LADY VENGEANCE: INTERVIEW WITH SUNDANCE FILMMAKER EVE SUSSMAN

By Farihah Zaman

Although Sundance is predominantly known for indie dramas and social issue documentaries, the New Frontiers section provides a loving home for particularly odd ducks. Unlike many projects in New Frontiers, which are presented as installations or other new media formats, Eve Sussman’s whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir was screened in a conventional theater. However, the film’s text, 300 bits of voiceover, 150 pieces of music, and 3,000 images are live-edited by an algorithmic computer dubbed the Serendipity Machine that creates a randomized sequence, meaning each screening is entirely unique. Not only does Sussman’s piece turn the idea of the mystery genre on its ear, it plays with the very idea of genre itself, as well as chronology, and convention, and every other building block of narrative as we know it.

Fresh from a successful three-show run at Sundance 2012, Sussman spoke with Lady Vengeance about storytelling and the nature of human perception.

LADY VENGEANCE: How did you conceive of whiteonwhite?

SUSSMAN: Well the title is named after a Malevich painting; White on White and Black Square are the two seminal pieces of Suprematist work, which is about transcendence through art, and pure feeling in art—getting away from representation. But as I was becoming interested in trying to make a piece about that painting, the actor I worked with, Jeff Wood, who was also at Sundance with us, became really interested in space travel. So his literal interest in space converged with the sort of conceptual, theoretical ideas of White on White. Malevich used these sort of megalomaniac theoretical concepts where he would call himself the chairman of space, and he would talk often about the idea of space, whether it was the space of the picture plane, or literal space as in the cosmos; you could sort of read it as a double entendre. And so we started conflating those two ideas, the idea of space and the idea of Suprematism and White on White and pure transcendence.

LV: How did this idea lead you to shoot in Central Asia?

SUSSMAN: Because Jeff kept talking about space I said, … Read the rest

BRYCE DALLAS HOWARD DIRECTS CANON EOS C300 SHORT

By Scott Macaulay

Here is a just-posted short science-fiction film, When You Find Me, directed by Bryce Dallas Howard and produced by Ron Howard. It’s short on Canon’s new EOS C300 camera. As Koo notes over at No Film School, the short was inspired by a photograph submitted as part of Canon’s Project Imagination contest.

… Read the rest

MUSIC VIDEO: THE WEEKND’S “THE KNOWING”

By Scott Macaulay

On my list of top ten culture for 2011 would be the woozy morning-after soul of the mysterious Canadian vocalist/producer team, The Weeknd. For a song from an album, House of Balloons, in which every other track sounds like the music from the final five minutes of a Miami Vice episode, this science-fiction opus, directed by Mikael Colombu and originally posted by Drake on his site, is not what I would have expected. Dim the lights, go full screen and check it out. (Hat tip: Pitchfork.)

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TRAILER WATCH: KIRSTEN DUNST IN LARS VON TRIER’S “MELANCHOLIA”

By Scott Macaulay

The trailer is both gorgeous and slightly perplexing — and after Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, seems to be continuing a trend of arthouse psychological planet movies. In truth, I can’t wait for this this new, presumably Cannes-bound pic from Lars Von Trier.

Melancholia from Zentropa on Vimeo.… Read the rest

“ZENITH” AND SHOCKS TO THE SYSTEM

By Scott Macaulay

Directed by Anonymous (or, maybe, “experiment supervisor” Vladan Nikolic), Zenith is described as a “paranoid sci-fi found object from the future,” and it’s inspired by the notorious Milgram experiment, a real psychology experiment exploring man’s potential for both acquiescence to authority and cruelty.

Wrote Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice:

“The film they don’t want you to see,” by “Anonymous,” shouts the teaser, prefaced by warnings of legal threats and “illegal” images. Zenith comes off at first blush as merely a spurt of faux-transgression looking for rubberneckers. But it’s actually a densely written, sparsely filmed dystopia, using the wasteyards and warehouses of Brooklyn and Queens as the city of a wasted future, when people have been genetically fine-tuned for “happiness,” leaving everyone numb and scrambling after painful-bad-side-effect pharmaceuticals just so they can feel something…. Nikolic’s lust for paranoid desperation is powerful, and his way with actors is stunningly graceful.

