good storytelling to provide a level of understanding, […]