Seattle filmmaker David Russo, one of Filmmaker's "25 New Faces of Independent Film," has begun work on his debut feature, #2, with the support of the Northwest Film Forum and it's "Start to Finish" grant. The grant was previously awarded to Robinson Devore's Police Beat, which was one of the best features to premiere at Sundance this past year. Russo's award-winning shorts include "Populi" and "Pan with Us."

Russo calls the movie "a janitor movie par excellance, designed to be wildly entertaining as it is meaningful. It's about some hardworking, invisible misfits at the waste end of our wasteful society being subject to an unimaginable, unintended consequence of our bizarre new era. It's a visually bold comedy built on a fugue of themes that burst into poignancy by the end."

Regarding the grant itself, here's what the press release reports: " In addition to a cash grant of up to $20,000 and assistance in all aspects of fundraising, the grant entails an offer of unlimited use of its production (studios & rehearsal space, cameras, lights, sound recording, etc.) and post-production resources. NWFF also donates the time and expertise of Executive Director Michael Seiwerath, who serves as Executive Producer on the film, and Studio Director Dave Hanagan, who acts as a coordinator with local film vendors."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/27/2005 09:54:00 AM Comments (10)

One of my favorite artist/photographer/music video directors, Floria Sigismondi, has massively updated her website with news of her forthcoming photography book, Immune (click through the opening image to get to photos from the book), as well as streamed versions of many of her videos, including her recent clip for The White Stripe's "Blue Orchid.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/25/2005 03:34:00 PM Comments (0)

The Boston Globe ran today this obituary for experimental filmmaker, documentarian, and teacher Mark LaPore, who died September 11 in Boston.

LaPore's newest film (pictured at right), Kolkata, will premiere next week at the New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant Garde."
From the piece:

"Mark McElhatten, cocurator of the Views from the Avant-Garde program of the New York Film Festival, described Mr. LaPore's films as ''unique, a form of visual anthropology but equally about the mystery of being and film as consciousness. These uncompromising films have enormous integrity and deserve a very important place within the entire history of film.'"

For the generation after him, LaPore was known for both his filmmaking but also his teaching. For many younger experimental filmmakers, LaPore was a seminal creative catalyst. Film and videomaker Erica Beckman taught at MassArt with LaPore and is quoted in the piece.

"'Mark was an absolutely inspired and committed teacher,' said Beckman, a MassArt faculty member who designed the school's filmmaking curriculum with Mr. LaPore. 'Students far and wide have followed careers in filmmaking because of him. He was an absolute artist, and in the last few months of his life finished four new films.'"

Another filmmaker, Elisabeth Subrin, spoke of LaPore's influence on her:

"'I can't think of any other single person who changed the course of my life than Mark,' said Elisabeth Subrin, a professor of film who taught at Harvard before going to The Cooper Union in New York. 'It's impossible to understand the impact he has had on many important filmmakers who went through his program,' she said. 'In the study of cultures through films, Mark was really ahead of his time.'"

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/25/2005 02:58:00 PM Comments (8)

Filmmaker Cruz Angeles emailed about the website of Planet Ibsen, a film by his NYU-colleague Jonathan Wyche. And with so many American indies rehashing the same old family dramas or quirky tales of teen angst, I had to take special note of this film, which is a historical fantasia about the rivalry between August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.

From the website:

"Planet Ibsen is an extreme adaptation of A Doll's House play, written in 1879 by Henrik Ibsen. The story is told from the perspective of Ibsen's real-life antagonist, August Strindberg, who never met Ibsen, but yet he publicly blamed him for the loss of his wife, family, and career. In Planet Ibsen, Strindberg believes he is trapped inside Ibsen's A Dolls House and his only means of escape is to rewrite Ibsen's play in the attempt to revise his life."

Click to the site for bios and the film's trailer.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/25/2005 02:46:00 PM Comments (0)

Variety has an amusing (subscription only) piece by Nicole Laporte today about a bi-coastal party this past Thursday attended by 200 Miramax current and ex-staffers (pre-maturely dubbed "Mir-Anon's" by the trade paper). Held at Barney's Beanery in L.A. and a rooftop in downtown Manhattan, the evening marked for the distributor's staff the end of the Weinstein era.

From the piece:

"Rick Sands, a Miramax alum who's now chief operating officer at DreamWorks, planned to be there.

