Archive for November, 2009
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
Filmmaker Kyle Henry was one of our “25 New Faces” in 2006 on the basis of his excellent debut feature, Room, and now he’s blogging about his fascinating follow-up, Fourplay. Executive produced by Jim McKay and Michael Stipe, and produced by Jason Wehling, Fourplay is a series of short films highlighting sexual transgressions, and, as the blog makes clear, the final product may be compiled into a feature, released as a series of shorts, or may be part of some other, more fluid kind of format.
From the description of the film on the blog:
Four transgressions, four transmissions, four true tales of sexual intimacy: in AUSTIN, a young heterosexual couple debate independence vs conceiving and arrive at a startling compromise; in TAMPA, a man finds his own private nirvana in a public restroom; in WEST HAVEN, an older woman falls for her pastor’s dog; and in SAN FRANCISCO, a transvestite prostitute faces a challenging assignment.
These are emotionally high stakes stories that require bravura performances and we are doing all this on a very small budget. Hope we are up the task! Also, by making a series of shorts, we don’t know what the final form will be, or if there will be a final form versus a series of forms (e.g. stand alone shorts serially released on VOD, a narrative feature packaged for festival/theatrical/cable/DVD distribution, or an add on for free to a progressive sex-ed websites like Nightcharm or Jane’s Guide or Butt Magazine). Who knows?
And:
We are interested in telling stories where sex functions as it does in our real lives: as potentially major/minor turning point/s in not only the relationships we create through the acts themselves but also in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us through committing these acts.
Or, as Henry wrote to me in an email, the film and its byproduct, the blog, “give voice to real-life visionaries like Chloe, whose knowledge of life (and sexual intimacy, not just sex) is gained through real living and not just its recreation through cinematic simulations.”
Start by checking out this … Read the rest
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
A few weeks ago I attended a reception at Ira Deutchman’s house in which Columbia University‘s new Focus in Creative Producing was announced, and I’ve been remiss in posting here about what is a really promising and, in these times, necessary course of study up on Morningside Heights.
From the press release:
Building upon a strong record of faculty and alumni recognition at the Oscars, Sundance and other film festivals, Columbia University School of the Arts is expanding its master of fine arts film program. Film: Creative Producing, a newly introduced course of study, will train the next generation of filmmakers in the modern complexities of professional movie production.
Applications for the three-year MFA program are being accepted now. The deadline for the fall 2010 semester is December 1.
“A strong and gifted group of producers has come from Columbia, including Albert Berger (Little Miss Sunshine) to Ben Odell (Padre Nuestro) to current student Bridgette Liebowitz, producer of the acclaimed student short Cigarette Candy,” said Jamal Joseph, associate professor and chair of the film department. “Our new program will build on the success of our unique approach that immerses students in the creative, business, history and practical aspects of producing.”
Unlike other film producing programs, students will take a completely integrated core curriculum in their first year, including courses in directing, directing actors, screenwriting and film history. In these courses they will connect with students pursuing a focus in directing and screenwriting. The cross-disciplinary approach is designed to emphasize aspiring producers’ knowledge of all aspects of the film making process. The small size of the producing program — 24 students — will ensure individual attention from faculty and encourage the development of a close-knit community of students.
In the second year, the program offers a broad curriculum that is defined by Columbia’s presence in the New York independent filmmaking community, but is comprehensive in its scope. It includes instruction in the nuts and bolts of producing, but is steeped in Columbia’s traditional emphasis on storytelling as an art form. The expanded focus will
… Read the rest
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
I came across this short video of Doug Rushkoff speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, and in it he echoes some of the things he spoke about at the DIY Days in Philadelphia, which I attended back in June. In that keynote as well Rushkoff hopskotched through the creation of central currency, detailing the role of governments in controlling the our ability to exchange value. It’s a lot to cover in 12.5 minutes, and while I’m no expert in economic history, there’s plenty to quibble with in his broad shorthand. Like, as a colleague pointed out after his Philadelphia lecture, didn’t the creation of currency also have something to do with the fact that people didn’t want to carry around big bushels of grain around everywhere? This video also has its share of head-scratchers, like his statements that today, “cash has lost its utility value” and “cash is scarce” (perhaps correct for many on an individual level but certainly not correct on a macro level).
In the last four minutes of this video, however, Rushkoff takes some useful shots at the “free” movement as well as what he sees as the wrong conclusions about creative property rights many have derived from the open source movement. (Funny how, after all the hype, Chris Anderson’s Free landed with something of a thud…) He is correct in his pinpointing of how value is being drained from content creators and displaced towards the proprietors of ad-based networks (i.e., Google), and his description of Anderson’s model as being about the constant and ultimately unsustainable leveraging of forms of free content or services is succinct and apt. With two-and-a-half minutes to go, Rushkoff reaches the reason I decided to watch the video: a discussion of alternate forms of currency to facilitate creative value exchange. Of course, the idea of local currency or script, actually being practiced in some communities, has surfaced recently in discussions about local solutions to the current economic crisis, and the idea of peer-to-peer value exchange led in the past to the creation of sites ranging from Craig’s List to Swaptree.
