I’m not sure whether or not Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a masterpiece, but I’m certain that it warrants being compared to quite a few films that are. The one that immediately sprang to mind when the lights came up was The Godfather. With The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola took the gangster movie and attempted to expand its emotional range and social and political themes without sacrificing the visceral pleasures of genre filmmaking. Guadagino’s Suspiria attempts to do something similar with the horror film, with a startling degree of success. Here is a curious fact of film history. Though horror movies […]
by Larry Gross on Sep 17, 2018#Tribeca2017 came to a close last night, after a final day of screenings dominated by the many winners from both Thursday evening’s award ceremony, held at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Saturday evening’s audience award announcement. Among the dozens of awards the festival gives out, Rachel Israel’s New York-set romantic comedy Keep the Change, which centers on an autistic couple, took home the Founder’s Award for Best Narrative Feature, while Elina Psykou’s Son of Sofia took home the Best International Narrative Feature prize. Elvira Lind’s Bobbi Jene, already a favorite in these parts, swept the documentary prizes for Feature, […]
by Brandon Harris on May 1, 2017This graphics-heavy analysis of a key scene from The Godfather juxtaposes images with the script directions, along with on-screen annotations and an audio assist from a Francis Ford Coppola interview.
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 11, 2017Legendary film editor, sound designer, writer, translator, amateur astronomer and director Walter Murch needs no introduction. (Oh, what the hell, his credits include The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tetro and more.) In addition to being a great filmmaker, he’s also a great teacher and talker about film. Here, at the 2013 Sheffield Doc Fest, where he accompanied the doc, Particle Fever, he gives an inspiring speech on film editing, technology, audience expectation, how film grammar is changing with digital technologies, and physics. Don’t miss this.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 23, 2014Gordon Willis is one of the truly great cinematographers of the second half of the 20th century, the man responsible for shooting everything from Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather to such lesser-known (but also brilliantly lensed) movies such as Hal Ashby’s The Landlord and Alan Arkin’s Little Murders. In the second of our ongoing series of exclusive Craft Truck videos, Willis talks about the approach he took to lighting Marlon Brando in the iconic opening scene of The Godfather.
by Nick Dawson on Aug 8, 2013In what is easily the most informative internet message board thread I’ve ever come across, “birth – Harris Savides,” which was started on Cinematography.com by a young man you may have heard of named Jody Lipes on November 1, 2004, the conversation turns around midway through to the aggressive underexposure used by Savides on Birth (pictured above). One of the forum’s members, who claimed to have worked on Birth, explained that Savides underexposed the film two stops, and then pulled it two additional stops, netting a total underexposure of four stops – which seems to have sent the head of […]
by Zachary Wigon on Oct 12, 2012