Posted May 16, 2012, by Nicholas Rombes
Second #5358, 89:18
When Blue Velvet is funny, it is very funny. This shot opens with Jeffrey’s mother and his Aunt Barbara (the late, great, Frances Bay) looking up from the breakfast table at something, aghast. However, in a sharp instance of delayed decoding, we don’t see what they see for several seconds. For all we know, they could be looking in frozen horror at an intruder, or a monster (perhaps the entity behind the Winkie’s dumpster from Mulholland Drive), or something visible only to them. It is only at this moment that we see what they see: Jeffrey, whose bruised face shocks them.
There is the recurrence of curtains used as a framing device; Jeffrey (like Ben) is about to enter the space between them, as if taking the stage. And there is the odd contraption just behind Aunt Barbara. But most of all there is the presence of Frances Bay who would appear again in several Lynch projects including Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as Mrs. Tremond, who hands Laura a framed picture of a doorway, a doorway which she will enter in a dream:
In Brian Evenson’s story “Discrepancy,” from Windeye, a woman becomes plagued by a temporal break resulting in an ever-increasing delay between her experiences and the sounds of those experiences:
There was a day she noticed a discrepancy between sound and image on the television, and found no matter how she messed with the tracking she could not make it go away. . . .
And now, she told him [a doctor she has sought out for help], it was not just television but other things as well. Like people. Even he, she told the doctor’s cousin, also a doctor, was off. She would see his lips move and then only a moment later did she hear his words.
She has fallen out of time which is, in a sense, what movies like Blue Velvet do. They are echoes from the past on at least two levels: as a sort of documentary record of reality and as a fictional representation … Read the rest
Posted May 16, 2012, by Courtney Sell
With less than twenty-four hours to reach my set goal on my Indiegogo campaign, it seems that every passing minute without a tiny donation is a strike against my project and a personal slap to my face. It’s hard not to take that fact that your idea is most likely a failure that generated little to no interest with the public personally. At the time of writing this, I have only acquired $140 dollars of my $1,000 final goal and it is quickly becoming evident that my project will end up under-funded, unless of course some patron from the heavens randomly decides that it would be in their best interest to donate the remaining funds necessary in order for me to feel like a success and move on without funding the project out of my empty pockets. While many people, and I mean the reasonable ones of course, would throw their hands up in the air, consider their project a failure, curse out the Gods before praying for a miracle, and down a pint of whiskey to wallow in their self-pity, I on the other hand, view this situation as just another, slightly expected, hurdle in my career of being an independent filmmaker. Though I must admit, I am sipping a whiskey right now.
The campaign was/is for a film festival that I decided to launch with my dear friends Reverend Jen (pictured here with me), Robert Prichard, and Tom Tenney called Assdance Film Festival a few months earlier. Now, before I go any further, let me briefly explain myself as I know what your thinking:
“Of course you’re not gonna make any money on something called Assdance, Courtney! How could you be so stupid into believing you would?”
To be honest, I knew I couldn’t. Yet, I have never steered away from pursuing even the craziest of my ideas; and believe me, I have quite a few of them. Also, don’t let the title fool you; this is not nor was it intended to be a porn film festival! The “Ass” in “Assdance” is actually an acronym for “Art … Read the rest
Posted May 16, 2012, by Scott Macaulay
It’s a strange paradox of today’s cinema that so many films feature lavish and eye-popping special effects yet are such ordinary viewing experiences. Sure, today’s VFX and surround sound are capable of overwhelming you, of beating you into submission, but, with a handful of exceptions, they seldom take you further. One film that does is Panos Cosmato’s Beyond the Black Rainbow, an astonishingly ambitious debut feature that is as much an elegant art object as it is a science-fiction head trip of the highest order.
Set in 1983 — and feeling as if it was actually made in 1983 too — Beyond the Black Rainbow is a hazily remembered waking dream of a picture about a tormented scientist (described in Cosmatos’s script as “an aging surfer calcified into a reptilian wax vampire”), who is subjecting a beautiful young captive to a series of unsettling mind control experiments. The film has secrets, plot twists and a daring escape, but it is more focused on tone, feelings and sensations than linear plotting. Pulsing with an omnipresent score by Sinoia Caves, Beyond the Black Rainbow evokes the eerie early cinema of David Cronenberg, and not just with its repressed scientist protagonist, dispassionate tone and cool production design; the film also riffs on similar ideas about repression and social control, drawing from such shared inspirations as William Burroughs.
