Friday, February 28, 2014

True/False: Day One

I am in Columbia MO ya'll! YAY! Last night on my way back to my hotel here I was talking to an amazing volunteer for the fest, in fact every time I engage with a fest volunteer it turns out that, when they are not driving people around to venues or taking tickets or trying to squeeze one more film into their schedule, they are leading wonderful, often vital, lives engaged in something they are (almost!) as passionate about as they are about True/False! Jackie & I got into a conversation about how people who have never been to T/F don't get it. And, like any good cult, it is true.

There really is a spark in every part of this festival that is indescribable and intangible, an ether-like mix of beautiful art, sweet souls, and a general feeling of home in some way as the streets are filled with all kinds of people discussing expertly curated documentary film, leaving the standard film fest attitude problem to be hugged out immediately upon arrival! You all know I drank the T/F Kool Aid (or maybe it's the Schlafly?) awhile ago but upon my return I can safely say: DRINK THE KOOL AID!  Ok, more to come after I continue my cult like rituals on Day Two!



O, and by the way, this years theme is : Magic Realism! That sweet spot of what is actually happening behind the magic trick, the realness existing somewhere before it gets trapped on film and portrayed as a version of truth before our eyes in the glow of the whirring projector.  (Also there is more caffeine in my blood than blood right now so I apologize for whatever this post sounds like.)

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T/F Film: 20,000 Days On Earth


As far as rock music documentaries go Maysles Gimme Shelter and Pennebaker's Don't Look Back are awesome...but 20,000 Days on Earth? It might be better. As a music doc it captures the person (the Australian singer, writer, musician, performer Nick Cave) inside the persona, a fluid portrait instead of purely a rockstar pose. As a film it is inventive in storytelling creating scenes that convey a feeling & style just as much as they convey information or understanding. As art it has touches of sweet, yet grotesque, absurdity and personal warmth that almost remind me of George Kuchar, a visual quality sometimes reminiscent of Nam June Paik, a thoughtful staging that moves like finely choreographed theater. Then there is the voiceover writing, mostly culled by the directors from Cave's notebooks and crafted by Cave directly, writing that continues to amaze, baffle, provoke, lash out, laugh, cry and love.  Cave's writing, in song and otherwise, is a mix of universal myth that softly bites with sharp teeth into reality like Wallace Stevens, toys at the edges of the absurd, is buttoned up like a porcelain Victorian novel yet lustful as a dimestore romance paperback. Cave's writing has always been the hook that has lured me long before I understood his music.

In the post film Q&A the directors, who hail mostly from an art background, spoke of how they rely on feeling when they are creating and this film definitely accomplished that as emotion and mood washed over the entire audience like the rainy Brighton shores Nick Cave resides along, like the microcosms he creates with each album, causing anyone- fan or not- to float into this alternate universe of the film & of Cave. Really beautiful art can provoke, and the best art can provoke in the name of hope and wonder. This film is a meditation on creation and destruction, inspiring, encouraging and warning about the power of ideas in the biggest and smallest of ways. 20,000 Days On Earth isn't about Nick Cave, like any good story the character here is just a fragile shell holding together something warm, alive, truthful. This film, like Nick Cave, is of another world, a scary gorgeous one that couldn't be better to get lost in for awhile so as to remember the reasons to want, need, and desire to return to the real one.

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Wednesday, February 26, 2014

True/False!

Heading down to the wondrous True/False Film Fest tomorrow in the lovely town of Columbia, MO! I will be trying to post as much as I can (like I did the last time I was lucky enough to make it down) but my ambitious film watching schedule might get in the way (please dear flight & weather lords, let me arrive safely on time so as to not miss Jodorowsky's Dune which begins one hour after my ETA in town!!!!!!!). I wrote a few blurbs about films for the fest this year so I am a little ahead of myself already having seen Sacro Gra, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, and Secret Screening Amber (which was a fun puzzle to write since no distinguishing features about the film could be used in the description given its "secret" status). These films were completely amazing and each one somehow managed to redefine what a film can be. I'm not kidding, EACH ONE of those films seriously pushed the boundaries of not only fact & fiction but also the nature of the way films are created; inventive/groundbreaking storytelling, soulful characters, astounding artful visuals, even using sound in a thought provoking way. You heard me! Thought provoking SOUND!!!  I don't know how the fest directors do it! I'll also be introducing a few films & leading a handful of post screening Q&As too so be sure to say hello if you happen to be in the land of beautiful, visionary films. Now: how many sweaters should I pack...hmmmm?

