Archive for February, 2009
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
CORNEL WEST IN DIRECTOR ASTRA TAYLOR’S EXAMINED LIFE. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS.Still in her twenties, documentarian Astra Taylor has already brought a philosophical bent to non-fiction filmmaking and is looking to push the form in new and exciting directions. Taylor was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1979 and grew up in Athens, Georgia. She studied first at the University of Georgia and then got an MA in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 2001, she co-produced and co-directed the 45-minute documentary Miracle Tree: Moringa Oleifera, about infant malnutrition in Senegal, and the following year acted as associate producer on another doc, Allison Maclean’s Persons of Interest (2004), which looked at the treatment of Arabs and Muslims following the 9/11 attacks. Taylor made her feature debut with Žižek!, a portrait of Slavoj Žižek, the inimitable “Elvis of cultural theory;” the film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005 and was released in the U.S. by Zeitgeist later the same year to glowing reviews. Taylor, who is married to Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum, currently runs Hidden Driver Productions with fellow filmmaker Laura Hanna.
With her sophomore feature, Examined Life, Taylor once again brings together her two main passions: film and philosophy. The title is derived from a quote by Socrates (who deemed that “the unexamined life is not worth living”), and over the course of the film Taylor introduces us to eight contemporary philosophers who delve into the issues and problems of the modern world. Though Cornel West talks to Taylor as they drive around New York, the other seven participants – Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Judith Butler, Sunaura Taylor and Žižek – hold forth on foot, as Taylor conceived the film as “philosophers on walks.” Going against the norm of “serious” documentaries tending to be depressing, Taylor here creates a film of substance that is nevertheless light on its feet. Neither the walking philosophers nor their conversations stop for a moment during Examined Life, so the … Read the rest
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Director Maria Beatty last appeared in Filmmaker in 2002 when she interviewed Erin Cressida Wilson about her screenplay for Steve Shainberg’s Secretary, and since then we’ve been hearing about her plans for a mainstream narrative feature. Now, reports Lauren Wissot in a “sneak peek” at The House Next Door, Beatty has finished Bandaged, which is executive produced by Abel Ferrara.
From Wissot, an excerpt:
Bandaged is S&M filmmaker Maria Beatty’s foray into the indie mainstream – if one could call a flick best described as Mädchen in Uniform meets The English Patient meets Eyes Without A Face “mainstream.” Fittingly, none other than Abel Ferrara is serving as executive producer, though it just as easily could have been David Cronenberg since Beatty’s stunningly visceral cocktail of sex and bodily terror would surely merit that auteur’s seal of approval.
Bandaged will have its world premiere at the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on April 3.… Read the rest
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Okay, here’s a pull quote you won’t often get from me: this film is good for your soul. I’m referring to Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center in New York and which is so engaging, hopeful and against-the-grain that it becomes a must-see cinematic tonic for these confusing times.
Examined Life is Taylor’s documentary about the related acts of thinking and walking. Using the history of mobile thought as her springboard (for more on this, read Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust), Taylor (pictured) follows eight philosophers as they stroll through their hometown environments engaging in a series of ethical dialogues about the act of living in this world. The film is heady but by no means dry. There’s abundant humor (the reliably entertaining Slavoj Žižek interrogates the environmental movement by stumbling through a trash heap), and real empathy throughout.
Nick Dawson interviews Taylor for this week’s Director Interview, and he hits on a perfect analogy for the film: it’s a concert doc.
Filmmaker: One of the analogies I was thinking about for the film was that of a concert film, and it struck me that there’s a certain resonance with films like The Last Waltz, which also showcases a series of great, virtuosic performances.
Taylor: Oh yeah, that’s neat. It’s interesting because The Last Waltz was the one film the producer from my previous film, Žižek!, made me watch. I do like the theatricality and formality of that film a lot. These walks in Examined Life are quite naturalistic but, obviously, they’re a total spectacle and the subjects speak to the camera, so I really liked playing with that. I don’t have any desire to portray something that seems authentic – in the sense of “Oh, they’ve forgotten the camera and now they’re being themselves” – and showing these people at home having a sandwich. That, to me, isn’t nearly as compelling as them staring into the camera and saying, “This is what I believe. This is my truth. This is where my conviction lies. This is me.” To
… Read the rest
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Well not, apparently, that Sam Fuller, although there’s something about this aerial view of New York City that seems timeless. Check out the director’s lovely “New York Paper Airplane Flight,” which is aided immensely by the Alexandre Desplat score (from Birth) that is yoked to it.
Flying from Sam Fuller on Vimeo.
Perhaps paper airplane flights are a new web sub-genre, like pet tricks and microwaved explosions? Here’s another take on the same idea, shot in 2000.
