James N. Kienitz Wilkins
-
Wavelengths 2019, Program 4: Full Circle
The fourth, and final, of this year’s Wavelengths shorts programs returned to the curatorial logic of the opening night, bringing together half a dozen disparate sensibilities based on formal, rather than thematic, common ground—in this case, their shared interest in performance. With one exception, the coherence here was more immediate than in the first slate’s buried interest in image production, though the styles of performance deployed across these works bear little resemblance to one another. The program began with Zachary Epcar’s Billy, a quick, cool sip of Michael Robinson-aid recounting the domestic unease experienced by its eponymous male lead (Peter […]
by Phil Coldiron on Oct 3, 2019 -
TIFF 2019, Last Days: Uncut Gems, Atlantis, Jallikattu, This Action Lies
At Marriage Story‘s TIFF premiere, the audience applauded the Netflix logo; a night later, the same happened for A24 at Uncut Gems. The latter makes slightly more sense—rightly or wrongly (no comment), A24 has coherent brand cachet in positioning itself as Art-Fixated rather than purely profit-motivated—but in both cases I felt like I was going mad, and even more so when I heard that the first question for The Lighthouse‘s cast and crew at their first screening was why is A24 is so very special (surely that’s not on Willem Dafoe to answer.) Admittedly, Adam Sandler shaking Kevin Garnett’s hand onstage […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 16, 2019 -
“You Run the Risk of Becoming a Brand”: Co-Writer/Co-Producer/DP/Editor James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Co-Producer Paul Dallas on Berlinale 2019 “Fake Indie” The Plagiarists
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 14, 2019 -
“I Don’t Think Movies are Old-Fashioned”: James N. Kienitz Wilkins on His RIDM Retrospective (and Making Art in the Internet Age)
For this year’s 20th anniversary of RIDM, the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival teamed up with Visions, the city’s experimental documentary film series, for a truly cutting edge retrospective titled “James N. Kienitz Wilkins: Vessels/Containers.” Wilkins, a 25 New Face” of 2016, was honored with four programs containing seven of his works, created from 2012 through 2017. This includes 2012’s nearly two hour Public Hearing, a 16mm, B&W-filmed performance of the transcript from a town hall debate about replacing a Walmart with a Super Walmart, all the way to 2017’s 38-minute Mediums, a medium-length movie made up entirely of medium […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 22, 2017 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 7: The Dreamed Path + Wavelengths
I had the truly rare advantage of a loose enough schedule to accommodate seeing all four of the Wavelengths shorts programs at TIFF this year, and they were kind of a lifesaver. For someone who’s made my trade watching and writing about movies, I’m a (paradoxically?) terrible marathon viewer. Following full-length, narratively driven films, one after another, is hard work, speaking purely personally; an hour’s-ish worth of avant-garde-leaning shorts does wonders to clear the mind. It’s a different kind of stimulation, and if you don’t like one another will be along any moment. I’m going to punt on the vast majority […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 22, 2016 -
Lost in Translation: Public Hearing
If you want to make a movie, you need a good script. Or, at least that’s what they tell you. A script gets the talent, which gets the financing (the two are really synonymous). The other thing you’ll need, of course, is luck. First-time filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins can thank Google for both (not the money part though). While cruising the Internet in 2007, Wilkins came across a transcript of a public hearing on a town hall website. It described in detail a well-attended public hearing in Allegany, New York, population 8,000. At issue was a proposal to replace […]
by Paul Dallas on Mar 7, 2014
