Winter 2016
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Now It’s Dark: Robert Eggers on The Witch
Read about Robert Eggers’s staggeringly accomplished first feature, The Witch, winner of the 2015 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Best Director Prize, and the first thing you’ll learn about is the writer/director’s obsession with authentic detail. As he has explained in articles like the one Filmmaker published when selecting him for our 2014 25 New Faces list, the writer/director developed his 1630s-set story of a Puritan family under attack by a witch living in a nearby forest from not just period fairy tales but diaries, court records and other primary source materials. He wrote his dialogue in the Caroline-era English of the […]
by Robin Carolan on Jan 20, 2016 -
The Pre-Fight: Arnaud Desplechin on My Golden Days
Arnaud Desplechin invigorates through assault tactics: aggressive camera movement, even more aggressively fragmented editing, seemingly irreconcilable musical cues that butt chromatic classical cues up against golden age hip-hop, a university library’s worth of citations and allusions. His films are scarcely less restless than their characters, who chafe against themselves and others. In his 1996 breakthrough My Sex Life…or How I Got Into an Argument, Desplechin promoted Mathieu Amalric from supporting bit player (in 1992’s La Sentinelle) to his regular onscreen alter-ego. A philosophy graduate student adept at tormenting both himself and girlfriend Esther (Emmanuelle Devos) while putting off completing his […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 20, 2016 -
Long-Term Care: How to Archive Your Film
Your film is done. Audiences have laughed and cried while watching it. You got a week-long run in New York and Los Angeles. Soon your aunt in Springfield will be able to watch it on Netflix and have a strained telephone conversation about how “interesting” it is. On to the next project! Not so fast. You need to archive your film now. Put down your storyboard for your next picture and help preserve your old one first. The Film Foundation estimates that “one half of all films made before 1950, and over 80 percent made before 1929 are lost forever.” […]
by Sergio Andrés Lobo-Navia on Jan 20, 2016 -
Editor’s Letter
I met with a director recently, and as I sat down I asked him about the small book he was reading, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. It’s a philosophical book about climate change, and the thesis is that we’ve passed a tipping point in terms of our relationship with our planet. We’re on the other side — we’re screwed — and we must not only learn to adapt but also to reorganize within new political, social and cultural institutions. We will have to do this in purely practical ways, author Roy Scranton argues, but also in terms of storytelling. We […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2016 -
Reality, Boxed and “The New China”
Dropkick.sh Our lives are becoming a game of measures and countermeasures, our daily journeys an assortment of micro-decisions as we alternately dispense and protect our most private information. But while some of us may consent to Internet tracking in order to improve our “advertising experience,” none of us wants to be recorded taking a shower or having sex in an Airbnb. Linux and Mac users can download Dropkick.sh, a script that disables the webcams some hosts have installed to keep tabs on their apartment renters. (https://julianoliver.com/output/log_2015-12-18_14-39) Google Cardboard With Oculus Rift slower to take hold in the consumer world and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2016 -
Family Plot: David Lowery Interviews Krisha Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults
One of the most impressive debuts of this year, Trey Edward Shults’s Krisha — the story of a recovering alcoholic thoroughly derailed by the pressure-cooker of her sister’s Thanksgiving Day dinner — is a work of astonishing performances, formal control, filmmaking ambition and, finally, deep emotional wisdom. It’s a movie that has all the dramatic pyrotechnics one expects from the “home for the holidays” sub-genre, but, loosely based on a true story about one of Shults’s actual relatives, is suffused with a real understanding about issues of addiction and recovery, regret, and the difficulties of being and feeling accepted. Winner […]
by David Lowery on Jan 20, 2016 -
Indie Housewarming
When IFP Minnesota was deciding whose name to place above the exhibition galleries in its new space in St. Paul’s Vandalia Tower, executive director Andrew Peterson and its board of directors didn’t go the obvious route. There’s not a corporate sponsor logo in sight. Instead, the organization named the gallery after two local photographers, Ann Marsden and Gus Gustafson, both of whom were avid chroniclers of the Minneapolis/St. Paul arts community before they each passed away in recent years. Along with IFP Minnesota’s offices, four classrooms and two editing suites, the Marsden/Gustafson gallery opened to the public and members this […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2016 -
Killers in Italy and the Forest
Wake Up and Kill A seminal crime movie from one of Italy’s most important and underrated directors of the 1960s, Wake Up and Kill represents a fascinating intersection between the neorealist films that preceded it and the explosion of Italian genre fare to follow. Directly inspired by then-recent headlines, the picture tells the story of Luciano Lutring (Robert Hoffmann), an armed robber known as the “machine gun soloist,” who committed over a hundred heists in Italy and France. In real life, Lutring became a sort of folk hero, but in director Carlo Lizzani’s riff on events that had taken place […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2016 -
Rep Reborn, Downtown: The Story Behind NYC’s Metrograph Theater
Though NYC is one of the best places in America to see repertory cinema, the number of theaters in the city has decreased greatly over the decades. That’s as true for rep houses as it is for first-run venues; the Metrograph will be programming in both fields. When the two-screen venue opens in March, it’ll be the first new independent movie theater to open in Manhattan in a decade; fittingly, it sits across the street from the long-boarded up Loew’s Canal Theatre. On a mid-December day, founder Alexander Olch, CEO Ethan Oberman and programming and artistic director Jake Perlin walk […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 20, 2016 -
The Orchard Ripens
One of the busier buyers at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, The Orchard — per its website, a “21st-century distribution company with a global presence and a local feel” — has only recently made a name for itself as an arthouse distributor. Founded in 1997, they’ve been known as a leading distribution label for independent music; to date, digital music sales, streams and transactions from titles The Orchard oversees have accounted for 20 to 30 percent of all digital music revenue. But recently, The Orchard garnered media attention for its newly created film division, a division that applies the lessons […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 20, 2016