Hat tip: Very Short List.… Read the rest
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Cinekink, the festival that can lay claim to being truly alternative kicks, off tonight with an 8pm gala and fundraiser at the Kush Lounge, 191 Chrystie Street. Screening will be three shorts — Petra Joy’s Artcore, Chuck Renslow’s The Blue Rose, and Eva Midgley’s Erotic Moments. Tomorrow the fest moves over to the Anthology Film Archives with screenings of Daryl Wein’s doc Sex Positive and Robert Pratten’s erotic horror film MindFLESH. Other highlights include Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon’s Slamdance-premiering doc Graphic Sexual Horror, which looks at how the U.S. Patriot Act was used to shutter the extreme bondage website Insex, and Un Piede di Roman Polanski, a short directed by Filmmaker contributor Lauren Wissot and Roxanne Kapista. For more info visit the Cinekink site or check out the community page created for the festival by B-side.… Read the rest
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
New York filmmaker Patrick Daughters is one of my favorite music video directors, and his new clip for Depeche Mode’s “Wrong” has the queasy logic and panick-y vibe of a waking dream. See it below.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
… that is, if your movie can cost $300. As reported by the Credit Matters Blog, the credit card company is offering select customers three c-notes if they’ll pay their cards off and close their accounts. For AmEx, the incentive serves to raise some cash and, undoubtedly, reduce on the books the amount of credit it needs to keep on reserve for each customer.
With the company trying to shrink its rolls with such an undignified come-on, the AmEx of old, that tony symbol of having made it, may be gone. So, let’s revisit (in a remastered version) Jamie Stuart’s 2006 home-made American Express spot.
AmEx (2006) from The Mutiny Company on Vimeo.… Read the rest
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
Ted Hope has an impassioned editorial on the Tribeca Film site about the calamity that is the stalling out of the New York State Film and Television Tax Credit program. In the piece, which carefully details not only the economic but also creative disaster that will be caused by a cessation of the program, Hope raises a great question:
All New York filmmakers—and those dependent on them—got a quick lesson two weeks ago, when we learned that the New York tax credits had run out of money. It hit everyone as a shock, but did it really need to? It couldn’t have come as a surprise that $500M was gone—or that it was being spent far quicker than expected. This wasn’t some sort of Madoff swindle. It was something that was easy to calculate or predict if you knew what films and TV shows were shooting in the state. But it seems that no one was doing that calculation. I wasn’t. Our politicians evidently weren’t. And neither were our industry’s leaders, organizations, or guilds. What’s up with that?….
I have found this city to be the greatest creative inspiration for me, but who can really afford to remain here anymore? It is expensive to live here. It is expensive to shoot here. The tax credits were the great leveler: they brought full employment to the filmmaking community, and they brought the costs of filming down for the financiers.
The cycle of each generation of NYC filmmakers recruiting the next is in jeopardy—and with that we can expect fewer films will be made in our city. Filmmakers will always be able to make the super low budget films here, but will they be able to make the ones that are decently financed enough to catapult them to the world stage? Will they even be able to afford to live here?
Read the entire piece at the link, and if you haven’t signed the petition protesting the cuts, you can do so here.… Read the rest
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
One of my favorite films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Ry Russo-Young’s New Frontiers selection You Won’t Miss Me, co-written by and starring Stella Schnabel. I’ve got a short conversation between Russo-Young and Lance Edmands, who cut the trailer with her, to run in our upcoming SXSW online coverage, but there’s one thing the director says in the interview that I want to quote here. As she discusses the intimacy she tries to create on-set with her actors, she says, “Well, I try to create an environment on set where people aren’t thinking about the film as a finished product. That’s the last thing I want them to think about.”
That quote sums up for me one of the things I like most about the film. With You Won’t Miss Me, Russo-Young has created a free-wheeling, lyrical but sometimes jarring depiction of a few months in the life of a character who is navigating her own chaotic and often inchoate emotional straits. The film has a deceptively casual feel as it avoids obvious plot points and melodramatic narrative contrivances. By its conclusion, however, it feels full — an honest portrait of character we haven’t quite seen on screen before at a very specific moment in her life. That feeling is a product of Russo-Young’s method, that avoidance of “finished product” thinking. She shot the film on multiple formats with in a series of short, tiny-crewed shoots over many months, and this loose-limbed process, one that evolved the story and character together over time, gives the film its own unique and personal footprint.
We’ll have more about the film in the months ahead, but, for now, here’s the trailer.
YOU WONT MISS ME trailer from Ry Russo-Young on Vimeo.… Read the rest
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
Via Indiewire the very sad news that New Yorker Films, the storied art-film distribution company that released the films of Godard, Tarkovsky, Bertolucci, Resnais, Wenders, among others, shut its doors today. From an email sent by New Yorker’s Jose Lopez to filmmakers that was then forwarded to Indiewire:
I have sad news.The parent company of New Yorker Films has defaulted on a loan. The assets of New Yorker were used as security on the loan. The lender has informed us that it intends to foreclose on these assets. New Yorker stopped doing business yesterday…We are in total shock that after forty three years this has happened.
Further details can be found at the link.… Read the rest
CORNEL WEST IN DIRECTOR ASTRA TAYLOR’S EXAMINED LIFE. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS.
