The Forbidden Room
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How to Cut a Trailer Redux: The Styles and Trends Reshaping the Art of Film Advertising
The following article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2020 print edition. We’re drowning in entertainment. Dozens of streamers, from mainstream catnip like Netflix and Disney+ to niche platforms like the Criterion Channel, each offer hundreds of feature films, limited series and TV shows. National theater chains like AMC and arthouse cinemas like the Alamo Drafthouse—at least before and hopefully after the pandemic—serve up fresh options every week on more than 40,000 screens. And legacy networks on basic cable, from NBC to TBS, continue to deliver a firehose of prerecorded content and live broadcasts every day. How to choose? Simple: […]
by Stephen Garrett on Jan 14, 2021 -
Tribeca 2016: Making Guy Maddin’s Seances Interactive
Watching Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s latest work Seances feels both familiar and utterly strange. Born from the knowledge that over 80% of silent movies have been lost, Maddin and his collaborators at the NFB wanted to resurrect as many titles — both real and invented — as possible: first in 2012 in production sessions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Phi Centre in Montreal that were open to the public, then last year in the feature film The Forbidden Room, and now in an interactive version called Seances that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes event and is […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 25, 2016 -
Previewing Berlinale 2015: Malick, Herzog, Panahi and More
Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 4, 2015 -
Cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke on Shooting Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room
Ben Kasulke has literally dozens of credits on his iMDb page, but running throughout his career are collaborations with two directors: Lynn Shelton and, more recently, Guy Maddin. And what’s remarkable is how different those collaborations are. With Shelton, Kasulke affects a seemingly casual, on-the-fly naturalism, never allowing his cinematography to deflect from the actors’ moments. With Maddin, however, Kasulke is working in service to an entirely different aesthetic, one in which a film’s look is part and parcel of its meanings. In Maddin’s work, Kasulke’s lensing takes us far away from the present, back to times when film both […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2015
