At his blog Keef has assembled a tasteful playlist of music videos by feature film directors. Van Sant, Jarmusch, Wong Kar Wai, Sayles, Scorsese, Lynn Ramsay and Gaspar Noe all make appearances. Here are two.
“Savoure le Rouge” by Indochine, directed by Marc Caro.
“Disapearer,” by Sonic Youth, directed by Todd Haynes.
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The excellent indie criticism site Hammer to Nail has taken the stratagem of being the first to publish its 2008 “10 Best” list, posting its selection (a baker’s dozen of 13, actually) the day after Thanksgiving, when some of us film bloggers were still digesting the previous evening’s turkey dinner. The rules: eligible films had to be American narrative films (features or shorts) budgeted at less than $1 million and which premiered or received theatrical distribution in 2008. I’m very happy to see Filmmaker favorite Frownland nabbing the number one spot! Ronnie Bronstein’s miserabilist masterpiece has been heralded here many times — it won the Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham Award last year, and I was on the jury that gave it its first recognition at SXSW — and I’m always looking for another chance to sing its praises here on the blog. Other favorites on the list include Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, Josh Safdie’s Pleasure of Being Robbed, Lance Hammer’s Ballast, Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy, and Benh Zeitlin’s Glory at Sea. The site also gave separate awards to Lance Hammer for not only making Ballast but distributing it, and to filmmaker Sean Baker for releasing two strong films (Take-Out and Prince of Broadway) in one year.
The complete list and commentary can be found at Hammer to Nail.… Read the rest
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I moderated a panel this rainy Sunday afternoon in New York with the five nominees for the Gotham Breakthrough Director Award: Lance Hammer (Ballast), Dennis Dortch (A Good Day to be Black and Sexy), Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy), Antonio Campos (Afterschool) and Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer). I’m not a big fan of reading (and writing) panel conversation blow-by-blows, but it was a good talk and some interesting contrasts and comparisons between the directors emerged during the conversation. I’ll note them here.
1. Independent films can take a long time to make. Four out of the five directors spend several years conceiving of, financing and making their movies. The exception was Jenkins, who conceived of Medicine for Melancholy in April, 2007 and was shooting several months later. But both Rivera and Hammer spent nearly ten years before they got to make their films, although, for Hammer, much of that time was spent working on another, more conventional (i.e. $5 million budget, name cast) film. When Hammer moved off that film he was able to take some of its financing with him to make Ballast. Rivera, who was one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces in the year 2000, described a long, multi-year development process during which the script got worked and reworked. Eventually, he said, producer Anthony Bregman sent the project out the same day to a dozen financiers, multiple offers ensued, and one person, who Rivera described as a billionaire banking and real estate investor out of England, put up the film’s budget.
2. Production approaches are malleable. Hammer described wanting to make Ballast with a small crew of 15 or so so that he could retain the flexibility to work with a loose shooting schedule. Jenkins worked with a crew of less than half of that, did not use an a.d., but, due to his own year spent working at a studio for a director, knew how to create a schedule and day out of days and replicated the discipline of a studio shoot on his … Read the rest
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When leaving Brooklyn on the BQ train, your commute is pleasantly disrupted by the flashing scenes of experimental filmmaker Bill Brand’s “Masstransiscope” (1980), recently restored by the MTA’s Arts for Transit program.
Masstransiscope is a 20-second kaleidoscopically colorful animation based on the principle of the zoetrope, a 19th century optical toy. Where in a standard zoetrope, the animation spins in front of you, Brand’s is a linear zoetrope, propelling you past abstract forms culminating in a rocket’s launch — all just before you’re hit by blinding daylight as you cross the Manhattan Bridge. Housed in the long-abandoned Myrtle Ave. Station just after the DeKalb stop, Masstransiscope is the only sanctioned art in New York’s subway tunnels, and it remains the only subway animation in the U.S. that is not advertising-based.
Bill Brand is the founder of the seminal optical printing house BB Optics, which has provided services for avant-garde filmmakers including Stan Brackhage, Carolee Schneeman and Todd Haynes, as well as the Nixon Library, N.Y. Public Library, and the archives of Hollis Frampton. Brand’s feature Home Less Home (1990) was included in the 2007 “Essential Documentaries” series at New Directors/New Films Classics and is scheduled to be shown at Anthology Film Archives in February 2009.