Beyond the Black Rainbow premiered in 2010 at the Whistler Film Festival before it was discovered by the Tribeca Film Festival programmers and screened at last year’s event. Filmmaker then placed Cosmatos on our 2011 25 New Faces list, and the following interview was done in preparation for that piece. Beyond the Black Rainbow opens Friday from Magnet Releasing
Filmmaker: Why is the film set in 1983?
Panos Cosmatos: Well, all the films that inspired it came from that era – from the mid-to-late ‘70s through to 1983.
Filmmaker: Do you know this band How to Dress Well?
Cosmatos: I don’t.
Filmmaker: It’s one guy, from Brooklyn and who has studied philosophy in Berlin. It’s basically soul music, except there is a lot of … Read the rest
Posted May 16, 2012, by Michael Murie
At NAB this year ARRI revealed that, at least for the coming year, they’ll be concentrating on anamorphic imaging and the dynamic range of the Alexa rather than trying to compete with high frame rates or 4K.
But they did have some interesting new additions to the product line, particularly if you want to get the camera closer to the action. The Alexa M, which will start shipping this month, is essentially an Alexa that’s been cut in two. You have a 12.1 lb body connected to a 6.4 lb head by a cable up to 20 feet long. That cable can be even longer if you aren’t sending power to the head from the body.
At $100,000 the Alexa M is probably outside the budget of many independent filmmakers, but Arri has posted a great video on their website showing the Alexa M being used in a variety of different ways. And the interesting thing is, it looks a lot like shooting with a DSLR – and I mean that in a positive way. Now you can do things with the Alexa that you used to do with a DSLR.
Don’t have the budget for the Alexa M? Well you can still use that DSLR in the same way that they used the Alexa M, and this video has some really interesting ideas for getting a camera closer to the action. I was particularly intrigued by the methods used in the ice hockey sequence, the skateboarding, and the attachment of the camera to the sword. And remember, you can always try doing something similar using a GoPro and Duct Tape like Ricki Bedenbaugh did in this video:
The ARRI video — ALEXA M – The Specialist is still worth checking out:
Camera attached to sword (cable runs under sword and down the leg of the soldier)
ARRI: Alexa M… Read the rest
Posted May 15, 2012, by Scott Macaulay
Focus Features is celebrating its tenth-year anniversary, and the distributor has just placed on its site a suite of videos in which Focus CEO James Schamus discusses the company’s history through its films. After an intro detailing the transition from Good Machine to Focus, Schamus gives us the back story on Focus titles like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Pianist and The Constant Gardner, among others. For the individual videos in the series, visit the 10-year anniversary page here and watch the overview video below.
… Read the rest
Posted May 14, 2012, by Nick Dawson
Just a quick heads up to alert you to the fact that the excellent NoBudge film website — run by indie actor/director Kentucker Audley, one of our 25 New Faces in 2007 — is running an innovative “live screening series” featuring filmmaker Q&As, starting tonight. Eight films will screen during the next two weeks, and each night the director of that day’s featured film will do a Q&A online.
Programmed for the next two weeks are the shorts Cochran (James Gannon, 2009), Prom Queen (Ben Siler, 2007), Bruno (Sam Goetz, 2007), and Repeat (Donal Foreman, 2009). The features portion includes Seattle-based filmmaker Christian Palmer’s gritty 2010 drama William Never Married and Joe Lewis’s bohemian performance piece Tyler B. Nice, while the two most notable inclusions are Impolex, the 2009 debut from The Color Wheel‘s Alex Ross Perry, and Stephen Gurewitz’s Marvin Seth and Stanley, which just had its world premiere a week ago at the Wisconsin Film Festival.
Go to the NoBudge website for more.
… Read the rest
Posted May 14, 2012, by Nick Dawson
This morning, the Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) announced the 10 films selected to participate in its 2012 IFP Documentary Lab, which takes place all this week in New York City. The slate for this eighth edition of the doc labs is very geographically diverse, with participants hailing from Washington, Kentucky and Berlin in addition to the usual indie strongholds of Los Angeles and New York City.
Each year, 20 indie films with budgets under $1 million — 10 documentary and 10 narrative — are selected for participation in the IFP post-production labs, which gives filmmakers strategic help and guidance regarding the completion, marketing and distribution of their projects.