I’d … Read the rest
Friday, November 20th, 2009
Contributing Editor Brandon Harris has posted on his blog a new preview of Filmmaker and MoMA’s annual “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” program, which unspools at the museum this week. Screening will be the five films that will be competing for the Gotham Award we sponsor on December 1. (For schedule and film descriptions, visit MoMA’s site.)
Brandon writes that this year’s program is the strongest we’ve put together in the six years of doing this series, and I agree. This isn’t to say that previous years haven’t been strong, but in the past we’ve always been able to indulge ourselves with some element of whimsicality in the selection process, including films that would truly be offbeat pictures in a theatrical context. This year, however, we have five films that all play great on the big screen and all herald important new talents. That these films don’t have broader distribution is shocking.
Ry Russo-Young’s You Won’t Miss Me, starring Stella Schnabel, is a hypnotic film collage taking us into the inner life of a fascinating yet tough-to-like downtown actress. Russo-Young made the film in bits and pieces over a period of months, and it contains a lovely, unforced mixture of emotions, from happiness to despair, anxiety to abandon. Read Alicia Van Couvering’s interview with the director here.
October Country is our lone doc. (One other strong doc was in contention up until the end but withdrew when it finalized distribution plans.) Like Russo-Young, filmmakers Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher (chosen this year for our “25 New Faces”) have made a film that seems to burrow under the psychic skin of its characters. A portrait of Mosher’s own splintered upstate New York family, October Country impresses with the mysterious visual language it creates to connect its lost fathers, sons, mothers and daughters.
First-time filmmaker Damien Chazelle’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench is an unexpected charmer, a film that will delight fans of street-level indie filmmaking as well as those who love music and movies about music. When I wrote about it for the … Read the rest
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
It didn’t used to be all reality shows. In 1990 MTV aired Buzz, an experimental video art collage show by director Mark Pellington. Genesis P-Orridge, William Burroughs, RU Sirius, David Byrne, and other transgressive thinkers (oh yes, and Jon Bon Jovi) were all featured in the debut show, which was openly inspired by Bruce Conner and other experimental filmmakers. Boing Boing noticed that the first episode has been been posted to YouTube, and I’ve embedded the clips below.
… Read the rest
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have announced the 15 films that have made the shortlist for Best Documentary. Two of the most prised docs of the year made the list: Louie Psihoyos‘s The Cove and Robert Kenner‘s Food, Inc., as well as a few lesser known titles like Anders Ostergaard‘s Burma VJ and Matt Tyrnauer‘s Valentino: The Last Emperor. But surprisingly excluded were Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story and James Toback‘s Tyson.
The 82nd Academy Awards nominations will be announced on February 2.
Best Documentary Shortlist:
The Beaches of Agnes
Agnes Varda, director
Burma VJ
Anders Ostergaard, director
The Cove
Louie Psihoyos, director
Every Little Step
James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo, directors
Facing Ali
Pete McCormack, director
Food, Inc.
Robert Kenner, director
Garbage Dreams
Mai Iskander, director
Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
Mark N. Hopkins, director
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, directors
Mugabe and the White African
Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey, directors
Sergio
Greg Barker, director
Soundtrack for a Revolution
Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, directors
Under Our Skin
Andy Abrahams Wilson, director
Valentino: The Last Emperor
Matt Tyrnauer, director
Which Way Home
Rebecca Cammisa, director… Read the rest
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
The Sundance Institute announced today the 13 artists selected for the New Frontier section at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. These works will be shown at New Frontier on Main, open to the public Thursday, January 21 through Saturday, January 30, 2010. (The full list of artists are below.)
One of the artists chosen this year is actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt (pictured), who we discovered last year has an interest in the new media/digital artists on the Web as he’s created the site hitRECord.org. In the Spring 2009 issue we talked to him about the site, which at the time was still not fully realized he admitted, but his goal is to have the site be a home where filmmakers, artists, poets, musicians, ect. can start or contribute to works (or what he calls “remix” works) in a supportive community with the final project owned by the community. “This is my whole take on the Internet creative culture,” Gordon-Levitt says in the piece. “Why would you take time out to be negative? Instead of posting something that’s negative I’d rather move on and look for something good. Everyone [who comes to the site] understands this and has built a positive community.” He continues: “What is good about hitRECord is that you don’t have to confront that blank page. I see what’s getting a lot of hearts (the way works are rated on the site), I add something to it and reupload it. The idea is if lots of people do that we’ll get a collective refining of our records. It’s not about an individual author; it’s the desires of what I hope will be hundreds of refinements.”
According to the release, Gordon-Levitt plans on “creating a cohesive short multimedia work that will have a special screening at the end of the Festival.”
Click here to learn more about the site.