Asked if the Weinsteins knew about the soiree, Sands said, 'Absolutely not! They'll be the subject of conversation. They won't want to be there.'

(Not that anyone would ever have anything negative to say about the brothers.)

Of course, Miramax will live on -- sans the Weinsteins -- at Disney. 'Miramax is being reborn, there'll be a 'new' Miramax, like New Coke,' Sands said.

Sands said he planned on attending the festivities because, to him, the Miramax experience was "unlike any other."

'There's a commonality that people have because of the shared experience,' he says. 'It's something that stays with you. Maybe forever.'"

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/25/2005 02:23:00 PM Comments (0)

Perhaps my favorite doc this year is Garrett Scott and Ian Olds' Occupation Dreamland, which opened this weekend at the Cinema Village in New York along with screens in Portland, Boson, D.C., and Berkeley. It's an essential piece of filmmaking for anyone wanting to learn more about the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Scott, who was one of our "25 New Faces" back in 2002, and Olds previously collaborated on Scott's incredible short doc Cul de Sac. That earlier film used the story of one man's mental breakdown (the tale of a San Diego man who stole a tank and went on a destructive joyride before being shot and killed by police) to etch a portrait of a dislocated post-war middle class. This film looks at a contemporary younger generation and the clash between their own dreams of the future and our current administration's vision of a reordered and democratized Middle East.

Scott, Olds and Rumur Releasing are distributing the film grass-roots style, opening it up slowly in theaters around the country. They premiered in Fayetteville, North Carolina with free screenings for military families, a strategy which speaks to the film's respect for its subjects. In fact, the film's complexity and its respect for its subjects, the soldiers Scott and Olds were embedded with, give it an appeal across the political spectrum. (I watched it with a pro-war friend who was equally knocked out by the movie.) At the same time, its capturing of the eerie melancholy of military occupation, a life rhythm far removed from the MTV-warfare of other Iraq docs, make Occupation: Dreamland a film that's too subtle for many of the conventional doc outlets.

Filmmaker and writer Peter Hall was one of several people whose emails advocating the film landed in my inbox this week. Here's what he had to say:

"I am writing because I really believe in OPERATION DREAMLAND, which opens tonight at Cinema Village on 12th Street in New York. In July I broke my wrist in three places while bicycling to a screening for it, and the titanium plates I wear will forever remind me of the eagerness with which I headed downtown that night. I saw the movie a month later in considerable pain and found it both compelling and relaxed. OP DREAMLAND is an extremely honest movie, an exploration of a group of marines in Fallujah before the US blew the city up. It is NOT rhetorical, but it confronts the issues that concern most of us. I once had a close friend who was an apolitical party animal and whose ex-Marine dad shamed him into volunteering for one of our wars; I wish the people who made this movie had been around to listen to Frank before he died, capture his soul the way they have captured these young pro- and anti-warriors in the dust of Iraq. The distributors are no less excellent than the movie--Michael Galinsky and Sukie Hawley never lie in the movies they make and they deserve our support. Attending this movie on this, the opening weekend in NYC, will make a huge difference in how the rest of the country perceives it. Attending this movie will also affect you."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/25/2005 01:43:00 PM Comments (0)

David Denby has a good piece in the New Yorker this week, the rather self-explanatorily titled "The Moviegoer: Susan Sontag's life in film." He of course begins by discussing Sontag's 1995 essay, "A Century of Cinema," in which the late critic bemoaned not only the decline of international art cinema but the decline of cinephilia as a necessary intellectual and social endeavor in general. From there Denby jumps backwards, tracing the development of Sontag's thinking with regards to art and politics as it appears through the lens of the movies she championed.

In this passage, Denby hits on what seems to me to be a particularly acute observation about directors in general while discussing the artistic failures of Sontag's own two features, Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl:

"Sontag had run afoul of a banal but inescapable problem. A critic-aesthetician may campaign for the dissolution of realism in narrative, but there's no getting away from the glory and curse of the movies: cinema is a photographic medium in which people appear to be moving through real space in real time. That, of course, is an illusion, but the medium, apart from the genre of poetic experimental films, poses an immediate demand for authoritative representation that no other art is burdened by. The camera remorselessly revealed Sontag's inadequacy to represent anything at all. Watching Duet for Cannibals, with its clumsy sexual fantasias and its possible dream sequences, one understands that to be a good fantasist one first has to be a good realist."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/09/2005 12:01:00 PM Comments (4)

