Oscilloscope Laboratories
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Doc (and Art-Film) Blocking: How Algorithmic Content Moderation is Hurting Indie Films
You have to look hard to find a trailer for the recent release of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, Estonia’s entry for this year’s Best International Feature Film category, on Facebook and Instagram — and forget about clips. Even though the lyrical documentary about women in an Estonian sauna has won numerous top prizes around the world—Best Directing at Sundance 2023; Best Documentary at San Francisco International; Best Documentary at the 2023 European Film Awards; Best Cinematography at IDFA 2024—many of the film’s artful moving images of women’s bodies were banned by Meta’s algorithms, and the U.S. distributor Greenwich Entertainment had to […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Feb 9, 2024 -
“The Pendulum Can Only Swing So Far Before the Industry Realizes That There is More to Film, and Life, Than Celebrities and Murderers”: Frances Henderson on Her Essay Doc, This Much We Know
“I think the reason we’ve never pinpointed the real beginning to this genre is because we’ve never agreed on what the genre even is. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It’s not very clear sometimes… I am here in search of art.” — Jon D’Agata When I interviewed documentary filmmaker Frances Henderson for Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2014, she discussed the above quote from author Jon D’Agata, noting that it held pride of place on the moodboard that hung above her desk. ” I am very much […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 14, 2023 -
Trailer Watch: Godfrey Reggio’s Once Within a Time
Koyaanisqatsi director Godfrey Reggio returns with his first feature in a decade, Once Within a Time, opening this Friday at New York’s IFC Center from Oscilloscope Labs. In Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2014 issue, Reggio, co-director Jon Kane and DP Trish Govoni discussed the “perfect image” of his last feature, Visitors, which was comprised of just 74 black-and-white shots, each running 70 or so seconds. Made during the COVID-19 pandemic, the animated Once Within a Time is a very different work, described as “a bardic fairy tale about the end of the world and the beginning of a new one, tinged with […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 9, 2023 -
Exclusive Clip: Mark Pellington’s Going All the Way: The Director’s Edit
Ahead of its opening weekend at NYC’s Quad Cinema, Filmmaker shares an exclusive clip of Mark Pellington‘s Going All the Way: The Director’s Edit. This re-edit and 4K restoration of Pellington’s feature debut includes a new title sequence created by Sergio Pinheiro as well as 50 additional minutes of previously unseen footage accompanied by new music from composer Pete Adams. Based on the 1970 novel by Dan Wakefield (who also penned the script), the film stars Jeremy Davies and an early-career Ben Affleck as Sonny and Gunner, two young men who return home to Indianapolis after serving in the Korean […]
by Natalia Keogan on Dec 16, 2022 -
Back to One, Episode 139: Tom Noonan
As the annual Sundance Film Festival begins again this week, legendary actor/director Tom Noonan takes us back 27 years to a very different Sundance, where his film What Happened Was… won the Grand Jury Prize. It’s the ultimate “actor’s film,” just two people, Noonan and the incredible Karen Sillas, in one room, real time, on a first date like no other. He talks about the circumstances that led him to Sillas, the extensive rehearsal process they had, the production, and the ups and downs of its ultimately triumphant reception. Plus Noonan tells the story of the first big lesson that […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jan 27, 2021 -
Are Virtual Theaters Here to Stay?
When Toby Leonard, programming director at Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre, returned to the space for the first time since the COVID-19 shutdown began, a six-foot cardboard display for Never Rarely Sometimes Always struck his eye. Eliza Hittman’s film was four days into the first week of a planned platform release before it was pulled from theatrical exhibition and hadn’t yet made it to the Belcourt, but its physical teaser remained. “How many of these things were there and how many did they send around the country?,” Leonard wondered. Then he took it down. As exhibitors and distributors initially adjusted to no theatrical releases for […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 18, 2020 -
Hits & Misses: The Theatrical Performance of the Sundance Class of ’16
How do you measure success these days? When more than two million people vote for you over the other guy and you still lose? When you receive no endorsements from a single major newspaper, your party’s leadership practically ignores you, and you still win? Or, perhaps, when your heralded Sundance acquisition earns a whopping $15.8 million at the box office, but you spend more than twice that in acquisition fees and prints and advertising costs to release it? (i.e., The Birth of a Nation). How about if your film isn’t released in theaters at all, but Netflix paid $5 million […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 18, 2017
