Spring 2024
-
Work Life Balance: The Feeling That the Time For Doing Something Has Passed Director Joanna Arnow Interviewed by Isabel Sandoval
“The film isn’t about you,” Joanna Arnow tells her parents at the beginning of 2013’s i hate myself :). “You’re secondary characters.” Her mother Barbara responds, “We know who the primary character is,” with a smile that’s half-loving, half-exasperated. Across a body of work that’s grown to include the Berlinale-awarded 2015 short Bad at Dancing, 2019’s follow-up Laying Out and now her first narrative feature, The Feeling That the Time For Doing Something Has Passed, Arnow has placed herself front and center in a variety of increasingly stylized modes. i hate myself :) was a documentary portrait of Arnow’s then-relationship […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 18, 2024 -
Notes from Inside the Ecosystem: Joanne McNeil on Apple Vision Pro
From the late aughts until pre-pandemic times, Apple’s presence in my life seemed concise and easy to recognize. It manufactured the phone in my pocket and the laptop I worked on. I picked an iPhone and a MacBook over the alternatives for the usual reasons: because Apple products were reliable and well-designed with intuitive user interfaces. The company, as a product manufacturer, appeared to have a vastly different purpose than the neighboring Silicon Valley empires extracting and monetizing data like Google and Facebook. Something changed in recent years. Now, when I think of Apple, I think of the AirTags I […]
by Joanne McNeil on Mar 18, 2024 -
Editor’s Letter
A red flag when speaking with a first-time director of an independent film, I feel, is an overconcern with the market. There are directors who want to tell their stories and be uncompromising, but they worry the film won’t be market-friendly enough and won’t sell, and that their future career may be compromised. So, they make the changes preemptively: There’s the film the director really wanted to make, and maybe that will be the next film, but meanwhile they begin writing their debut under a cloud of internalized self-censorship. You know the outcome: The indie, not-too-bold, “market-friendly” film, trying as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2024 -
Every Six Hours
The film and TV industry has been through a lot these past four years, including the start of a pandemic and two strikes. Then, there’s inflation, one of the causes of another issue: skyrocketing food prices. That means that on-set catering, an oft-overlooked but important part of any production, has been hit with a triple whammy. There are other matters as well—food quality, increasing focus on dietary restrictions, waste. As productions get back to work post-strikes, caterers—and those who hire and eat from them—are juggling a return to normal and new challenges. Set caterers are responsible not only for lunch—which, […]
by Matt Prigge on Mar 18, 2024 -
A Blurring of the Real: Damon Packard, Documentary Archival Footage and Generative AI
A crowd of people, animals and AI-generated beings sleeps in a movie theater. Faces are lit by the explosions of an atom bomb on screen. All we hear is the loud snoring of hundreds of people and the sounds of their bodies moving; a nondescript rodent crawls on the floor. We cut to the 70mm IMAX projection room, where the projectionist is also sleeping. The camera moves very slowly, but each shot morphs within itself at a faster pace. These two visual rhythms are layered on top of each other. The explosions on screen intensify; a panic sets in. We […]
by Deniz Tortum on Mar 18, 2024 -
Did You See (and Hear) That? Why Home Viewing Can Be Dark and Inaudible
If the most frequently used pejoratives for contemporary films—“dim,” “muddy,” “inaudible”—are to be believed, we’ve entered a literal dark age of cinema, with cinematographic and sonic tools pushing filmmakers to ever-greater depths of audiovisual obscurity. For more than a decade, Christopher Nolan has incurred the wrath of audiences who prefer their dialogue clearly audible.1 Five years ago, the Game of Thrones episode “The Long Night” propelled the topic of the visual “New Darkness” into mainstream discourse. That this seemingly unsustainable state of affairs has persisted for as long as it has is, to many outside observers, perplexing. Why haven’t we […]
by Devan Scott on Mar 18, 2024
