Under the Skin
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Without Words
Although it’s too early to designate this a golden age of film editing, examples of unexpected, creative and sometimes flat-out radical cutting continue to suggest that the digital turn in cinema has always been, at its fundamental and structural level, about new possibilities for joining together images and sound. This column will explore the rhythms of editing in films that are exemplary — each in their own way — in the manipulation of time and space that is the foundation of editing. First up is the remarkable, wordless 13-minute-plus opening of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, which recalls René Clair’s […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jan 21, 2015 -
2014: The Year in Movers, Shakers and Standout Scenes
Last year I skirted around the issue of a Top 10 list by highlighting my 10 favorite scenes of the year, my logic hovering somewhere above “What is an effective film, if not the sum of its parts?” This year, I’m not so sure that axiom stands. Whether or not you regard it as the masterpiece it may or may not be, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has unimpeachably proved to be *the* film of 2014. I was fortunate it enough to see it in its best possible setting: front row at the Paramount Theater at SXSW, where a sizable chunk of the audience was hometown cast and crew. […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Dec 18, 2014 -
Cinema Eye Honors Announces 2015 Heterodex Nominees
The Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking today announced the five nominees for its annual Cinema Eye Heterodox Award, sponsored by Filmmaker Magazine, a publication of IFP. The Cinema Eye Heterodox Award honors a narrative fiction film that imaginatively incorporates nonfiction strategies, content and/or modes of production. The five films nominated this year for the Cinema Eye Heterodox Award are: Boyhood directed by Richard Linklater Heaven Knows What directed by Josh and Benny Safdie A Spell to Ward off the Darkness directed by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell Stop the Pounding Heart directed by Roberto Minervini Under the Skin directed […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 8, 2014 -
Load & Play
12 O’Clock Boys Oscilloscope Laboratories — Aug. 5 Lotfy Nathan’s debut documentary gets up close and unsentimental with preteen Pug, whose only dream is to join the title crew of Baltimore’s weekend motorbike and four-wheeler riders. It’s a physically dangerous spectacle and a law-baiting traffic hazard for the city, but in Nathan’s NFL Films-style super-slow-mo it’s also a majestic procession and one-day release from systemic economic inequity and urban racial division. 12 O’Clock Boys sets four years of Pug’s life against the danger and thrill of his stunting idols’ most questionably liberating processions. — Vadim Rizov Under the Skin Lions […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 17, 2014 -
The One-Cam: Under the Skin’s Customized CCD Camera
Eventually we’ll stop posting about Under The Skin but today is not that day. Last month, I ran a featurette from A24 about the film’s guerrilla style execution. The production rigged Johansson’s vehicle with eight hidden cameras, recording her improvised interactions with any given passerby in real time and with maximum coverage. Now, we have yet another featurette that gets into the specifications of said cameras, called “One-Cams,” which were developed especially for the occasion. For the van sequences, the VFX studio One of Us rigged a CCD camera (about the size of a GoPro) with anamorphic super 16 lenses. Though the rest of the […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 30, 2014 -
Under The Skin and the Problem with the Adjective “Kubrickian”
As unclassifiable and startlingly original as promised, Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin has an obvious experiential agenda. Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed alien rides around Glasgow, picking up men, bringing them back to her pad for sex, then harvesting them for meat. As sound designer Johnnie Burn told Ashley Clark in an interview Filmmaker published earlier this month, the intensely fussed-over sound mix literally took years. In the mall, at the club or on the street, different snatches of ambient sound compete for attention, with normally unexamined noises briefly coming to the fore. The movie is totally successful at defamiliarizing ordinary actions […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2014 -
The Limits of Supernatural Subversions: Under The Skin and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
The following essay contains spoilers. As far as premises go, Under The Skin’s most alluring intimation of Scarlett Johansson rolling around the slick Glasgow streets, seducing men left and right, is actually not as titillating as it sounds – unless you’re one for inverted gender plays (not for nothing is she perched behind the wheel of a predatorial white van). Each would-be sex scene instead succumbs to alien interpretation. As smoothly as she rolls down the car window, inquiring after irrelevant directions, Johansson’s Laura takes the man in question not to bed, but to another dimension. She moves backward on […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 3, 2014 -
“Groundbreaking Work Often Sits at the Boundaries of Technology”: Sound Designer Johnnie Burn on Under The Skin
It’s unlikely many films released this year will lean as heavily on sound design for their overall impact as Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name. The director’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s Birth is a warped, haunting melange of sci-fi and cinema vérité which reinvents Hollywood siren Scarlett Johansson as a blank-eyed, cold-hearted alien with a cut-glass English accent. The alien shores up in the Scottish highlands and embarks on an implacable quest which involves cruising around in a white van, looking for hapless local men to “seduce.” Under The […]
by Ashley Clark on Apr 2, 2014 -
Behind The Scenes Featurette on Under The Skin’s Guerrilla Filmmaking
Expect to be hearing a lot more from me on Under The Skin in the ensuing weeks. The film is pretty much flawless. One of its innumerable exciting aspects extends beyond the glossy finished product, and into its production. Director Jonathan Glazer and his team rigged Scarlett Johansson’s abduction vehicle with eight cameras, allowing her to freely cruise the Glasgow streets and lure actual pedestrians to her van. They’d drop her in a mall, a busy intersection, and let the scene unfold before their very eyes. In the above featurette, Glazer, Johansson and producer James Wilson discuss the film’s guerrilla production, among […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 18, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin Starring Scarlett Johansson
If you’ve been wondering where on God’s green earth Jonathan Glazer has been for the last decade, then April should be a very fine month for you. Come the 4th, A24 will release Under The Skin, the Englishman’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s Birth. As transparently plotted as that Nicole Kidman-starrer was, Glazer (with significant assistance from Harris Savides) demonstrated a clean handle on its foreboding mood, a trait that has apparently carried over to his latest. In this teaser, cut by Glazer himself, we can barely glimpse Scarlett Johansson’s extraterrestrial stalker for more than a second a piece, but the atmosphere pulses […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 30, 2014