2010 New Frontier Artists:
Artist Spotlight
Gina Czarnecki
“Nascent,” “Cell Mass N2,” “Infected”
Multimedia artist, Gina Czarnecki, explores the convergence of biology, sensuality, dance, and the cinematic in her mesmerizing single channel installations. Developed in collaboration with biotechnologists, computer programmers, dancers, … Read the rest
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Forty-plus years into a still-vital, ever-proliferating filmmaking career, Werner Herzog has aged gracefully into the role of the sage adventurer, still fearlessly exploring the terrain between documentary and fiction as well as the vanishing point between charismatic eccentricity and full-blown psychosis. Born in Munich, raised in the Bavarian Alps, and lumped early on with other avatars of the New German Cinema, Herzog has ceaselessly chronicled the obsessions of dreamers and renegades both real (God’s Angry Man) and imagined (Stroszek, The Wild Blue Yonder), as well as social outcasts whose quest for ecstatic truth leads to madness, self-destruction, or sometimes, in the case of Grizzly Man’s Timothy Treadwell, both. There are those who find Herzog’s documentaries to be the apotheosis of that singular vision, and those who are partial to the fevered collaborations with Klaus Kinski, when Herzog seemed to be placing his own life at risk in order to realize impossible ambitions, just like the protagonists of his twin monuments to crazed hubris, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God. In recent years, he has journeyed to a science colony in Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World), ringed the jungle canopy with a high-flying inventor (The White Diamond), and revisited the story of downed airman Dieter Dengler (Little Dieter Needs to Fly), this time in fiction (Rescue Dawn). Regardless of whether it makes sense to divide such effulgently individualistic output into separate genres (in this director’s cinema of extremes, we are forever on the brink of both catastrophe and revelation), one thing is certain: only Herzog is ever Herzogian.
His latest film is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a rogue-cop drama loosely based on Abel Ferrara’s 1992 crime thriller about a drug-deranged, out-of-control New York detective investigating the murder of a nun. (Herzog claims never to have seen Ferrara’s film.) In the new reimagining, Nicholas Cage plays Lieutenant Terence McDonagh, a decorated Crescent City officer who injures his back rescuing an inmate from a flooded cell in the aftermath of … Read the rest
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
The mountain came to Mohamed.
I picked up a bug that lingered and made me miserable. But I had accepted the honor of being a juror for the Kieslowski Prize at the 31st Starz Denver Film Festival, which began last week and runs through November 22. Only six foreign-language films were competing for our votes, and, either at other festivals or through the kindness of European sales agents, I had seen them all. (The prize is sponsored by Screen, for which I am a reviewer.) Something told me I should cover myself as a journalist just in case I didn’t heal in time, since I had promised to cover the event. So I made a list of films I hadn’t seen (many I had viewed at other fests) that seemed of particular interest and asked for screeners, which I received. In fact, I watched most of them on my laptop in the hospital.
Ultimately, I didn’t make it to Colorado. We did our jury deliberation over the phone (winner announced this weekend, sorry). And I am keeping my word about writing on the festival—without attending. Which begs the question, why go to festivals, especially ones with few or no premieres, unless you live in that city and it’s your only shot at seeing the stuff that’s being packed and repacked in film cans and sent all over the world that year?
That’s a big topic, but I want to make clear that the reason I offered to write something is that, once I saw the festival’s website, I realized this fest is a huge cut above the usual regional festival (even if such bland regional films as Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s October Country, Bill Ross and Turner Ross’s 45365, and Hue Rhodes’s Saint John of Las Vegas did little to enhance the genre), with provocative programming, useful panels, and career awards given for talent—Ed Harris, avant-gardist Ernie Gehr, Hal Holbrook, and J.K. Simmons–rather than for generating media buzz. It is greener than any other festival I know, and it is the only one to my knowledge with … Read the rest
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Thanks to everyone who came out tonight for the first in our series, “A New World: A User’s Guide for Filmmakers and Audiences” at the IFC Center. The speaker was Jon Reiss, who gave listeners an accelerated yet detailed overview of his thoughts on DIY distribution and what a theatrical release means today. (Some of these thoughts can be found in this article in Filmmaker.)
There was a lot to take away, but here are a couple of things that impressed themselves on me.
1. During the development of your project, think of five specific audiences your film will appeal to. Jon said that too many people think of their audiences too broadly, like, “I think my film will appeal to women between the ages of 25 to 45.” That’s a demographic, not an audience. You have to be a lot more specific because that specificity is what enables you to tap into a niche audience that will mobilize itself around your film. Jon said that Valentino director Matt Tyrnauer was surprised to discover that women’s sewing groups were buying blocks of tickets for his doc on the great fashion designer.
The trick, then, becomes not just identifying those niches early on but — and this is my addition — developing your film so that these potential niches are motivated to rally around it. This doesn’t mean pandering to an audience — it means making sure that you present your subject matters in fresh, original, and deep ways so as to inspire those naturally predisposed to them.
2. Prioritize among the four goals for a feature filmmaker. Jon discussed the four things a filmmaker might hope to get from their film. The first is furthering of his or her career. This could come in the form of a development deal, an agent, a studio assignment, financing of a second film, etc. The second is money. The third is to get your film seen, to communicate and reach people. The fourth is to change the world, or to advance a particular social or political message. (He also spun out two … Read the rest
