Winter 2024
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Lessons from the AI Filmmaking Rabbit Hole: Holly Willis on Teaching During Rapid Technological Change
I recently found myself sitting between three tech bros on my right and three cinephiles on my left. The film festival panel was meant to be a discussion about AI in the film industry; instead, it was an exasperating—if entertaining—demonstration of the radical gap in knowledge separating people who have some technical understanding of AI and those who don’t. There were tone-deaf proclamations about “generating content” and “optimizing workflows” on one side. And there was shouting, swearing, table-pounding, finger-pointing and (almost) tears on the other side, culminating in the announcement, “We’re very afraid!” I get it. AI has been foisted on […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 15, 2023 -
Creative Reactions: Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema on Oppenheimer
When it comes to the machinery of moviemaking, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema refuses to be constrained by the bounds of technological precedent. For van Hoytema, “That doesn’t exist” or “That’s never been done” isn’t the end of a conversation, but rather a puzzle to solve. Oppenheimer, a look into the life of the titular physicist (played by Cillian Murphy) and his role in the creation of the first atomic bomb, offered several such puzzles. To enable van Hoytema to capture macro shots in a water tank on gargantuan 15-perf 65mm IMAX cameras to depict physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s visions of […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 15, 2023 -
Behind Closed Doors: Production Designer Kevin Thompson on Maestro
In making Maestro, his magisterial portrait of Leonard Bernstein, Bradley Cooper set out to explore the life of the legendary American conductor and composer through the lens of his complicated relationship with wife Felicia Montealegre, which lasted from the 1940s until her death in 1978. Depicting their love story across four decades, two engagements and three children, Cooper—who directed, co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the biopic—often approached Maestro “as if he was conducting a musical symphony,” according to production designer Kevin Thompson. Envisioning its story in movements, Cooper opted for period shifts in color and black-and-white (both in a 1.33 […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 15, 2023 -
Tone and Rhythm: Editor Hilda Rasula on American Fiction
Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, a satire of the publishing world and modern race relations, stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an English professor and novelist frustrated by what he sees as the literary establishment’s exploitation of Black stereotypes for profit. To prove a point, Monk adopts a pseudonym, writes a book steeped in tired and offensive tropes and jokingly sends it off to publishers. Much to his chagrin, the book becomes a massive hit. But before Monk can unmask himself, a family tragedy leads him home, where the financial needs of his ailing mother (Leslie Uggams) compel him to […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 15, 2023 -
Progress in Small Steps: Camera and Lighting Technology Trends in 2023
Commercial theatrical projection for most folks is an afterthought. A DCP gets loaded into a playout server, sound levels checked, curtains adjusted, and everything is good to go. This testifies to the efficacy of the two-decade old DCP (Digital Cinema Package) container format. However, DCP adoption was not always smooth sailing. In 2009, a necessary DCP revamp complicated the industry’s transition away from 35mm. The original “Interop” specification, which had only been provisional, was superseded by a set of standardized specifications from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). Interop supported only one frame rate, 24 fps, but […]
by David Leitner on Dec 15, 2023 -
The Art of Angling: The Making of Rose Troche’s Classic Microbudget Lesbian Love Story, Go Fish
1994’s Go Fish, Rose Troche’s smart, punked-out work of guerilla filmmaking, combined a playful take on lesbian dating with discursive dialogues around gender politics and the cultural history of gay female representation. Part of the late ’80s and early ’90s low-budget boom of what critic B. Ruby Rich dubbed New Queer Cinema—films such as Poison, Swoon, The Hours and Times, Born in Flames and The Watermelon Woman—the Chicago-set Go Fish finds hip college student Max (Guinevere Turner, also the film’s screenwriter and producer) in a romantic rut and set up by friends with a hippie-ish older lesbian, Ely (V.S. Brodie). […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 15, 2023 -
Inner Soundtrack: Composer Jerskin Hendrix on Poor Things
Jerskin Fendrix’s 2020 album Winterreise wends through a bog of squelchy pop textures—discordant bursts of rubbery noise, percussion lines that sound banged-out rather than played, synthesizers overextended to within an inch of their lives. Upbeat melodies and Dada sloganeering are punctuated by dirge-like ambient burbles. Speaking from his home in England, the Brixton-bred Fendrix still seems surprised that Yorgos Lanthimos “just happened to hear” it when seeking a composer for his fantasy/sex comedy/road picture/existential bildungsroman Poor Things. For his first screen credit, Fendrix builds on those tonal disjunctures, translating cinematic themes into musical ones. Supplied with a script and a […]
by Charles Bramesco on Dec 15, 2023 -
The 29 Features Shot, In Whole or In Part, on 35mm in U.S. Release Year 2023
During the NBA playoffs this year, a Miller Lite commercial unexpectedly compelled my attention. The frames’ edges were rounded, the images’ scratches conspicuous—this was either shot on film or trying very hard to look like it. Further digging confirmed the spot (title: “You Never Forget”) was shot on 35mm, perhaps in keeping with its nostalgic world of bars with CD jukeboxes and cathode-ray TVs. I’d often read over the past decade that commercials and music videos have been using celluloid with increasing frequency; collating this year’s (tenth!) annual edition of U.S.-released features shot in whole or part on 35mm [2014, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 15, 2023 -
The Passionate Epicures: The Taste of Things Director Tran Anh Hung Interviewed by Frederick Wiseman
A long-gestating passion project for Tran Anh Hung, The Taste of Things takes as its starting point Marcel Rouff’s eccentric, echt-French novel The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet, which follows Dodin-Bouffant in the wake of the death of his longtime cook and occasional sexual companion Eugénie. For his adaptation, Hung retains a few of the book’s incidents but otherwise chooses to tell the story of Dodin-Bouffant and Eugénie’s life before the novel starts. A period romance set in 1889, Taste begins with a lengthy sequence of pure cooking—when I saw the film at Cannes, a woman behind me moaned […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 15, 2023 -
Hits & Misses: How Six Sundance 2023 Titles Performed in Distribution
After nearly flatlining during the pandemic years, American independent film saw some signs of life in 2023. While optimists might call it a year of transition as the industry looks for new audiences and a new equilibrium, cynics see an unsustainable and contracting arthouse marketplace, with most producers and distributors increasingly unable to recoup. But, if you look at the fates of last year’s Sundance titles, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. For all the doom and gloom about the acquisitions market (“No one is buying films!”), 10 out of 12 films in this year’s Dramatic Competition […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Dec 15, 2023
