Spring 2019
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Digital Haves and Have-Nots: Disappearing SVOD Deals and Independent Film
Subscription streaming services are dominating the independent film marketplace—in more ways than you think. Yes, Amazon dropped nearly $50 million at Sundance to buy several movies, and Netflix spent another $25 million in the days and weeks that followed. Beyond inflating acquisition costs over industry norms, the outsized influence of the over-the-top new media giants are affecting all sectors of the distribution business. Some industry veterans suggest this isn’t so different from previous bullish markets when well-heeled specialty divisions like the Weinstein Company or Fox Searchlight drove up prices. “Sundance has been competitive for years, so I’m not sure it’s […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Mar 14, 2019 -
When 2019 Was the Future
The artist David Levine once staged reenactments of memorable film scenes at their original locations in Central Park. A performer ran laps around the reservoir in a nod to the opening of Marathon Man, while stand-ins for Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis acted out the Cracker Jack scene in The Out-of-Towners by the Trefoil Arch. Scenes from The Royal Tenenbaums, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm and Portrait of Jennie, among others, were underway elsewhere in the park. The performances were unmarked, and some were more discernibly theatrical than others. Period clothes or the spectacle of a confrontation played and replayed in intervals could tip […]
by Joanne McNeil on Mar 14, 2019 -
Locked in Rage: Writer/Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre on The Mustang
A wild horse is captured, transported to a prison facility where he will be “broken,” or trained, in a program that doubles as a form of therapy for the inmates inside. A broken man is released from solitary confinement into the main population, where his ability to banish his anger is dependent on the relationship he forges with that horse, a brilliant brown mustang. The Mustang, the first feature from Paris-born, LA-based filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, is an artfully restrained, quietly moving film built around the most elemental of oppositions: freedom vs. imprisonment, man vs. animal, violence vs. self-control. And […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019 -
Moonshot: Todd Douglas Miller on Apollo 11
Todd Douglas Miller’s Apollo 11, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, originated from the simple idea of using archival footage to revisit, in time for its 50th anniversary, the first moon landing. For those who’ve grown up watching the same images trotted out over and over—Neil Armstrong bouncing on the moon, a burning ring of fire propelling itself backwards toward Earth as Apollo leaves the planet—the premise seems tedious and redundant, an ossified staple of Baby Boomer montages regularly intercut alongside clips of Woodstock and the Vietnam War, now freshly recharged by nationalistic rumblings about a space force. And as […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 14, 2019 -
Audiences in the Sky: How to Sell Your Film to the Airlines
In 1996, flying home from Slamdance, I was stuck on the tarmac at the Salt Lake City airport in a blizzard. After an hour and a half, a Sundance actor and I tried to talk the flight attendants into playing a VHS tape of my film Omaha (The Movie) in the cabin. They were happy to but said we had to clear it with the pilot and led us into the cockpit. The pilot thought it was a cool idea, too, but ultimately wondered whether the corporate office might object and decided he probably shouldn’t play the film. To this […]
by Dan Mirvish on Mar 14, 2019 -
Breathe Deep
“I prefer placing the perceptual, intuitive, emotional and spiritual growth of the student at the center.” That’s the succinct teaching statement of Pablo Frasconi, a soft-spoken, thoroughly grounded filmmaker and faculty colleague of mine in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has developed a three-course sequence that helps students engage in a form of creativity based on quieting the mind. “Mindfulness and meditation are central,” Frasconi explains. “It is where these classes begin: by looking inward to discover the ’moving visual thinking’ and ’song of the cells’—as Stan Brakhage called these experiences—that is our […]
by Holly Willis on Mar 14, 2019 -
No Money, No Problem?
They’re the two most beautiful words in the cinematic language: tax credits. Almost no one who practices the seventh art got into it to learn about business; if anything, they got into it to avoid it altogether. Alas, it’s almost impossible to participate in the most expensive art form without being at least semi-fluent in business jargon. State film tax incentives are a crucial part of most American films’ financing these days, be they giant Marvel productions filming in incentive-rich Atlanta or a tiny indie shooting in Albuquerque, mere miles from the set of Better Call Saul. As of this […]
by Matt Prigge on Mar 14, 2019 -
Memories of Jamaica
Black Mother, Khalik Allah’s follow-up to Field Niggas, finds the photographer/filmmaker in Jamaica, examining his family’s story and his relationship to the island as a whole. Structured as three “trimesters,” the film takes root in Allah’s complex relationship to Jamaica and his love for the land and its people, which unavoidably meets concerns over its colonial past and neocolonial present. A mixture of Super 8, 16mm, old family films and shiny new digital, Black Mother is a first-person stream-of-visual-consciousness tone poem, drawing intuitive connections across an entire country’s history and culture. While shooting, Allah didn’t take any photos, but his […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 14, 2019 -
Troubling the Desktop
In an age when digital screens mediate hours of daily existence, it seems logical to turn that experience into the basis for a movie. Low-budget narrative features like Unfriended and Searching are widely known examples of desktop cinema, but the approach flourishes in a range of other practices, from YouTube videos (Klaire fait grr…) to experimental media art (Nick Briz, Foundland Collective). Our own desktop cinema practice deals with it specifically as documentary, starting with Kevin’s 2014 video Transformers: The Premake and leading into our current project, Bottled Songs, a feature-length investigation of online terrorist media. Leading a workshop with […]
by Chloe Galibert-Laine and Kevin B. Lee on Mar 14, 2019 -
Distant Locations
Deciding where to shoot a movie can be one of the most consequential decisions a filmmaker can make. There are numerous and obvious reasons, but when deciding how to allocate resources, location is one of the most pressing riddles to solve. “Put your money on the screen” is a mantra producers mutter in their sleep; the meaning, of course, is to prioritize expenses that will discernibly make the final film better, avoiding big spends that are invisible to the eye of the audience. Despite where a script takes place on the page, it’s no secret that artful filmmaking can often […]
by Kishori Rajan on Mar 14, 2019
