Archive for January, 2009
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
I’ve posted previously on this blog about The Long Tail author Chris Anderson’s recent series of articles (and forthcoming book) on the economics of free. Briefly, Anderson’s proposition is that digital production and delivery, which decreases the marginal cost of goods, drives their purchase price down to zero. For most, this means adapting to the idea of distribution being ad-supported in some way, and this type of revenue scheme is what has dominated Anderson’s previous writings on the subject. But as I noted in a previous post on the Google Book Settlement, the problem with free models for the producer is that they drive the revenue per consumer way down below what truly devoted consumers would pay for the same product. That’s fine if free distribution picks up enough consumers to allow ad revenue to offset the pricing decimation, but for many products this type of audience expansion is not possible.
Now, though, with ad dollars in free fall, it’s obvious that the free model could use some tweaks. Said tweaks are provided by Anderson in a piece posted at The Wall Street Journal that argues that, in the end, content producers have to find a way to get consumers to value their product enough to pay for it. Here’s the final paragraph, but read the article for his commentary on what the ad bust will mean for Facebook, Twitter and the old model of the internet start-up.
Does this mean that Free will retreat in a down economy? Probably not. The psychological and economic case for it remains as good as ever — the marginal cost of anything digital falls by 50% every year, making pricing a race to the bottom, and “Free” has as much power over the consumer psyche as ever. But it does mean that Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid. Just as King Gillette’s free razors only made business sense paired with expensive blades, so will today’s Web entrepreneurs have to not just invent products that people love, but also those that they will pay for. Not all of
… Read the rest
Friday, January 30th, 2009
BORCE NACEV AND VESNA STANOJEVSKA IN DIRECTOR MILCHO MANCHEVSKI’S SHADOWS. COURTESY MITROPOULOS FILMS.Writer-director Milcho Manchevski has only made three features over the course of his 15-year film career, yet the multi-talented Macedonian rarely allows himself a moment to catch his breath. Born in 1959 in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, Manchevski studied History of Art and Archeology at his hometown university before going to film school at Southern Illinois University on a scholarship. Following his graduation, he relocated to New York and began making commercials, music videos, documentaries, shorts and experimental films. In 1992, he won several major awards for his video for Arrested Development’s “Tennessee,” which is considered one of the great pop promos of the period. With the release of his debut feature, Before the Rain (1994), Manchevski shot from relative obscurity to international prominence as the film, a triptych of overlapping, ill-fated love stories, won the Golden Lion at Venice and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. Manchevski did not immediately capitalize on his success, and it was not until 2001 that he returned with his sophomore feature, Dust, a century-spanning double narrative encompassing a Macedonian western and an NYC crime story. In addition to his cinematic activities, Manchevski continues to make commercials and music videos, has directed an episode of HBO’s The Wire, teaches film at NYU, and is also an acclaimed photographer, performance artist, and writer of short fiction, essays and journalism.
Manchevski’s previous films have both been set in multiple countries but in his latest feature, Shadows, the action is entirely set in Macedonia. The film begins with Lazar “Lucky” Perkov (Borce Nacev), a handsome surgeon with a gorgeous wife and young son, getting into a near-fatal car crash. A year later, his rehabilitation is complete but his marriage is disintegrating, he sees strange people in his apartment building – including an ancient woman spouting a warning in an obscure dialect – and he is becoming drawn to the mysterious and alluring Menka (Vesna Stanojevska). Shadows is a curious patchwork of genres, organically mixing together … Read the rest
Friday, January 30th, 2009
Over at Splice Today, John Lingan has interviewed legendary d.p. Gordon Willis. An excerpt:
ST: To what do you ascribe the simultaneity of directorial and cinematographic talent during those years? Was there a greater level of artistic freedom afforded to filmmakers then? Or was it the momentum of ’60s counterculture finally reaching the film industry? Hall and Wexler have credited “accidents” like sunspots in the lenses for spurring their perceived innovations; what was it about the industry climate that allowed those kinds of accidents to stand?
GW: The studio system was beginning to buckle, but I think it’s more like “A Man For All Seasons.” All of us came along at the right time and did what we wanted to do. And it wasn’t easy—management, and many in the old school hated us, me especially [since] I didn’t live in California.
Let me clear something up: Good films are not made by accident, nor is good photography. You can have good things happen, on occasion, by accident that can be applied at that moment in a film, but your craft isn’t structured around such things, except in beer commercials.
… Read the rest
Friday, January 30th, 2009
Over on Web Exclusives page and coinciding with the Lincoln Center “Mavericks and Outsides: Positif Celebrates American Cinema” (beginning today), Jamie Stuart interviews Positif editor Michel Ciment about the magazine and also his long relationship with Stanley Kubrick.
