Fall 2016
-
The Music Fades
With a name like Fortissimo Films, that could have been the company’s unofficial motto in its early years — fortissimo, of course, defined in music terms as an instruction to play notes with force. The 25-year-old international sales company boldly took on challenging arthouse cinema, from the likes of Wong Kar-wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jim Jarmusch, and championed them in global markets with a deafening level of commitment. But earlier this year, the sales company went silent, declaring bankruptcy and signaling not just the end of the respected arthouse giant, but as former Focus Features CEO James Schamus says, “the […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Oct 20, 2016 -
Politics of Style: Restoring and Rediscovering Apparatus Films
“I want to make films on the other side of fashion, on the other side of taste,” whispers a melancholic starlet into a velvety black void. It’s the 1930s, and the alluring actress — known in Europe as “La Divina” — has been brought to Hollywood to vamp in commercial confections alongside an American matinee idol. She doesn’t fit in. She wants to play real roles, like Dorian Gray or Christ. Her nervy agent is bewildered. “That’s art!” he scoffs. “Who’s gonna to pay for that?” Brooke Dammkoehler’s 45-minute La Divina (1989), a buoyant pastiche of Golden Age melodrama by way […]
by Paul Dallas on Oct 20, 2016 -
Embodied Teaching
The notorious 1964 film Scorpio Rising opens on a tangle of metal, pieces from a disassembled motorcycle, and a young man tinkering with the detritus in a garage. Ricky Nelson sings “Fools Rush In” on the soundtrack as the camera pans lovingly over rugged boots, bulky links of chain, and then down over the back of a leather jacket with the film’s title and director’s name — Kenneth Anger — written in shiny studs. The man wearing the jacket spins around, and we’re suddenly up close both to his crotch and the soft naked skin of his belly. I was […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 20, 2016 -
A Woman Above Everything Else
The camera pushes tight in on Natalie Portman’s distressed face, a layer of 16mm grain putting a slight filter on her perfect features. From the very beginning, we’re too close; the customary distance from an iconic first lady is gone. Also missing are biographical flashbacks, or early happy moments, or pretty montages locating Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy within the tapestry of her husband’s life and administration. No, Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, which follows the first lady in the days following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, begins in a kind of emotional media res, a heightened state accentuated by the dark chords of Mica […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2016 -
There’s a Critic On Set!
In the nearly ten years I have worked as a film critic and journalist, the sources and stability of my income have severely varied. Freelance movie reviewing for multimedia outlets, like The Rotten Tomatoes Show on the now-defunct Current TV, or Medium Rare TV in San Francisco, kept me afloat through film school. Then in Sydney, Australia, internships in advertising and radio paid well enough for me to start and support a boutique film blog, CineMalin: Film Commentary and Criticism. But in Austin, Texas, where I moved for graduate school some years ago, employment options for professional film writers are […]
by Sean Malin on Oct 20, 2016 -
Editor’s Letter
Two nights ago I stopped by a party following a screening of Barry Jenkins’s superlative new Moonlight at the New York Film Festival. Jenkins was there, along with producer Adele Romanski, actress Janelle Monáe, and there was a mood of excitement as well as appreciation. Let’s face it: we in independent film need things to be excited about, and it’s great when those things are actually movies made by great people who we can unabashedly champion. Jenkins made our 2008 25 New Faces list and then, in 2009, our cover with his debut picture, Medicine for Melancholy, and it’s been […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2016 -
Examined Life: Mia Hansen-Løve on Things to Come
There are only a few minutes of calm at the beginning of Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth feature Things to Come. In a prologue two years before the film’s narrative kicks off, philosophy professor Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) is on seaside vacation with longtime partner Heinz (André Marcon) and children, a stroll reminiscent of the family outing that kicks off her sophomore film, 2009’s The Father of My Children. In both films, this stroll prefigures much strife to come: shortly after Things’ opening, Nathalie — already frayed by the demands of looking after her elderly mother (Edith Scob) — finds out Heinz is […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 20, 2016 -
Dispatches from the Frontlines of a Studio Picture, Part 1
Not that long ago, and certainly on my last feature, I would often find myself joking with the gaffer or the key grip: “So if this was a $20 million film, what would we do differently?” Most of the time the answer involved big lighting cranes, custom lightboxes, technocranes and time. Lots and lots of time. On an indie, we are constantly pushed to produce more with less. Thirty-five-day schedules are becoming 28-day schedules. Eight million dollar films are being produced for five. The bar miraculously remains the same — you simply need to squeeze more juice from a smaller fruit. If you […]
by Sean Porter on Oct 20, 2016 -
High Tide: Kenneth Lonergan on Manchester by the Sea
“…If it is true to say that, in essence, the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.” — Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man” (The New York Times, Feb. 27, 1949) How should we grieve? When faced with inconceivable loss, most of us become amateurs, fumbling in the hope of recovery. Grief tends more to ugliness than elegance, and it has a nasty habit of overstaying its welcome. For Lee Chandler, […]
by James Ponsoldt on Oct 20, 2016 -
Festival Beat: Toronto, Camden and Fantastic Fest
Toronto International Film Festival By Scott Macaulay Following 2013’s The Flag, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker returned to the Toronto International Film Festival this year with an entirely different meditation on national identity, Karl Marx City. Here Epperlein, who emigrated to the States following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, travels back to her East German homeland, attempting to uncover the reason for her father’s suicide in 1999. Evidence he may have been a Stasi informant deepens the urgency of her journey, with a visit to Stasi archives revealing thousands of hours of footage, somewhere in which may be the clue […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 20, 2016
