TALKING GODARD AND HERZOG WITH SASHA GREY

By Scott Macaulay

The Girlfriend Experience star Sasha Grey continues her march through the jungles of mainstream media with this Current TV piece in which she lists her five favorite movies. Hey, given that she’s using her promo time to promote Werner Herzog and Catherine Breillat, it’s totally cool with us.

Read my interview with Grey here.… Read the rest

THE 62 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL WINNERS

By Scott Macaulay

Having taken the train from Cannes early this morning to Paris, I’m now watching the closing night ceremony on television following a few stressful moments in which it appeared that our cable might be out. But, Canal + is on, the Steadicam follows Jan Kounen and his closing night film Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky star Anna Mouglalis into the Palais, and the awards begin….

Best Short goes to Joao Salaviza’s Arena.

Isabelle Adjani presents the Camera d’Or, given to the Best First Feature, to Australian director Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah. (A special mention was given to Ajami.)

Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Park Chan Wook’s Thirst were both awarded Jury Prizes.

The Prix du Scenario (Best Screenplay) goes to Lou Ye for Spring Fever.

Terry Gilliam bounds onstage to give the Prix de la Mise en Scene (Best Director) to Brilliante Mendoza for Kinatay.

Best Actress has gone to Charlotte Gainsbourg for her role in Lars von Trier’s Anti-Christ. Best Actor goes to Christoph Waltz for his role in Inglourious Basterds.

A special Jury Prize was given to the great Alain Resnais, who appeared in this year’s festival with Wild Grass.

The Grand Prix goes to Jacques Audiard’s French crime drama A Prophet and the Palme d’Or is given to Michael Haneke’s pre-World War 1 story of generations and classes divided by a series of mysterious and malicious acts in a small German town, The White Ribbon (pictured).… Read the rest

CANNES SNAPSHOTS: TARANTINO, NOE, HANEKE

By Scott Macaulay

A lack of wireless, fatigue, and my dislike of netbooks (particularly the kind in the American Pavilion) have curtailed my Cannes posting. I have no idea how Eric Kohn, Matt Dentler, Allison Willmore and the trade reviewers get their well considered reviews up so quickly after their screenings. That said, I’ll try to have my thoughts on the handful of films I saw up when I get back to Paris tomorrow. Very quickly, though, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void is disquieting and dreamy, as much a psychologically charged immersive space as it is a conventional film narrative. Noe’s decadent Tokyo riff on the Tibetan Book of the Dead is structured around births, a death, and finds its twists through hypnotic tracking shots, strobe-lit effects and vertiginous clockwheeled pans. The film conceives its own sense of filmic structure, which makes the criticism that it’s too long a bit puzzling to me. In that the consciousness of the protagonist becomes largely inaccessible to the viewer in the film’s second half, I suppose this section is challenging, but to me that’s where its eeriest psychological moments are. I liked it a lot.

Inglourious Basterds (did I spell that right) is Quentin Tarantino’s most personal-feeling movie, an ambitious meditation on the myth-making abilities of cinema and the responsibilities inherent in being a film director. It is a bit oddly shaped — here the “too long” critique might be right — but the film is boldly conceived and audaciously executed. I liked it a lot and am still digesting its heady riffs on ’30s and ’40s cinema; two friends I was with thought it was Tarantino’s best movie.

Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon is precisely and perfectly made, an austere portrait of a small German town and some malicious goings-on in the years just prior to World War 1. I found its grimness enervating, however, and was put off by Haneke’s stoic refusal to make the film’s mysteries either more suspenseful or more mysterious. The targets of Haneke’s critique seemed liked straw men to me. And while the single historical event referenced midway through the … Read the rest

OPEN VIDEO CONFERENCE

By Admin

Next month the Open Video Conference comes to NYU’s law school on June 19th and 20th. OVC is a special gathering of the tech and creative communities to discuss all things related to internet video.

I had a chance to ask the OVC conference organizers Dean Jansen and Ben Moskowitz a few questions about this year’s event.

What is OVC and why now?

DEAN: Video is blossoming online, but its future is still unclear. The big issues are: free speech, richer cultural engagement, and the pace at which we are able to innovate. Greater openness in online video strengthens each of these causes. This conference addresses these issues, and the need to move in a more open direction, as opposed to a more consolidated and broadcast style environment.

The event comes at a time when people are beginning to see limitations inherent in our current video landscape. This is a critical moment where norms for video are being set, and we want to make sure they go in an open direction.

BEN: At this very moment, in 2009, we have a chance to ensure that internet video retains these key characteristics. It’s still early and things are looking good, but we need devices that play nice with each other, networks that aren’t totally neutered, and playback and production tools that are low-cost (ideally free/open source) and easy to use. Developments like Hulu are pretty good for the user, because they can watch what they want, when they want. But we don’t want internet video to be a glorified TV on demand service. We want video to be a dynamic medium that invites clipping, archival, remix, collage, repurposing, and many other uses that are currently inhibited by law or by lack of tools.

