HURRICANE RELIEF

By Scott Macaulay

Please consider donating to the American Red Cross to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina.… Read the rest

BURNING MAN: MAPPING THE MIND

By Admin

It’s that time of year again: Burning Man — “an experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance,” which takes place annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert — has begun. (It runs August 29-September 5.)

The theme of this year’s event, Psyche, “explores psychology: self expression, self reflection and the unconscious power of dreams,” and organizers will divide the playa outside the town of Gerlach, Nevada into zones related to different aspects of the mind: the Conscious, the Subconscious and the Unconscious.

If you’re planning to attend Burning Man check out the improbable orchestra, “an interactive table chock full o’ knobs for collaborative soundmaking.”

” ‘But,’ says you. ‘I hate knobs. Give me lasers, man.’ Sure! You obviously want the interactive Aeolian harp, which suspends a series of laser beams through which you can walk to trigger sound,” writes Peter Krim on the Create Digital Music Web site.

For those of you not attending Burning Man this year check out the photo galleries at flickr, or rent Alex Nohe’s documentary Burning Man: That Burning Sensation, Paul Barnett and Unsu Lee’s Confessions of a Burning Man, or AquaBurn, a collection of Burning Man films by Bill Breithaupt.

Aficiandos should also keep an eye out for the Festival in a Box, a touring program of Burning Man-related films organized by the Burning Man Film Festival, a project of Santa Cruz-based Burning Beach, or book a ticket for the London Burning Man Film Festival.… Read the rest

EYES BACK ON THE PRIZE

By Admin

In the Winter 2005 issue of Filmmaker we published an article entitled “Untold Stories: Creative consequences of the rights clearance culture for documentary filmmakers,” by Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi.

In that article — which can also be found in a longer version on the Web site of the Center for Social Media — Aufderheide and Jaszi interview Jon Else, series producer and cinematographer for Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize, who explains why Eyes on the Prize — “virtually the only audio-visual purveyor of the history of the civil rights movement in America” — is no longer available for purchase.

“What happened was the series was done cheaply and had a terrible fundraising problem,” says Else. “There was barely enough to purchase a minimum five year rights on the archive heavy footage. Each episode in the series is 50% archival. And most of the archive shots are derived from commercial sources. The five year licenses expired and the company that made the film also expired. And now we have a situation where we have this series for which there are no rights licenses. Eyes on the Prize cannot be broadcast on any TV venue anywhere, nor can it be sold. Whatever threadbare copies are available in universities around the country are the only ones that will ever exist. It will cost $500,000 to re-up all the rights for this film. This is a piece of landmark TV history that has vanished.”

DeNeen L. Brown and Hamil R. Harris elaborate in the Washington Post: “The film is hampered by the same problem many documentary filmmakers are encountering as they wrestle with buying and renewing licenses to use copyrighted archival footage, photos and music. Independent filmmakers must pay for each piece of copyrighted material, and those costs have escalated in the past 10 years.

“Some of the footage in Eyes was cleared for only five years, and the executive producer died before renewing the rights. Eyes on the Prize, which was produced by Blackside Inc., a film and television company founded by Henry Hampton, won 23 awards, including two … Read the rest

MOUNTAIN MAN

By Scott Macaulay

First assistant camerman and blogger John Ott emailed to tell us about the the blog he’s been keeping on the production of Rain in the Mountains, an indie feature written by Joel Metlen and co-directed by Metlein and producer Christine Sullivan. Ott blogs on everything from day-to-day production issues to “poor man’s ADR” to the stroke that affected one the leads just days before the film wrapped just last Tuesday. (The actor is recovering and Ott is regularly updating his progress.) Ott even links to Peter Jackson’s “making of King Kong diary so you can compare the difference between making a low-budget indie and a holiday blockbuster.

Here’s from Day 21, when another actor called in sick with some kind of serious flu:

“When we came to pick her up, it was clear she wasn’t exaggerating. Danny and Patrick took her to the emergency room and the rest of us went on to Ericksons’. We shot everything we could without Audrey, including a re-shoot of a scene that Joel and Christine didn’t feel we got after they saw the dailies.