Brand originally conceived Masstransiscope as an exploration of the role of the audience in experimental work. His previous work includes several experimental shorts exploring and reworking early film and its techniques. They are well-received films with extremely limited audiences.
Brand says, “While I was thinking about what makes a film fundamentally a film, I was also asking myself, what does audience have to do with how I think as an artist? Turning the subway into a movie machine was a way of exploring these ideas with a very large audience.”
Initially, Masstransiscope was planned as a photo animation, with images that unspooled to subway riders one at a time over several months, allowing the audience to experience the act of creating animation. But this time and resource intensive process was quickly put aside for a relatively simpler process with more visually striking … Read the rest
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On Feb. 20, 2005 the grandfather of Gonzo journalism, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, was walking around his snow covered compound in Woody Creek, Colorado when he decided to point the gun he was carrying to his head and pull the trigger. For a man who lived his life with a glass of Wild Turkey in one hand and a hand gun in the other it was a fitting end. Now doc filmmaker Alex Gibney recounts Thompson’s roller-coaster life and how his intoxicating prose changed journalism forever with Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
Blessed with volumes of letters, photos, tape recordings and videos from the Thompson estate, Gibney holds nothing back as he pieces together Dr. Gonzo’s life with the help of Johnny Depp‘s narration and colorful interviews from people who crossed Thompson’s path like Jann Wenner, George McGovern, Jimmy Buffett and Tom Wolfe. Though some of the material covered is repetitive from earlier docs on Thompson’s life, Gibney’s attention to detail weaves a moving story that is as much enlightening as it is funny.
Some of the most entertaining and revealing footage is from a BBC doc that can be found in its entirety on the Criterion Collection’s disc of Terry Gilliam‘s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Shot in the mid ’70s at the height of Thompson’s fame we find him tucked away at Woody Creek shooting and snorting. But at a moment of clarity Thompson reveals his disdain for what he’s become: a journalist whose gone from covering the story to becoming it. A theme that Gibney weaves throughout the film.
With the success of Hell’s Angeles, his expose on the world of the biker gang which ended with them jumping him, followed by his seminal book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where the drawings of Ralph Steadman heighten the bizarre “trip,” Thompson becomes a star journalist and Gibney shows Thompson can’t handle it as he has to live up to his alter ego from Fear and Loathing, Raoul Duke, ending many … Read the rest
Category Load & Play | Tags: Alex Gibney, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp,
In Filmmaker‘s Summer issue we ran David Rosen’s “The Next Telecom War,” which argued that net neutrality debates are distracting us from the real goal of infrastructure common carriage. Now, Rosen has contributed to “What Now for Broadband and the Telecoms,” posted on the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard’s Nieman Watchdog site. Bruce Kushnick’s article poses a series of relevant questions regarding broadband and telco policy to the incoming Obama administration:
Q. Will you set the goal of broadband access at 1 gigabit in every American home?
Q. Why aren’t telecom subsidies being directed to cover much-needed infrastructure improvements?
Q. What steps should be taken to democratize the FCC’s decision-making process?
Q. Will you re-introduce and implement the parts of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that promote competition?
Q. Is it time to break up AT&T again? And Verizon, as well?
For those who have read “Creative Destruction” in the current issue of Filmmaker (it is excerpted at the link but the full version that contains the relevant passages to net neutrality is only available in the print or digital edition of the magazine), these questions will resonate as they cut to the heart of what Ira Deutchman and Ted Hope talked about in the piece. Check out the piece at Nieman Watchdog, which begins like this:
Telecommunications reform needs to be on President-elect Obama’s agenda and that of the 111th Congress. It is a key aspect of overall infrastructure renewal and will impact the future of the nation’s economic prosperity, educational system and its role in an increasingly globalized world.
