Winter 2022
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The Gigging Economy: Laura Parnes on Her Tour Without End
For more than 25 years, Laura Parnes’s multiplatform films, video installations and photographs have provoked and charmed audiences with genre-bending satirical narratives about teenage rites of passage gone terribly awry. From County Down, an episodic series about an epidemic of adult psychosis that coincides with a girl’s invention of a designer drug, to Blood and Guts in High School, which reimagines punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s titular book against the backdrop of early 1980s televised disasters, Parnes fuses comedy with pathos to probe social and political trauma. Her newest feature-length work, Tour Without End, has the feeling of an epic—think a […]
by Elisabeth Subrin on Jan 18, 2022 -
Hard Light and Shadows: Passing Cinematographer Edu Grau
Five weeks is not an unusually truncated preproduction period for a cinematographer on a modestly budgeted independent film like Passing. However, the interval between landing the gig and starting that work is typically longer than the time needed to pack a suitcase. That’s the extent of the notice Spanish DP Edu Grau had before hopping aboard the project—and a flight to New York—after a last-minute crew change left Passing director Rebecca Hall without a cinematographer on the eve of prep. “Rebecca called me on a Saturday, and I jumped on a plane the next day to start prepping the movie,” […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 18, 2022 -
Deep Cuts: Licorice Pizza Editor Andy Jurgensen
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films can all be described as “episodic” in various ways—some more explicitly than others. Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Inherent Vice are divided into subplots and adventures, but even more austere character portraits (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread) have a “and that’s when this happened…” bent. But Licorice Pizza, which follows the tumultuous flirtation between 15-year-old actor/entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and wayward 20-something Alana Kane (Alana Haim) against the backdrop of early-1970s San Fernando Valley, is the first to adopt a memory-based style, in which various sequences flow into each other like a series […]
by Vikram Murthi on Jan 18, 2022 -
An Image by Gina Telaroli
For the past 10 years, I’ve been making collage films that utilize and composite together found footage from movies (all eras, all genres!) and original footage that I shoot—a mix of the abstract (light, colors, shadows) and the concrete (flowers, paintings, landscapes)—on a wide variety of formats, most notably the many different models of BlackBerries that I’ve owned over the years. I had been working on a new film since an inspirational 2016 screening of Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, staring Theresa Russell. But just as pandemic events have caused people to abandon their homes, jobs and lovers, the last year […]
by Gina Telaroli on Jan 18, 2022 -
Commercial Breaks: How AVOD is Providing Independent Film Distribution Opportunities
As theatrical audiences continue to shrink due to COVID, DVD and Blu-ray sales wane and, for filmmakers, streamer licensing deals trend lower as companies prioritize original production, the film sales distribution business is transforming in real time. We’re now in the age of hybrid windowing, and with it a lot of head scratching and uncertainty. But hopeful independent filmmakers, sales agents and distributors are finding that one release model is generating unexpected upticks in revenue: AVOD (advertising-supported video on demand). “According to trade news and distributors I speak with, AVOD is one of the fastest growing categories and buyers for […]
by Tiffany Pritchard and Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
Hits and Misses, Pandemic Edition 2.0: Anthony Kaufman Breaks Down Six Sundance 2020 Films’ Theatrical Releases
According to Box Office Mojo, our contemporary plague ended on June 14, 2021—the last day the label “COVID-19 Pandemic” was included on its daily box office reporting. But don’t tell that to anyone trying to release a film in the second half of 2021, as viral variants spread widely across America, plunging the hopes of many filmmakers and distributors. Welcome to Pandemic: Year 2. The merciless persistence of the coronavirus and its wide-ranging impact on theatrical moviegoing and home viewing habits became more entrenched over the past several months—with indies on the losing end of the stick. Struggling to gain […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 18, 2022 -
The Wind is Your Enemy
Countless books, essays and stories have been written about legendary German director Werner Herzog—his various earthly escapades, his endless search for the ecstatic truth and, of course, his always entertaining meme-ability—which mostly make heavy-handed attempts at understanding that which is simply impossible to understand: What makes Herzog so unique? Even after spending two weeks alongside the man on the island of Lanzarote, I will not attempt to explain the unexplainable. I shot an interview with Herzog at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago in 2019. As someone described the video to him, he slowly turned toward me and extended his […]
by Curtis Matzke on Jan 18, 2022 -
Editor’s Letter
My 2020 pandemic purchase was a new LG TV, replacing the Samsung that was more than a decade old. The new TV is bigger, of course, but it’s also got way more “smart” features than the old one ever had. I don’t use an Apple TV or Roku, and I probably missed a step or two in the set-up process, but when I turn on the TV, I’m launched into a disorienting grid of dozens of channels offering everything from Johnny Carson reruns to celebrity cooking shows to, on NatureVision TV, “soothing, relaxing programs in crystal clear HD.” Oh, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
The (Approximately) 30 Movies of 2021 Shot on 35mm
As I began, for the eighth year in a row (!), to research the year’s U.S. releases shot in 35mm1, the two movie events I was personally anticipating didn’t primarily revolve around that format. One was Anthology Film Archives’s pandemic-delayed retrospective of Canadian experimental filmmaker, multihyphenate artist and all-round hero Michael Snow—initially scheduled for March 2020, finally screened in December and finished just before Omicron started surging around me. Most of his films were shot and shown on 16mm, making the few 35mm inclusions startling for their comparative, immediately perceptible sharpness and sheer volume. I went all in, taking a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 18, 2022 -
Freedom as a Preset: Joanne McNeil on Metaverses Past and Present
“What we’re selling is freedom,” says a digital media executive played by Demi Moore, of the promise of virtual worlds in Disclosure (1994). “We offer through technology what religion and revolution have promised but never delivered: freedom from the physical body; freedom from race and gender, from nationality and personality, from place and time.” Based on a Michael Crichton novel, the movie explores in classic Crichton fashion a theoretically possible but highly unlikely scenario—in this case, a 32-year-old single woman who sexually harasses her married 50-something male subordinate; it is also one of a number of features from the 1990s […]
by Joanne McNeil on Jan 18, 2022