Commenting on the importance of the labs program, IFP’s Executive Director Joana Vicente said, “The Labs are unique in our focus on guiding filmmakers to concretely and constructively plan for their films’ lives beyond post-production, and are tailored to maximizing their opportunities given the particular assets of each film. With almost 80% of previous Lab projects debuted in festivals and released worldwide, the impact of this has been significant.”
Below is a full list of the projects and their creative teams:
Alias Ruby Blade
Alias Ruby Blade is the story of Kirsty Sword Gusmão, former First Lady of Timor-Leste. An aspiring documentary filmmaker, Kirsty instead became a courier for the Timorese resistance movement in Jakarta code named Ruby Blade. Through correspondence, she fell in love with the imprisoned resistance leader Xanana Gusmão. Together they nurtured the tumultuous birth of the world’s newest nation. Fellows: Alex Meiller (Director), Tanya Ager Meillier (Producer). Brooklyn, NY
Big Joy Project: The Adventures of James Broughton
Told by his angel at age 3 that he’ll be a poet of Big Joy, James Broughton pioneers experimental filmmaking and poetry readings in San Francisco, leading to the Beat Movement. Jungian analysis forces him to marriage with children, but his heart hurts until he meets a male student 35 years his junior – his soulmate for 25 productive years. Fellows: Stephen Silha (Director/Producer), Eric Slade (Director/Producer), Dawn Logsdon (Editor). Vashon, WA
For Thousands of Miles
For Thousands of Miles
… Read the rest
Posted May 14, 2012, by Nick Dawson
New technology is increasingly opening up filmmaking options to people all around the world, and that’s no more evident than in the upcoming The Owner. The movie is first project of CollabFeature, which is described on its website as “a group of independent filmmakers from all over the world who have come together to create multi-director feature films. Each filmmaker writes and directs a segment of the bigger story in his or her own country. By pooling our talents and resources, we are creating something bigger than the sum of its parts — a kind of film that has never been made before.”
Made by 25 directors in 14 countries across five continents, The Owner is a global group film which follows a backpack as it changes hands from one owner to another on its journey around the world. It will have simultaneous premieres in multiple international locations on May 25 (in the U.S., it will screen in Chicago, Detroit and New York, with Orlando and New Orleans showings in the works), and is just the first of a planned series of globally produced movies to be made through CollabFeature.
It will be interesting to see if this idea takes off, and whether CollabFeature’s films can transcend their high-concept hook to become genuinely satisfying narrative experiences.
… Read the rest
Posted May 14, 2012, by Nicholas Rombes
Second #5311, 88:31
1. This frame is from around twelve seconds into a thirteen-second shot, just before the screen goes black. Jeffrey sobs. The unflinching, unmoving camera eye does not look away. There is no soundtrack. There is nothing ironic or postmodern about this moment.
2. Paul Virilio, from his book Open Sky:
‘If anyone thinks I paint too fast, they are watching me too fast,’ Van Gogh wrote. Already, the classic photograph is no more than a freeze frame. With the decline in volumes and in the expanse of landscapes, reality becomes sequential and cinematic unfolding finally gets the jump on whatever is static.
3. Rendered at a low frame rate (below) the shot in question suggests Jeffrey’s jagged brokenness. In order not to watch too fast maybe we ought to watch differently, deforming the film to correspond to its own portrayal of psychological torment and deformity.
4. David Lynch, from an interview with Chris Rodley:
So I had this idea, and that’s when I did The Alphabet. It was four minutes long. That’s when my daughter Jennifer was born and I recorded her crying with a Uher tape recorder that was broken. I didn’t know that it was broken, but the crying and everything I recorded with it was fantastic.
5. The fact of crying in the films of David Lynch, and in Twin Peaks. Laura Dern’s is the face that cries the most, anguished and beautiful. But Jeffrey cries, too.
6. The movie turns at this point, back to Sandy. Jeffrey has gone as deep into the black well as he can, and now he must journey back. But he can’t come back and become the same man that he was before the journey. Something in him has already changed. A fuse has been blown. He went too deep.
Over the period of one full year — three days per week — The Blue Velvet Project will seize a frame every 47 seconds of David Lynch’s classic to explore. These posts will run until second 7,200 in August 2012. For a complete archive of … Read the rest
Posted May 12, 2012, by Scott Macaulay
Forget long hallways and white light — in the upcoming Post-Singularity age, death is just another user experience. Welcome to Life is a short film by Tom Scott inspired by the work of Jim Monroe and Rudy Rucker.
… Read the rest
