jonas mekas
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The Low Down: Is Microbudget Production the Response to the Industry’s Devaluation of the Dramatic Feature Film?
There are conflicting opinions regarding the budget cutoff for the category commonly referred to as “microbudget filmmaking.” Sometimes referred to as “no-budget,” “ultra-low-budget” or “nano-budget,” the term refers to an increasingly popular level of filmmaking below “low-budget” that emerging filmmakers as well as, in some cases, veterans engage in. When Venice’s Biennale College Cinema was started eight years ago, the budgets of €150,000 (about $162,000) awarded to each filmmaker seemed low. And indeed, while makers of films—ambitious pictures such as The Fits, H., Memphis and This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection—produced through that program struggled with the budget […]
by Mike S. Ryan on Mar 17, 2020 -
RIP Jonas Mekas (1922-2019)
I only met Jonas Mekas once, briefly, in the most technical and unimpressive sense of “met”: I was coming out of Anthology Film Archives, emerging from a press screening and grimly proceeding to the nearest USPS branch. He asked why I wasn’t smiling, for which I didn’t have a good or succinct answer, and turned tail. I blew it! He didn’t identify himself and didn’t need to: Mekas’s status as an East Village institution and NYC film legend was imprinted on me long before I moved to the city. Artforum‘s obit puts it succinctly: “His output, which spans seven decades […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 23, 2019 -
Sleepless Nights Stories — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Sleepless Nights Stories opens theatrically at the Anthology Film Archives on Thursday, December 15, 2011. Visit their website to learn more.) December can be perverse, especially in New York. Underneath the jingling bells, cinnamon, and pine, the promises and obligations to keep, there’s a pervasive anxiety about the dying light. Time flattens the remaining days like a steamroller as we frantically categorize our memories into lists of ten and wrap it all up in colored paper and ribbons. This can create a hectic, merry numbness that doesn’t subside until January’s hangover, when the cold is undeniable. Perhaps the timing is […]
by Susanna Locascio on Dec 15, 2011 -
21st Century Man: Abel Ferrara
In person, Abel Ferrara is a whirlwind of gestures and jokes, of quick smiles and vulgar asides, digressions piled upon digressions, even if he’s much sharper and in control of his staccato New Yorkese vernacular than he lets on. Ferrara, who will turn 60 this year, has had one of American indie cinema’s strangest and most fascinating careers, one which has taken the Bronx native from the old 42nd Street’s row of exploitation and porn cinemas to the Croissette in Cannes. Often we talk of middle-aged artists mellowing, but Ferrara maintains a manic, youthful energy that is both infectious and […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 11, 2011 -
CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FEST LINEUP; HONORS JONAS MEKAS
The 2010 Chicago Underground Film Festival, to be held June 24-July 1, will be honoring experimental film guru Jonas Mekas with its Lifetime Achievement Award. Mekas will attend a number of festival screenings, including that of the new documentary Visionaries: Jonas Mekas and the (Mostly) American Avant-Garde, at which he will participate in a Q&A with director Chuck Workman. Here is the complete CUFF lineup: June 24 8:00 p.m.: The Wild Hunt, dir. Alexandre Franchi. A jilted boyfriend enters the strange world of medieval re-enactments in a desperate bid to win his girlfriend back. June 25 6:00 p.m.: World’s Largest, […]
by Jaimie Stettin on Jun 3, 2010
