Spring 2015
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The Journey is the Destination: On the Maysles Documentary Center Production, In Transit
Opening tomorrow at New York’s Metrograph and the Maysles Documentary Center is In Transit, about Amtrak’s long-distance passenger train, the Empire Builder. It was legendary Direct Cinema pioneer Albert Maysles’s final directing credit, a collaboration with young directors Lynn True, Nelson Walker, Ben Wu and David Isui. Below, from our Spring, 2015 print issue, is Paul Dallas’s report on the film. An attractive, middle-aged woman sits isolated against a snowy landscape that sweeps by. Her eyes are bright and sad. “I’ve always been a wife, a mother, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s something,” she explains. “But it didn’t matter. I was just […]
by Paul Dallas on Jun 22, 2017 -
Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2015: The Dust Settles
Have you heard? The United Nations designated 2015 the “International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies,” and cinematography made the cut. But is IYL 2015 finally the year in which the dam burst of innovation subsides, and new digital cameras and techniques no longer threaten to drown us? Surveying the latest advances in large-sensor digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker’s fifth annual round-up — written, as always, on the eve of NAB — gives me pause to consider how far we’ve come in the five years since Sony’s F3 and FS100 were cutting-edge… since Panasonic’s AF100 stirred passions, ARRI’s Alexa represented a bold choice, and RED’s hand-assembled Epic-M […]
by David Leitner on Apr 28, 2015 -
I Want to Take You Higher: Josh and Ben Safdie on Heaven Knows What
New York these days: There’s a chain store on every corner, Times Square is a paved-over pedestrian mall with $6 hot dogs and, if you want voyeuristic thrills, you peer into the bedrooms of the luxury condos flush against the beautifully manicured, elevated High Line that’s transformed the West Side. No one wants to reflexively cling to a misplaced nostalgia, but given the blanding of the city’s physical landscape it’s not hard to imagine that the number of urgently jaw-dropping stories in the Naked City is decreasing daily. Fortunately, for those of us who associate New York with subcultural energies, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2015 -
Lose Yourself to Dance: Mia Hansen-Løve on Eden
French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve makes movies about walking and not talking. About the unsaid stuff that underpins everyday life, that tacitly ferries us toward and away from life’s big dramas: love, first love, broken love, careers as they peak and wane, reunions and ennui, death, family. Hers is a world where the moving image, like life, is animated not by the noise that accompanies celebration and turbulent times, but by time itself. So much so that Hansen-Løve’s four features, All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love and her most recent, Eden, span years, sometimes decades — […]
by Durga Chew-Bose on Apr 28, 2015 -
Talk, Write, Kill
Best Seller An old-school scribe who never met a genre he couldn’t work in, Larry Cohen honed his craft as a writer on ’50s and ’60s television before graduating to features via assignments like Return of the Seven and a series of unproduced treatments for Alfred Hitchcock (one of which would resurface decades later as the Colin Farrell vehicle Phone Booth). Cohen promoted himself to director in 1972 with Bone, a wickedly funny class satire in which a white couple’s repressed tensions are brought to the surface by an encounter with a black man who wanders onto their property. Shot, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015 -
Stream or Screen: Are Film Festivals Still Worth It for Short Films?
Before the advent of streaming platforms, the festival circuit was practically the only option for distributing short form content. You’d ship your finished film off to Sundance and pray for that acceptance letter — and maybe even a feature deal made at the festival. But while some of today’s filmmakers still hold tight to that romantic ideal, others are capitalizing on the visibility and fan cultivation teased by the online sphere. They argue against festival submission fees and pricey DCP shipments and for the simplicity of an online premiere on Vimeo, YouTube, NoBudge, Fandor or another platform where audiences are […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 28, 2015 -
Shakespeare in the Park: On the Set of Matías Piñeiro’s Hermia & Helena
Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s last three films have started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France. In all these structurally playful and formally rigorous works, troupes of actors are working on new productions, and the films are given further continuity by a recurring ensemble cast and crew including actress Augustina Muñoz and d.p. Fernando Lockett. In Piñeiro’s newest production, Hermia & Helena, a young woman (Muñoz) comes to New York on a fellowship for a new Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2015 -
Getting Strong Now: Andrew Bujalski on Results
Andrew Bujalski’s first three features — Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax — were all more or less of a piece: illusorily casual 16mm portraits of young people in ambiguously comfortable stasis in, respectively, Boston, Brooklyn and Austin. Computer Chess, released in 2013, was a total UFO both in relation to his work and in relation to just about everything else. Film was out, but instead of clean digital, Bujalski shot on three 1969 SONY AVC-3260 cameras, its unfamiliar type of black-and-white grain making even denser a complicated comedy about a computer chess conference happening sometime in the late […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2015 -
15 Sexy Things You Get to Do When You Think Your Film is Finished
Okay, you’ve spent seven years making your indie opus, another two years playing the festival circuit, and somewhere along the way you even managed to sell your film and get distribution. Hooray, you’re done and the party’s over! Your goal by this point is undoubtedly to move on and start working on the next film. But, wait a second, just because you’ve “sold” your film and you “got” distribution doesn’t mean your job as a filmmaker is “done” (or that you need to stop using “air quotes”). On the contrary, you’re still staring at a 20-to-life sentence for your film. […]
by Dan Mirvish on Apr 28, 2015 -
The Need for Speed
It was sheer stupid curiosity, I’ll admit it, that lead me to Jupiter Ascending on a cold, sunny afternoon in early March. With a mixture of shame and defiance, I shelled out my 10 hard-earned dollars and entered the newly carpeted theater, where the movie began to play to a grand total of three souls. I had been intrigued by the terrible reviews, the sort that actually make a film sound interesting. The comparisons to Dune (although completely misplaced, in my book) helped with the allure, as did the notion that this was a cult film in waiting. There’s also […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Apr 28, 2015