Can you explain the mix of people that will be attending and what do you think or hope will happen with that type of pollination?

DEAN: The conference promises a very unique audience of creators, thinkers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and others coming together to discuss these opportunities and challenges. We hope to raise cross-awareness in a … Read the rest

ANDERS ØSTERGAARD, “BURMA VJ”

By Nick Dawson

Danish cinema currently has numerous talented fiction directors – everybody from Lars von Trier, Christopher Boe, Ole Bornedal, and Susanne Bier to Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Nicolas Winding Refn and Lone Scherfig – and now Anders Østergaard is bringing attention to the country’s documentary output. Born in Copenhagen in 1965, Østergaard studied at the Danish School of Journalism, graduating in 1991, before deciding to eschew a career as a journalist to become a documentarian. Throughout his career, he has been concerned with the boundaries of non-fiction and with the idea of documentary itself. Østergaard’s debut film, Gensyn med Johannesburg (1996), was about filmmaker Henning Carlsen’s return to the eponymous South African city, where 35 years earlier he had shot the docudrama Dilemma. Since then, Østergaard has become particularly interested in documentary reenactments: he recreated the death of Swedish jazz musician Jan Johansson in Troldkarlen (1999), and in Tintin et Moi (2003) he used 3D animation to explore the previously two-dimensional world of Hergé’s cartoons. In 2006, he scored a big hit in his home country with Gasolin’, a portrait of the Danish 70s rock band of the same name, and in 2008 followed it up with Så kort og mærkeligt livet er, about Danish poet Dan Turéll.

Østergaard’s latest film, Burma VJ, once again grapples with how and why we capture the world on film. It was initially meant to be a small-scale film about “Joshua,” a junior video reporter living in Rangoon, the largest city in Burma, who is part of the Democratic Voice of Burma (or DVB). Though any journalistic activity is banned under the current Burmese junta, the DVB risk their lives and freedom to secretly document government suppression in the country so that its own citizens, as well as the international community, can see. However the project changed radically in 2007, when, after 19 years of relative quiet, the Saffron Revolution – an uprising of the country’s Buddhist monks – took place, turning the film into a document of the Burmese people’s attempt to fight back. Narrated by “Joshua” and featuring reenactments … Read the rest

THE FEST WHERE $100,000 IS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

By Jason Guerrasio

Just posted over on Festival Ambassador, Mike Plante highlights this year’s Off Plus Camera Film Festival in Karkow, Poland (he and Trevor Groth presented the “25 Years of Sundance” program at the festival). Off Plus Camera has not only begun to grab the attention of celebs like Anna Karina (pictured) but filmmakers who can vie for it’s Grand Prize of $100,000. And I don’t mean 100g’s worth of equipment and other prizes, I mean $100,000 in cold hard U.S. cash.… Read the rest

NOTES FROM THE OFF PLUS CAMERA FILM FESTIVAL

Regular contributor Mike Plante filed this report on the Poland-based fest Off Plus Camera, which took place April 17-26 and is gaining notoriety on the fest circuit because of its Grand Prize of $100,000. We can just hear you all practicing your Polish now.

The Off Plus Camera film festival is brand new but already pushing expectations. The first edition of the fest held in beautiful Krakow, Poland, was last October. In an effort to have more crowds and better weather, the fest was moved to April. But they didn’t wait a year – they slammed straight to April ‘09, being crazy enough to do a fest twice in one physical year. With less time between fests, it might be hard to find that many good films, but when you are looking for films from every country regardless of their premiere status, you have tons of great choices. Premiere status is necessary for many fests to entice press, industry and some audiences, and to help achieve a level of importance inside the indie film industry. It becomes tedious though, with many great films missing out on screening and competition opportunities because they had one show somewhere else.

I digress – Off Plus Camera had a powerful choice for opening night – the I-can’t-believe-its-not-a-documentary Johnny Mad Dog, a great and harrowing film that kept people talking. The fest’s official competition section stressed first and second features from directors, with the fest’s opinion each film had not been highly exposed yet, or played at other festivals and has since fallen below the radar. It was a section many fests would want to show, with Afterschool, Big Heart City, Gigante, La Nana, Medicine for Melancholy, The Messenger, Shutes, Sois Sage, Splinterheads, Unmade Beds, Wojna Polsko-Ruska (from Poland) and Zion and his Brother.

Besides their good taste in films, Off Plus Camera gives incredible awards: $100,000 to the jury-selected best film (La Nana, pictured above), which also includes a promise of 1 million zloty to the director if they make … Read the rest

CANNES: 42 BELOW’S ONE DREAM RUSH FILMS FETED

By Scott Macaulay

This year’s Cannes Film Festival was the occasion of the European premiere screening of films from One Dream Rush, a film series sponsored by 42 Below and the Beijing Film Studios in which 42 directors were commissioned to create 42-second short films dealing with and hailing from the world of dreams.

