The Childhood of a Leader
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Shadows Under Strain: DP Lol Crawley and the Cipher of Vox Lux
When it comes time to “punish” the image of a film, say with filtration, grease (generously applied to the front of the lens), or underexposure, cinematographers regress from their dear and safe technical jargon and assume the barbarous dialect of medieval executioners. They don’t just underexpose their picture to see how it reacts under strain, they “suffocate” it, “break” it, and “destroy” it — sometimes in spite of itself. The digital image is nary embraced and mostly worked against, its sterile lines deliberately corroded and beaten to a duller moosh. Cinematographer Lol Crawley BSC (Ballast, 45 Years) tortures the film […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jan 21, 2019 -
Fabled: The Childhood of a Leader
Youthful innocents relish playing the part of amateur cartographer for school assignments, drawing prats, or, even more fun, molding contours from papier-mache. Seven-year-old Prescott (Tom Sweet), the subject of Brady Corbet’s astonishing debut feature, The Childhood of a Leader, is no innocent. The film, adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story of the same title and co-scripted by Norwegian Mona Fastvold, charts his rocky path from angel in his church’s Nativity play to one of the signature faces of the diabolical: totalitarianism. The scene in which the boy slides his fingers across a wall map of Europe just as it was […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jul 21, 2016 -
Toronto, Camden and Venice
TORONTO by Scott Macaulay High Rise has long been considered one of the J.G. Ballard’s most “adaptable” books, with the author’s dispassionate meditations on disassociation, inner and outer space, and the psychologies and paraphilias unleashed by 20th-century life encased within the sturdy confines of a modern apartment building and a class-based tale of survival. Nonetheless, High Rise has taken decades to reach the screen, despite the attachments of numerous directors, including Vincenzo Natali, Bruce Robinson and, revealed producer Jeremy Thomas at a talk at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, interest from Nicolas Roeg. Premiering at the festival in Platform, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 28, 2015