One film that’s part of the Positif series is Barbara Loden’s Wanda, which was one of Filmmaker‘s 50 Most Important Independent Films back when we did that list in 1998. Long difficult to see, it was re-released on DVD a year or so ago and has been claiming its place as an inspiration for a new generation of independent filmmakers. Over at Hammer to Nail, director Mary Bronstein writes about the film.
An excerpt:
In 1971, actress Barbara Loden made her directorial debut with Wanda, a work so uncompromising that it could easily pass as the paradigm example of American independent filmmaking. A Hollywood actress by trade (best known for her supporting role in Splendor in the Grass), Loden had no practical background or training in filmmaking when she landed on the idea of directing this intensely personal project. But her drive to realize it drove her to forgo looking for conventional studio financing, ignore sound judgment (most coming from her then husband, Elia Kazan), and simply throw herself face-first into the process. Made over the course of ten weeks, largely self-financed and shot on 16mm reversal film with a crew of only four people, Loden produced something brutally raw, relentlessly downcast and unapologetically small in scope. And so, after an auspicious premiere at the Venice Film Festival (where it won top prize), the film failed to obtain proper distribution and outside of one theatrical engagement in New York, disappeared from circulation almost entirely.
See Wanda as well as many other excellent American films, including Fingers, Keane, True Confessions, and The Honeymoon Killers.… Read the rest
Friday, January 30th, 2009
In connection with the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s new series “Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Cinema,” Jamie Stuart spoke recently with Positif‘s editor, the noted French film critic and author Michel Ciment.
FILMMAKER: I probably know you best from your Kubrick book. What was that like, having the ability to interview him over the years?
CIMENT: Well, it came very naturally. I don’t know why. I think he had a piece of mine translated from 1968 — a long essay I did on the work of Kubrick. It was probably the first essay in France to try to show the strands of Kubrick’s work and the connections between all the films. People were always skeptical about the unity of his work; he was changing all the time, his style and form and so on. I was on the list of people he would approve to do interviews with on A Clockwork Orange. He liked what I did. He liked the interview. He liked the conversation. He would call me regularly for information on various things he wanted to know: Distribution in France, exhibition, technical things, people who could help him and so on. And then, I met him regularly — I was not a friend of his, I don’t think anybody was really friends with Kubrick — but he was not at all aloof, he was extremely charming. I found him one of the best people to interview, though of course it was a little intimidating because you’d have such a short time. But he was very professional. We’d talk quite a lot on the phone, that’s true. And then, I wrote this book in 1980. My wife said Kubrick called, he’d got the book. He called me back at 9 in the evening and said, “I received your book. It is the most beautiful book I have seen on a film director. I would like to order 400 copies, if you could get me a price.” There’s not much else to say, except of my fascination with Kubrick’s work. But it went on quite easily. … Read the rest
Friday, January 30th, 2009
Nelson George attended Sundance this year in two capacities. First, from January 9th to the 15th he was an advisor at the Sundance Writer’s Lab. Then, he went to the festival as an executive producer with Good Hair, the doc he made with Chris Rock. In the below video diary he takes us through both events, including the Obama inauguration party on Main Street and the premiere of his film, and along the way he also catches up with a number of other filmmakers at this year’s fest. Check it out.
Nelson George: Sundance 2009 from Nelson George on Vimeo.… Read the rest
Friday, January 30th, 2009
Originally posted on the blog, Brandon Harris and Scott Macaulay report from the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
IFFR ANNOUNCES TIGER AWARD WINNERS
Feature film prizes were handed out on the second to last evening of the 38th annual International Film Festival Rotterdam tonight, following the announcements earlier in the week of the CineMart and Tiger Award for Short Film prizes. The festival’s top prize, the VPRO Tiger Awards, for which 14 first or second time feature film directors competed, went to three films, as is the festival’s custom.
They were far from surprising choices, including Ramtin Lavafipour’s Iranian smuggling drama Be Calm, Count to Seven, Yang Ik-June’s South Korean gangster melodrama Breathless and Mahmut Fazil Coskun’s Turkish drama of unrequited love, Wrong Rosary, all of which drew strong partisans among festival attendees and critics. FIPRESCI gave its critics prize to Edwin’s Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, a formally ambitious if often disjointed comedy about the repression of Chinese identity in Indonesia, while the KNF award (The Association of Dutch Film Critics Circle), which includes all films in the official selection, went to Chilean Pablo Lorrain’s riveting look at a Saturday Night Fever obsessed killer during Pinochet’s brutal reign, Tony Manero. Below is the full list of winners:
The jury statements on the VPRO Tiger Award winning films:
Be Calm and Count to Seven (Aram bash va ta haft beshmar) by Ramtin Lavafipour (Iran, 2008)
(Supported by Hubert Bals Fund)
‘We were extremely impressed by the artistry and vigor of the first film – the level of craft and cinematic intelligence on the one hand, the dedication to rendering the reality of a particular way of life on the other. For us, this film did what all films strive to do: it represented and dramatized a way of life in terms that were at once specific and universal, not to mention unfailingly vivid.’