What’s the difference between this series and any number of other sponsored film/multi-director internet plays? Short answer — the filmmakers chosen are great, their films are for the most part really, really good, and their extreme brevity gives each piece the quality of a memory half-remembered from a dream the night before. The complete list of directors is below, but just to name a few: Asia Argento, Kenneth Anger, Harmony Korine, Larry Clark, Abel Ferrara, Sergei Bodrov, David Lynch, Carlos Reygados, Mike Figgis, James Franco, Floria Sigismondi, Cat Power’s Chan Marshall, Michele Civetta, Charles Burnett and Gaspar Noe.

The films were produced by Rajan Mehta, David Komurek and Civetta out of Quintessence Films and Illiz, and the Cannes screening was scheduled to feature a Q and A with directors Argento (also on the Cannes jury), Clark and Civetta. The party after was sponsored by Agnes b., the Wild Bunch, 42 Below and Quintessence.

Many of the films can be streamed at the 42×42 site, and some are up at the Quintessence site too. Gaspar Noe’s is a beautifully scary nude almost-painting, Argento’s is a spirited, dreamy, and ear-piercing portrait of the mostly South American transsexuals who live in her Rome neighborhood, Civetta’s is a gorgeously layered “modern occult ceremony,” and Jonathan Caouette contributes an odd but beautifully unsettling piece of near-horror starring Chloe Sevigny.

Check them out and revisit the 42×42 site as new ones are being added regularly.

The directors: Kenneth Anger (Youtube), Grant Morrison: The 42nd Minute (Youtube), Matt Pyke, UK, Chris Milk, USA, “Last Day Dream” (Youtube), Dee Poon, China, “An Exercise in Futility” (feat. Chun Xiao), Arden Wohl, USA, “Jacobian”, Asia Argento, Italy, “S/He”, Zhang Yuan, China, Michele Civetta, Italy, “Astarte”, Florian Habicht, New Zealand, Liebestraume, Taika … Read the rest

THE MACARTHUR FOUNDATION BYTES DOWN ON DIGITAL MEDIA

By Scott Macaulay

Jonathan Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, has posted a “President’s Essay” in which he discusses the ways in which digital media is transforming both our lives as well as the working methodologies and granting practices of the Foundation. I recommend the essay, and particularly noteworthy is the section on media grantmaking, in which Fanton says the Foundation will now seek to fund projects that take advantage of the new distribution tools as well as those from new sources of information and that stimulate and include audience interaction.

An excerpt:

With these changes, the challenge of providing individuals with diverse perspectives and reliable information is more complex than in the past, precisely because the tools available are so much more powerful. We enjoy unprecedented access to data, analysis, and opinion from around the world, but this also requires greater effort to filter, choose, and process such information.

In light of these developments, MacArthur’s long-standing programs supporting documentary film and public radio and television are in transition. We still want to help ensure that reliable information on important topics is available and that it finds the audience it deserves. And we want to help bring fresh sources of information to bear on the debate of important issues.

MacArthur will continue to support the creation of exceptional documentary films and high-quality nonfiction programming for public radio and television. But to take full advantage of new technologies, the Foundation is challenging content-producers to tell their stories through more than one medium — radio and podcasting, for example; or documentary film and streaming video. We are especially interested in projects that invite significant participation from their audiences.

The piece goes on to give recent grants as examples. One is Frontline World, is a PBS program that fully integrates broadcast and online content, and another is Global Voices, “a website that calls attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world.”

I attended a panel the other day in which the audience consisted of mostly documentary filmmakers. One admitted that she “was just getting into the internet.” She had … Read the rest

FREE IS NOT ENOUGH

By Scott Macaulay

A funny thing happened on the way to the publication of Chris Anderson’s upcoming Free. The newspaper business went into free fall, other content industries may soon follow suit, and at least a small group of media consumers are beginning to wonder what type of content will be lost if everything is delivered free to the consumer but enabled (and defined?) by its advertising and marketing support. Representing the resurgent tollkeeper model is the Financial Times in this article by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson entitled “Media’s want to break free.” It concludes:

Content owners are battling what Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, calls “a revolutionary price” in his next book, Free; and many things – from search to user-generated content – will remain free online. Professionally produced content, however, is likely to become much scarcer for those unwilling to pay for it.

“Who started this rumour that information had to be free and why didn’t we challenge this when it first came out?”, Time Inc’s Ann Moore asked this year.

According to Mr Grimshaw, the answer is that a “free evangelist movement [convinced] everybody that the internet was somehow different and any attempt to impose a business model was an imposition on people’s human rights”. Changing that perception will mean nothing less than challenging the culture of the internet as we currently understand it.

Before you get to these statements the piece has a worthwhile discussion of micropayments, ‘net tollkeepers, and the inadequacies of the internet advertising model.… Read the rest