Having had full houses last week, the film is screening again this weekend at midnight (actually, 12:25AM) at New York’s IFC Center and then will be released “experimentally” in other cities around the country in the coming months. (On the film’s website, you can, a la Paranormal Activity, request the film come to your city.) From their website, here is “Tape 6,” which details the Milgram experiment and gives you a taste of the film.

Tape 6 from Surla Films on Vimeo.… Read the rest

“ONE HUNDRED MORNINGS” AND GENRE

By Scott Macaulay

Here’s the last of our guest blog posts by the makers of One Hundred Mornings, currently running at Los Angeles’s Downtown Independent Theater. This one is by writer/director Conor Horgan on the genre possibilities of his movie.

When I finished writing the script for One Hundred Mornings, I wasn’t overly concerned about which genre the film would be — I just wanted to get it made. But most filmmakers have to specify their project’s genre at an early stage — it makes everything nice and neat, and life is a little easier for all involved, except maybe for the writer/director who finds it important to try something that doesn’t fit in so easily, for whatever odd reasons of his own…

One Hundred Mornings has elements from several different genres: horror, thriller, dystopian relationship drama and others, but it wasn’t specifically any one of those. And without wishing to quibble at all with the decision of the fine people at the Rhode Island International Film Festival who recently gave us the Vortex Science Fiction & Fantasy award, I don’t think it’s really one of those categories either.

It does have what could be called a sci-fi element, albeit more of an indie sci-fi than anything more lavish. I used to devour science-fiction books when I was a kid — Frederik Pohl, Stanislaw Lem, and when I got a little older, the twisted, paranoid imaginings of Philip K Dick (though after reading about PKD later, it seems a lot of it was pretty real for him.) I was always more interested in ‘hard’ sci-fi, which has its logic rooted in the possible and probable, than in the other kinds, which often felt like some kind of faerie opera in space. One of my first school essays that attracted any kind of positive attention had definite similarities to the plot of The Omega Man, with my solitary teenaged protagonist wandering down deserted streets and past familiar Dublin landmarks, utterly and gloriously alone. In hindsight, I suspect that story was much more about being a teenager than about living in a … Read the rest

CONOR HORGAN ON POST-APOCALYPSE AND ONE HUNDRED MORNINGS

By Scott Macaulay

Here’s the first of two blog posts from writer/director Conor Horgan, whose One Hundred Mornings received the Workbook Project Discovery and Distribution Award and runs beginning this week at Los Angeles’s Downtown Theater. — S.M.

There’s an old saying, that you should write what you know. I think you should also write about what scares you, and the world we’ve created in One Hundred Mornings scares the hell out of me. As we prepare for our week of screenings at the Downtown Theater, I’m reflecting on some of the real-life inspirations for the film, and what motivated me to make it.

The first question I’m usually asked after a screening of the movie is “Do you have an idea what happened in the film to cause the breakdown?” My answer is usually “Yes.” I’m not being disingenuous — I have good reasons for not putting an explanation for what has caused the breakdown into the film. I wanted to make a film about how we tend the deal with the consequences of our actions, and we all already know which of our actions are going to have the most challenging consequences. I also knew from other post-apocalyptic films that no matter how you set out the premise of how the world of the film came to be, a section of the audience would quite likely spend the first half of the film locked in a silent, internal argument about the plausibility of that particular set of circumstances happening in such a way and at such a time. I think that kind of internal chatter can often in itself be a form of denial, a way of avoiding a larger and usually far more inconvenient truth. So I didn’t set out to make a cautionary tale about an easily-avoided catastrophe — I wanted to make a realistic portrayal of what a societal breakdown might actually feel like, and how it would affect a group of very human characters.

The characters in the film are hugely important to me — as well as being distict characters in their own right, each … Read the rest

SOLVE A HUMAN MYSTERY, PRODUCE A FILM

By Scott Macaulay

Since I was a teenager, one of my favorite science-fiction writers has been Norman Spinrad. Of course, to call him a science-fiction writer is tremendously reductive, because his writing has encompassed historical fiction, political commentary and cultural critique. But when I encountered him, he was part of a renegade group of science-fiction writers who were pushing the genre’s boundaries of form and content. He was collected by Harlan Ellison in his Dangerous Visions series, which is where I first read him. Later I stumbled across a signed copy of Norman’s excellent and now astonishingly prescient tale of the media and government conspiracy, Bug Jack Barron (once set to be adapted by Costa Gavras starring Jack Nicholson!) in a used bookstore, and I was hooked.