Right now I’m sitting with Joel, Christine and Lillian watching dailies. Before this movie, I thought dailies were a general waste of time, especially with shooting on video, when you can see pretty much what you got right away. But I’ve learned that you think different under on-set pressure. It’s neccessary to take a step back and review when you have a clear head. It also let’s you know if you got what you needed to get while re-shoots are still possible. Another reason to continue the tradition of dailies is how encouraging it is when you see you’ve nailed the shots. Don’t underestimate the satisfaction of a job well done.”… Read the rest

AMERICAN INDIES, THE SLEEPING GIANT

By Scott Macaulay

Here’s our good friend Noah Cowan, co-director of the Toronto Film Festival in Indiewire today talking about a surprise in this year’s selection process:

“The biggest surprise this year has actually been the United States. There has been a kind of copycat lethargy to the US indie scene over the last few years, from our perspective. Only a few films a year really stood out from the crowd as meaningful cinema. But we have been overwhelmed this year by strong, political films by filmmakers unafraid to take risks. There are maybe twenty or more films from the indie scene that add to the international cultural debate. It’s amazing – like watching the sleeping giant suddenly awake. It feels like 1992 again – or even the 1970s!”… Read the rest

DESTROY HOT ACTION!

By Scott Macaulay

The folks at Fleshbot linked to this totally genius video blog, Destroy Hot Action, that is both web-based art and a Quicktimed portfolio of personal empowerment. In these short clips, posted daily, Philip Clark samples hardcore porn streamed over the internet and scrambles short bursts into totally abstract and strangely hypnotic video art. What’s more, he’s compellingly literate about the childhood roots and contemporary rationale behind his project:

“My earliest encounter with hardcore video porn happened at a friend’s house, also late at night. They had cable at their house and my friend was scanning through some channels with really high numbers, like 56 or 57 or something. Some of these channels were showing scrambled porno movies.

He whispered, ‘Sometimes it comes in clear for a while, and you can just see everything.’

Sure enough, every now and then the signal would come through and you’d get a glimpse of a heaving breast or a thrusting buttock. Then the screen would lapse back into the wavy black lines of interference.

I found the movies just as fascinating when they were scrambled. Naked female flesh rippled and pulsed across the screen in random, abstract patterns. The video had a strange sharp quality that didn’t look like anything else on television.

I felt hypnotized, as if the patterns on the TV were telling me everything, transmitting a message that would allow me to decode the mystery of sexuality.”

After explaining a bit about his decision to vlog contemporary internet porn, Clark outlines its possibly therapeutic effects:

“If you remove sex from its context, and then strip the sexuality from sex, what are you left with? Absurdity. And yet the brain responds to it. Pornography is compelling when it seems like there’s no other action to be had.

You might claim to have no idea what I’m talking about; fair enough. But for millions of people, I’m describing the erotic landscape of their lives.

I’ve lived in isolation and felt the effects of porn addiction. I’ve written about it before. You can spend all evening clicking around, clicking and waiting, always two clicks … Read the rest

INDIE FILMMAKING, IRAQ STYLE

By Scott Macaulay

Anybody else check out the ABC News Nightline tonight? I’m watching as I’m blogging here about Ted Koppel’s interview with Cyrus Kar, an American documentary filmmaker who was held in an American detention center in Iraq for 55 days after the cab he was riding in was pulled over. When U.S. soldiers found a collection of washing machine timers in the cab’s trunk, suddenly his camera equipment, microphone wires and the cab driver’s timers all seemed elements of potential Improvised Explosive Devices. Kar was held briefly at Abu Ghuraib before being transferred to a prison near the airport that also hosts Saddam Hussein.

Kar was legally in Iraq making a historical documentary about the Persian King Cyrus the Great, an explanation that didn’t seem to convince the young soldiers who pulled him over. After being held in prison for a few days, his story checked out in the States with the FBI, but it would then take him 47 days to get the administrative hearing that would see him released. Now, Kar has gone public with his tale of the “wanton hostility” he experienced while incarcerated.

If you missed it tonight, Koppel has a part two tomorrow.