Be Calm and Count to Seven is supported by the Hubert Bals Fund.
Breathless (Ddongpari) by Yang Ik-June (South Korea, 2008)
‘A powerfully rendered and acted film with a keen sense of … Read the rest
Friday, January 30th, 2009
Feature film prizes were handed out on the second to last evening of the 38th annual International Film Festival Rotterdam tonight, following the announcements earlier in the week of the CineMart and Tiger Award for Short Film prizes. The festival’s top prize, the VPRO Tiger Awards, for which 14 first or second time feature film directors competed, went to three films, as is the festival’s custom.
They were far from surprising choices, including Ramtin Lavafipour’s Iranian smuggling drama Be Calm, Count to Seven, Yang Ik-June’s South Korean gangster melodrama Breathless and Mahmut Fazil Coskun’s Turkish drama of unrequited love, Wrong Rosary, all of which drew strong partisans among festival attendees and critics. FIPRESCI gave its critics prize to Edwin’s Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, a formally ambitious if often disjointed comedy about the repression of Chinese identity in Indonesia, while the KNF award (The Association of Dutch Film Critics Circle), which includes all films in the official selection, went to Chilean Pablo Lorrain’s riveting look at a Saturday Night Fever obsessed killer during Pinochet’s brutal reign, Tony Manero. Below is the full list of winners:
The jury statements on the VPRO Tiger Award winning films:
Be Calm and Count to Seven (Aram bash va ta haft beshmar) by Ramtin Lavafipour (Iran, 2008)
(Supported by Hubert Bals Fund)
‘We were extremely impressed by the artistry and vigor of the first film – the level of craft and cinematic intelligence on the one hand, the dedication to rendering the reality of a particular way of life on the other. For us, this film did what all films strive to do: it represented and dramatized a way of life in terms that were at once specific and universal, not to mention unfailingly vivid.’
Be Calm and Count to Seven is supported by the Hubert Bals Fund.
Breathless (Ddongpari) by Yang Ik-June (South Korea, 2008)
‘A powerfully rendered and acted film with a keen sense of reality in its portrayal of a situation that has been seldom seen in cinema. We were also surprised to see an extremely troubling … Read the rest
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
Recently I linked to a CNET survey of mainstream video-hosting sites that critiqued these platforms according to their usability and picture quality. Now, CNET has published a “part two”:
Around this time last year we put together a comparison of various video sites to determine which ones had the best overall quality and user experience. Since then, high-definition-capable digital cameras and camcorders have taken off, and several major video hosts have rolled out official support for wide-screen, super high-quality Flash video in response. So we think the time has come to take another look at what these sites are offering now and crown a new leader in the realm of HD video.
The six sites we’re putting head to head are: YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, DailyMotion, SmugMug and Blip.tv.
Check it out — I was surprised by the winner.
Speaking of internet video, Mark Cuban has posted a provocative blog post about why it is not the be-all for content creators. His lede:
Internet Video. Its the salvation for content creators everywhere. Its the end to dependence on the big bad meanies, the cable and satellite companies. Right ? Hell no. The concept that “over the top” video creates a valid business alternative for content creators is as misguided an internet business myth as there is.
Of course, Cuban owns HDNet, so you can see why he might be more natually inclined towards arguing the long-term viability of cable, but his is still an interesting argument. So far it’s prompted almost 100 replies and, as always, the back-and-forth on the comments thread is as interesting as the blog post itself.
Thanks to producer Noah Harlan for tipping me to both of these.… Read the rest
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
I’m here in Rotterdam with poor wi-fi connectivity, so that’s one reason the blog has been a little light this week. But I want to join many others in the film journalism field by noting my dismay over this week’s Variety lay-offs, which include two great writers, Mike Jones (Filmmaker‘s former Managing Editor) and Ann Thompson, whose Risky Business column was published here at Filmmaker for a couple of years. In addition to being strong writers and reporters, both are journalists who understand the internet, the blogosphere, and the specific topics and tone required to engage an online audience. It’s kind of baffling to me that the two writers I most am drawn to at Variety Online are being let go at a time in which so much journalism is having to figure out how to transition to the web.
Both writers have posted about the layoffs. You can read Jones’ comments here and, at her Thompson on Hollywood blog, Ann Thompson’s here.
They are both super-talented, so I know we’ll be hearing from both of them soon.… Read the rest
