Summer 2017
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Revolutionary Memories and Defiant Promises
Late Fame In 1895, Arthur Schnitzler wrote Late Fame, a satirical novella about an obscure civil servant who arrives home one day to find an earnest young visitor informing him that Wanderings, a slim volume he published 30 years ago, is now a cult hit among the youth. In an ironic twist, the book itself disappeared for 100 years, only to be now rediscovered. Late Fame was written for the literary magazine Die Zeit, which wanted the manuscript cut down; after being laid aside for over a century, it was first published in Germany in 2014. The NYRB Classics original […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 16, 2017 -
Credit Risk: Student Debt’s Impact on Post-University Film Careers
“My credit isn’t what it used to be,” admits Fabian Euresti, who graduated from the film directing program at California Institute of the Arts in 2010. A child of farm laborers in the San Joaquin Valley, Euresti made shorts, including 2010’s Everybody’s Nuts, that have played at prestigious film festivals in Europe (Vienna, Oberhausen, Tampere) and the U.S. (Los Angeles, Full Frame), but he’s currently got more than $100,000 in student debt and remains without a steady job to pay it down. “Knowing what I know now,” says Euresti, “I would have been more diligent in procuring grants and scholarships […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jun 16, 2017 -
Beyond the Boundaries of Language
In recent memory, there’s been a never-ending deluge of bad news for the arts and humanities in the U.S.: government support, which is already low, may be cut entirely; universities, facing budget crises, have axed language and arts programs; prominent professors spend their time writing books defending the basic value of humanistic inquiry, while their pecuniary graduate students fight for poverty wages as adjuncts, and earn a little money on the side writing articles about their plight. In the midst of all this, I was struggling to put together a dissertation proposal — it was something on the history of […]
by Carmine Grimaldi on Jun 16, 2017 -
Something Sinister
As the industry and media have increasingly placed a spotlight on the filmic achievements of female directors, the recent rush of celebrated genre films masterminded by women — Julia Ducournau’s Raw, Alice Lowe’s Prevenge, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, among them — has been cited as a welcome phenomenon, but it’s not an altogether new one. A network of female-driven genre film festivals that celebrate the activities and influence of women in the genre cinema community have been running for, in some cases, decades. Filmmaker and programmer Briony Kidd says, drily, “The idea that it might […]
by Sean Malin on Jun 16, 2017 -
Making of the Murray Hustle
It might have seemed like an odd fit when I was brought in to help launch the new Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri’s esteemed School of Journalism in 2015. If one were to describe my films, such as Kate Plays Christine or Actress, the word “journalistic” isn’t likely to come to mind. Yet there I was, in the hallowed halls of the world’s oldest journalism school, working with Stacey Woelfel, a 30-year veteran of the institution, to build a new program from scratch. We wanted to create what Woelfel calls the “pirate radio […]
by Robert Greene on Jun 16, 2017 -
Parting Shot: Naomi Ackie
“A cheerful lass around town” is how actress Naomie Ackie describes herself on her Twitter account. It’s an ingratiatingly modest introduction that belies the sense of discovery surrounding this British actress who makes her feature debut in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth. Ackie, who studied at London’s Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, had a career in U.K. television (Doctor Who is a notable credit) before she was cast by Oldroyd to play the quietly observant maid in his microbudget adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 Russian novella, a role she imbues with an unexpected power. The success of the film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 16, 2017 -
Currents and Currencies
Ophélia Claude Chabrol was the first member of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd to direct a feature film with Le Beau Serge in 1958, and he scored the first box-office hit of the French New Wave with his second movie, Les Cousins (1959). Yet it took almost another 10 years for him to hit his commercial and critical stride with a series of thrillers (most notably La Femme Infidele, La Rupture and Le Boucher) that would firmly establish Chabrol as the most reliable genre stylist of his generation. In between were a series of flops and for-hire assignments, all of […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 16, 2017 -
Message From the Other Side
Matthew Heineman’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Cartel Land was a visceral cinematic journey into the Mexican drug wars, focusing on a pair of citizens hailing from both sides of the border who take vigilante action against the cartels. Heineman shot most of the movie himself, and his approach was to startle viewers with his level of access — he and his fellow shooters were in real danger — while, in postproduction, crafting his images, sounds and music with the emotional sweep of a narrative feature. Just two years after Cartel Land, Heineman has returned with another riveting doc, City of Ghosts, […]
by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus on Jun 16, 2017 -
Editor’s Letter
As a number of our filmmaker readers wrap up classes and prepare to head into their senior year, whether high school or college, the question of film school arises. What’s the utility of film school in a time in which the very notion of film — or, perhaps, work within the film industry — is changing so much? This issue, Filmmaker brings you a suite of articles looking at a number of issues facing film schools — and, by extension, their students — today. Calum Marsh considers a number of broad trends affecting schools in this time of disruption, from […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 16, 2017 -
Check Your Canon
The issue of diversity in the film canon — the movies celebrated and studied at film schools across the country — has come under hot debate in the past couple of years, with students starting conversations about the larger consequences of curricular omissions. “When I look at a syllabus and there’s no one from my perspective on there, I wonder if my ideas will be taken seriously by Hollywood or by any producer,” admits Zsaknor Powe, a junior studying film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “It really affects the artistic self-esteem of the students,” explains Powe, […]
by Whitney Mallett on Jun 16, 2017