One other strange, not so random thing: Nightline’s “closing thought” is sponsored by Ambien.… Read the rest

MARKETING THUMBS UP

By Scott Macaulay

Most movie marketing sucks, so when a campaign for a new film catches my eye and causes me to surf to the site and learn more about it, it’s worth throwing some props towards the filmmaker and marketing team. I first noticed the sweetly ironic posters for Mike Mill’s Thumbsucker last weekend in the East Village, and now the website is up. Check it out and you’ll find some of the usual materials (cast bios, a trailer, etc.) but also a lot of other stuff that seems personal and direct from the filmmaker. There’s a page devoted to the Humane Society, a link to the art publisher Iconoclast who will be releasing a photobook from the movie with pics from artists like Ryan McGinley, a fantastic Friends page, with links to various art, political, music and other sites, and a Thumbsucker blog on which Mills posts photos and diary entries from his current publicity tour. Here’s one with Mills talking about travelling with actor Lou Pucci:

“At about 5pm everyday a black car picks me and Lou up, takes us to the airport, we fly to the next town, check in at about 9pm, eat room service together, I listen to Lou’s script idea wherein Lucifer is actually a Buddhist – not as odd as you might think. I go to sleep and dream that my relationship with my girlfriend is a series of different flavor cough drop bags hanging from a rope, like laundry. She and I are small white balls that move down the rope and enter each bag becoming the different flavors, each flavor being a different part of her, and then we move on to the next bag. I wake up, try to call my actual living breathing girlfriend but she’s in a very different time-zone so all I get is missing her all day, like carrying around five dollars worth of nickels in my pocket. We begin our next day of press, we meet a new person every half hour, they come and go so fast, like David in Denver and Hugh in … Read the rest

BRICK BY BRICK

By Scott Macaulay

I was on the international jury this year at Toronto’s Hot Docs, and one of the best and most original docs I saw there, Simone Bittan’s Wall, is receiving its U.S. premiere this Friday at the Quad in New York.

Paris-based Bittan, who is both an Israeli and French citizen, was born in Morocco and considers herself an Arab Jew. Employing her hybrid identity as something of a structuring device, Wall documents the construction of the “security fence” that is separating Israel from Palestine, creating a portrait not only of a region divided but of a world in which the modern military industrial complex is physically altering traditional ideas of land and freedom.

In addition to the film’s menacing formal beauty — its gorgeous shots of a Middle Eastern landscape bisected by crane-lowered blocks of grey concrete — it contains a sophisticated montage that cleverly overlays comments by both Israelis and Palestinians affected by the wall over shots of the wall’s construction without identifying the nationality of the speakers. At Hot Docs some I talked to were irritated by this device and would have preferred tidy lower thirds ID’ing the dialogues for easy political positioning. It’s part of the film’s genius that it doesn’t do this, forcing the viewer to relate first to these residents on the most basic human levels.

Explains Bittan, “I’ve been traveling in Palestine and Israel for over 20 years and I have never encountered so much cruelty and madness as today. The wall is not only a slap in the face of those of us who want peace, not only a crime against one of the most beautiful and historically meaningful landscapes in the world. For Palestinians, it is a mechanism of ongoing dispossession and expulsion. As far as Israelis are concerned, it is terrible to see how these people, my people, who have crossed the seas to escape the ghettos, are enclosing themselves willingly and consensually. One of the characters of the film expresses this very well: “We love this land so much, that we enclose it.” Another says that the Holy Land … Read the rest

BALLARD ON POWELL: “REALISM HAS FAILED US…”

By Scott Macaulay

I was a big J.G. Ballard fan in my late teens and 20s when I pretty much devoured works like Terminal Beach, The Atrocity Exhibition (made into an independent feature by Jonathan Weiss, linked to here), The Crystal World, and Myths of the Near Future. I’ve been interested then to see the dystopian science fiction writer pop up several times in The Guardian in just the past couple of weeks. I quoted him below in a blog entry on a new Helmut Newton book, and here he is again in The Guardian discussing the great director Michael Powell in a passage that is vintage Ballard:

“I think of Powell as a prophet whose films offer important lessons to both filmmakers and novelists, especially the latter, who are still preoccupied with character and individual moral choice. My guess is that the serious novel of the future will be serious in the way that Powell’s and Hitchcock’s films are serious, where the psychological drama has migrated from inside the characters’ heads to the world around them. This is true to everyday life, where we know little about the real nature of the people around us, and less about ourselves than we think, but are highly sensitive to the surrounding atmosphere.

Fancy and the creative spirit rule everything, Powell seems to say. Realism has failed us, and the imagination must take its place. Love may be an illusion, but it is all we have. It must be tested, not against our modest private lives, but in the fiercest fire. We are less important than we think, but our imaginations can transcend everything, even our own deaths.”
.… Read the rest