Independent Film Week is a NYC-wide promotional effort encouraging us to see more films at first-run independent theaters by providing an incentive of free concessions and free access to hear directly from filmmakers and actors about the process of making their movies. Produced by IFP, the weeklong celebration kicks off with the NY premiere of the Magnolia Pictures' release of Rodrigo Garcia's "Nine Lives" on Monday, September 19th. The week concludes with a retrospective and conversation with Glenn Close, one of the featured actors in Garcia's film, on Thursday, September 22nd. Independent Film Week is one of IFP's numerous initiatives designed to nurture the development of new work while expanding the audience for more filmmaker-driven projects. In total, film-goers will have an opportunity to attend six public events Monday, September 19th through Friday, September 23rd and redeem a promotional coupon at nine first-run theaters throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens to receive a free popcorn and soda with the purchase of a movie ticket.

www.independentfilmweek.com

# posted by Jay Milla @ 9/08/2005 01:09:00 PM Comments (0)

My first job in film was reading scripts for New Line Cinema. When I got rid of my old Epson desktop computer, which was a couple of years after I stopped reading, I counted the coverage files and realized that I read 1,300 scripts for the company over the few years I worked for them. And though that gig was some years in the past, I constantly hear news about writers whose name I recognize from decade-old scripts.

One such writer is Tom Benedek, an early script of whose I remember reading and liking. The New York Times has this piece in today's paper detailing Benedek's recent screenplay accomplishments. Using drafts of his 20-something unproduced scripts as his raw materials, Benedek is firing live ammunition into them and exhibiting them as art:

"After 20-plus years of a middling career as a Hollywood screenwriter, Mr. Benedek, 56 -- the brother of Peter Benedek, a partner in the United Talent Agency -- is forging a new path in the field of fine arts, using the raw material of his past failures for a canvas. Having shot the >Ivory Joe script, which he wrote in 1992, Mr. Benedek will make it into a bronze sculpture, or take photographs with a special camera for striking jumbo prints. He will show these and other pieces this month in an exhibition at the Frank Pictures gallery in Santa Monica titled 'Shot by the Writer - Works on Paper: 1982-2004.'

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/06/2005 11:40:00 PM Comments (0)

The composer Jon Brion, who has done scores for directors such as Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, and Paul Thomas Anderson, has been getting a lot of ink this week for his producing and arranging work on the new Kanye West album. Here's Rob Mitchum in Pitchfork Media, who compiles a 70-minute mixtape designed to update you on Brion's eclectic body of work.

From the piece:

"The most talked about man in music right now is Kanye West, whose recently-released Late Registration album is already one of the most prominent critical battlefields of 2005. It's no shocker that an expert self-promoter like Kanye is currently smiling out from every magazine and newspaper, but humbly caught up in the publicity cross-winds is a surprising figure: Jon Brion, the L.A. producer/film composer/multi-instrumentalist. It's practically a rule that Brion, who has production credits on 11 of 16 Late Registration tracks, must be mentioned by the second paragraph of every review, and much of the credit, or blame, for the album's lush, adventurous production is being sent his way, to varying degrees of accuracy.

I've been obsessed with Brion since catching one of his weekly Friday night sets at Los Angeles club Largo. Expecting little more than the standard Piano-Man act, I was instead treated to my head being blown off by a 20-minute improvisation involving a good half-dozen keyboards, samplers, a record player, some sort of cymbal/vibraphone hybrid, and occasional interjections of Brion's wounded-pitch vocals. And then he took an audience request for "Cortez the Killer", and my heart exploded."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/06/2005 11:18:00 PM Comments (1)

Matthew Barney, whose Cremaster film series was the cover story in the Spring 2003 issue of Filmmaker, has completed a new feature with a soundtrack composed by his wife, Bjork. The 150-minute-long film, Drawing Restraint 9 premieres this week in the Horizons section of 62nd Venice International Film Festival; it will also screen at the forthcoming Toronto International Film Festival.

According to the Web site of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, which recently concluded a retrospective of Barney's Drawing Restraint series -- a project he has worked on continuously since 1987 -- Drawing Restraint 9 "is an abstract fairy tale carried by striking visuals and music (much like opera), which draws its inspiration from Japanese cultural tradition, the history of petroleum-based energy, and the evolution of the whale. Framed within the Japanese whaling tradition, the story draws an elliptical connection between prehistoric fossil fuel, the prehistoric land mammal as a pre- condition for the modern whale, whale oil as a primary energy source, and the contemporary condition of the diesel fueled factory ship."