Spinrad has a blog, and in a posting this week he posed a human mystery. I’ll let him explain, and if you can help solve this you may have a great film on your hands.

From Norman:

OK, this is going to sound crazy, and maybe it is. While rooting around in old files for something else, I found a complete and very good screenplay adaptation of my novel PICTURES AT 11, written about 10 years ago. The crazy part is that there’s no name on it, and I think I wrote it, but I’m not sure.

All options on PICTURES AT 11 having expired, I own all film rights myself for sure, and no one else can do anything with this screenplay even if I didn’t write it. If I wrote it, of course, the rights are mine. But if someone else did, and can prove it, we’d have to be partners. So if anyone out there did, let me know.

If you’re a film producer, director, or bankable actor, this is a good screenplay whoever wrote it, and PICTURES AT 11 would be a winner at the box office these days because of what it’s about. And the budget necessary to make the movie would be quite low by current standards, certainly less than $25 million.

Read or download the screenplay at the

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CHRISTINA HENDRICKS FELL TO EARTH

By Scott Macaulay

Via Pitchfork comes this video for Broken Bells’ “The Ghost Inside,” directed by Jacob Gentry and starring Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks. As part of their “Director’s Cut” series, they interview today the director of this haunting sci-fi critique of our glamour-obsessed culture.

From the interview:

Pitchfork: This looks like a pretty big production for a relatively small band like Broken Bells.

Jacob Gentry: A lot of people say it looks big and expensive, but it wasn’t by any stretch. The special effects in the video were limited to things that could’ve been done in the late 70s or early 80s. I knew I couldn’t compete with Star Trek or Transformers in terms of effects, scale, and scope, and that wasn’t necessarily something that I’d want to do. At this point, people have seen everything, so I wanted to make a lateral move that garnered a different response. It’s almost like choosing to record a song in analog in 2010 because you like the sound of it. There’s a feel to those older effects that’s way more interesting than the ones now.

Pitchfork: Were you inspired by any specific science fiction films?

JG: Sure, Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner were important. I wanted to create that classical science fiction where the technology was almost vintage. There’s a beat up quality to it. The way that we photographed the spaceships was done using motion control and models– almost exactly the same way they did in Star Wars. I wanted it to make it where you could see the seams. Growing up as a kid, seeing the edges of a movie revealed how they were made, and that was part of the fun for me.

… Read the rest

WEEKEND LINKS, 5/2/2010

By Scott Macaulay

Most of the time when I come across interesting articles or video on the web I clip them to my Evernote reader and check them out later on my Blackberry or iPad. Here, then, are a few things I’ve clipped that might interest you too.

From CNN Money: “One in eight to cut cable and satellite TV in 2010.” What are the implications for online content creators?

In Spring 2008 I wrote about Alix Lambert’s Crime book for Filmmaker. (The piece is not online, but you can check it out on her site.) Here, at The Graveyard Shift, she discusses taking the book and three actors on the road to “think tank the idea of crime as theater.”

The making of Brent Green’s Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then is chronicled by the artist himself in the new issue of Filmmaker. I hope you check out the article as well as the film, which opens this Friday at the IFC Center. In the meantime, limited editions of artwork from the film are available from Art We Love. And, below, is a visit to Green’s studio.

Ask me what I am most proud of last year in Filmmaker and it might have been my exclusive interview with Mark Region, director of the uncategorizable After Last Season. So I was thrilled to get an email from Joseph Childers who writes for the site True/Slant, which I’ve been a reader of, telling me that he quoted from my interview throughout this review of the After Last Season DVD. From Childers’ review:

But as craptastic as the film is, it’s more than mere incompetence that makes the film fascinating. Most incredibly lame works of almost-art are compelling and sadly comic because of a massive gap between highfalutin intent and piss-poor execution. But like The Room and Troll 2, it’s incredibly hard to even begin to fathom the intent behind After Last Season. In other words, it’s so weird, I don’t even what they were going for – and that’s strangely admirable. It may not be,

… Read the rest