January 1, 2008, marks the 25th anniversary of the breakup of the old AT&T after a successful Department of Justice antitrust suit during the Reagan administration. AT&T was broken up because a then-upstart, MCI, wanted to compete to offer long distance service and AT&T did everything in its power to block competition. The case, initiated by the Ford Administration and pursued under Jimmy Carter, showed how the government could help foster fair competition in the telecommunications industry. But thanks to deregulation in the 1990s, we now live in
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Andrew Sullivan picked this up from the Today and Tomorrow blog, which in turn picked it up from Bored and Beautiful: Alan Woo’s “Pie,” described thusly:
“Curious to see if there were any stark similarities or contrasts within particular films, Pie aims to create an incredibly simple and concise baseline of comparison of films trough one particular trait: colour. The outcome is a number of triptychs comparing various films of particular trilogies, directors or genres. A program written in processing captures each frame of each movie and essentially creates a ‘pie chart’ of the colours contained within each film producing a simplistic and abstracted representation. Each poster includes the film title, year, director, cinematographer, running time and occasionally, various surprising/unsurprising similarities.”
The images were created in the free program, Processing.
Below: Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette.
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Expertly timed to premiere today, on so-called “Black Friday” when many parents rush to the stores to buy the latest must-have gifts for their sons and daughters is Lauren Greenfield‘s documentary Kids + Money. Greenfield is the photograher and author of the seminal Girl Culture, a book chronicling the reality of being a teenage girl in America today. Visit any filmmaker, screenwriter, production designer, of costume designer who has worked on a teen film and you’ll find this book on their shelf of reference materials. Next Greenfield made Thin, a photo essay and also documentary film about girls with eating disorders and their treatment. Now, Greenfield’s latest, Kids + Money, a well observed, smart and far-from-expected filmic look at the way kids navigate a world in which concepts of status and self-worth are tied to wealth and the ability to spend, premieres on HBO. The doc plays throughout the next three weeks on HBO and its schedule can be found at the link above on the HBO site or here on Greenfield’s site.
From the HBO website:
This 30-minute documentary short is an illuminating portrait of several young people in Los Angeles and the complex and intricate role that money plays in their lives. Ranging in age from 11 to 17, and spanning several socio-economic levels, thirteen kids (and a few of their parents) are interviewed in their homes, and discuss everything from their shopping habits and addictions, the importance of clothes and fitting-in at school, getting money from parents versus making their own money, and the overwhelming pressures of consumerism and image in LA.
A decade ago, photographer Lauren Greenfield’s monograph, “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood,” explored the way Los Angeles youth are affected by an overwhelming materialism that exalts image. One of the photographs from “Fast Forward” depicted Phoebe, a three-year old, lying on a couch in the Barneys shoe department. Now 16, Phoebe makes a return appearance in Kids + Money, newly sensitive to the adverse effects of affluence.
Among the other young people we meet in the film:
Category News | Tags: documentary,
Before I head out of town for a couple of days I want to post here my best wishes for a great Thanksgiving to you, our readers, and your friends and families. It’s been a tumultuous year for independent film and independent filmmakers, but on the eve of this holiday, it is clear that we have much to be thankful for. The indie film world may be cash and credit-deprived at the moment, but, at least from my vantage point, it is rich in creativity and passion. It’s also blessed with a deep brain-trust capable of thinking ourselves out of the challenges ahead.
Personally, I want to thank all of our readers, contributors and photographers as well as my colleagues and collaborators here at Filmmaker for their great work and support. Have a great holiday, drive and travel safely, and try to slow down, relax and take yourself off-grid for a day or so. We’ll be here when you return.… Read the rest
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The people who run the Masters of Criminal Justice website, which provides “valuable resources to help you make a career transition into criminal justice or to advance your current criminal justice career,” like lists. On the site now are the “100 Best Open Source Security Tools” and “DIY Home Security: 100 Essential Tips, Tools and Resources.” There is also the site’s picks for the “100 Top Crime Movies of All Time.” A lot of the expected classics are there — The Godfather, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction — but what’s interesting is that the list is broken down by sub-genre. The Matrix, for example, shows up under “Cybercrime and Technology,” and the Audrey Hepburn-starrer Charade (pictured) is listed under “Blackmail, Revenge and Corruption.” Check out the list at the link above.… Read the rest
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