Bjork's Web site immodestly describes Drawing Restraint 9 as "the first creative collaboration of two of the most protean, dynamic forces in music and fine art."

"[Barney's] latest work, the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute magnum opus Drawing Restraint 9, was shot in Nagasaki Bay on board the Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru.

"Its core idea is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity, a theme it symbolically tracks through the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid vaseline, called 'The Field,' which is molded, poured, bisected and reformed on the deck of the ship over the course of the film.

"Barriers hold form in place, and when they are removed, the film tracks the descent of form into states of sensual surrender and formal atrophy; this shift in the physical state of the sculpture is symbolically mirrored through the narrative of The Guests, two occidental visitors to the ship played in the film by Matthew Barney and Bjork, who we first see taken on board, groomed, bathed and dressed in mammal fur costumes based upon traditional Shinto marriage costumes.

"They take part in a tea ceremony in which, in the film's only moment of spoken dialogue, they are informed about the history of the vessel, and then, as an increasingly powerful lightning storm breaks out overhead, the tatami mat room they occupy floods with liquid vaseline, a fluid which we sense has emanated from The Field sculpture itself.

"In a harrowing liebestod which is the climax and centerpiece of the film, the Guests, locked in an embrace and breathing through blowhole-like orifices on the back of their necks, take out flensing knives and cut away each other's feet and thighs. The remains of their lower body are revealed to contain traces of whale tails at an early stage of development, suggesting rebirth, physical transformation, and the possibility of new forms.

"Having reached a state of maximum disintegration, the sculpture of The Field
is then reorganized and the ship emerges from the storm, sailing through a field of icebergs towards the open southern ocean. In the last shot, two whales can be seen swimming behind the ship, headed for Antarctica."

Barney's Drawing Restraint works are inspired by the idea that resistance makes muscles larger and stronger due to hypertrophy. " 'The Drawing Restraint project proposes resistance as a prerequisite for development and a vehicle for creativity,' said Barney. In Drawing Restraint 1 and 2 (pictured right), Barney drew running up an incline while strapped with an elastic band. In Drawing Restraint 3, he lifted a barbell cast in petroleum wax and petroleum jelly. Drawing Restraint 7 is a three multi-channel video installation. In a limousine entering Manhattan, a hairless satyr chases his tail in the front seat, while in the back seat, two developed satyrs 'one ram and one ewe' wrestle. Using the tip of the ram's horn the ewe attempts to draw a ram horn in the condensation on the sunroof."

"Drawing Restraint 8 is composed of eight elegant transparent vitrines with cabriole legs. Inside the vitrines, drawings are framed and exhibited with a nylon fiber substance, which looks like mold, growing between the frames. As Barney explains, 'In "Drawing Restraint 8 stored energy is sacrificed for eroticism and the body begins to atrophy.' The theme of eroticism continues on to "Drawing Restraint 9."

# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 9/05/2005 12:24:00 PM Comments (3)

MoveOn.org has launched a new project, HurricaneHousing.org, a website at which you can post offers to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina with free housing. If you are able to house someone displaced by the storm, head on over to the site.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/04/2005 11:26:00 AM Comments (0)

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 9/01/2005 12:14:00 PM Comments (0)

Congratulations to friend and Filmmaker columnist Graham Leggat (pictured above with his doppleganger, Moby), who announced yesterday that he's leaving his post as director of communications at the Film Society of Lincoln Center to take on the executive director job at the San Francisco Film Society. The organization runs the San Francisco Film Festival, among many other programs. I first met Graham in 2000, when I, a very unqualified journalist, arrived in New York to cover the New York Film Festival for the Creative Planet website. Graham and I hit it off, and a day later I was sitting in the Essex House interviewing Catherine Deneuve and Bjork for Dancer in the Dark. When I finally left L.A. and moved back home to the city, he was one of the first people I called for some guidance, and we've since become good friends. He'll be greatly missed here in New York -- let's hope that he, his wife Lily, and his little boy Willie come back from time to time to say hi.

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 9/01/2005 11:12:00 AM Comments (1)