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Monday, February 24, 2014

The New Theater Programmers




I love when predictions I make come true! Behold: a magazine exclusively streaming a film! YES! I was just talking about how I think more curated or boutique availability of films would help everybody; the filmmakers looking for an audience in a saturated market (sign the petition to stop mediocre indies!), audiences looking for trustworthy guidance, another cheap(ish) distribution platform etc... YAY! YAY! Behold the future of indie film! Actually, behold the future of most creative endeavors! 


The more accessible making stuff becomes the more I feel like organizations and companies are going to act like sieves, like a profitable pinterest or something. A lot of websites really are just hubs for particular lifestyles and there is nothing stopping labels (film, food, clothing, music, and so on) from becoming even more specific, catering to a particular, cultivated, personal audience. And, to eventually make everybody win, these filters can charge subscription fees, or offer unique goods, services, or media unavailable anywhere else, possibly even pay for the production of these things too, not to mention the ad potential- it'll be like cable tv but with a station designed for every weirdo subculture one could think of...you know what, it's almost like the way kickstarter functions now: paying for the production of something you want to see and getting something special for doing so.

Sooo, maybe don't sign that petition afterall! Keep the stuff coming and us critics & curators, of all levels & backgrounds, will keep filtering out the stuff that each and every one of you wants to see! (Images from Ian Clarks MMXXIII streaming only at Filmmaker Magazine until Feb 27th)

MMXIII (official trailer) from IAN CLARK on Vimeo.

Friday, February 7, 2014

Indie Film Predictions: What's Next?

What I think is gonna happen based on what I see....


1. Post Mumblecore. Finally. Mumblecore is a low budget genre that's been bumming around for awhile now.  "Natural" settings instead of sets,  unprofessional actors, vernacular heavy, using sparse dialogue as the main impetus of the narrative as opposed to bouts of action. This season of film screener-ing I found a big return to the similar yet pre-mumblecore days, maybe even a return to the early Kevin Smith or early Richard Linklater days (a school of which is called "Slacavetes" after Linklater's famed Slacker). These films have near monologue-like deliveries of highly written (over written?) scripts and, like mumblecore, often take place in natural settings as a stylistic choice (& as a function of their low budgets). I watched three movies IN A ROW that happened to have overwritten, theater stage quality blocking, white boy leads on pseudo-intellectual quests for love and/or meaning.  The stylistic choice of leaning towards theater-like acting & theater-like dialogue in these films creates a barrier- an awareness of film and audience separation- a thing that I think has become so blurred in the reality tv generation and the ongoing accessibility of life though technology. It only makes sense that a return to a more staged and contrived feeling of reality would begin to seep back on the big screen when fiction film & tv have been so preoccupied with a "realness" lately...



2.  ...speaking of real: The New Doc. Documentary film has been flooding the film market more and more. There are a lot of reasons this is so; the (potentially) lower production needs, the availability of high quality cameras, and maybe even the inverse of what I said in No. 1... Documentaries are increasingly (and have been!) pushing what a documentary can be, fictionalizing & embellishing an idea of reality and breathing life into the drab old informational format with style (narrative, visual, sonic, editing etc.). Personally I feel like documentary filmmakers are taking the risks that the early days of independent fiction film did, pushing the limits caused by space & money to create unique visions that are spawning a whole new generation of artistic nonfiction filmmakers. Institutions & other outlets are recognizing this ongoing shift too and I think the genre is really headed into pure experimental territory where cinematic storytelling and art will seamlessly collide and eventual lead into mainstream productions. EXCITING! (Note: another awesome doc trend I've noticed is that the digitization of archival footage is rising and creeping into docs in more pronounced and interesting ways: no more will we need to rely on the Ken Burns effect!)


Ceremony Trailer from vince mckelvie on Vimeo.

3. ...speaking of art: Digital Filmmaking as Art. There have been a lot of little flourishes here and there of indie filmmakers using features of the digital camera to their advantage. I loooooove when someone artfully uses the autofocus to blur things in & out, creating the feeling of planes of depth like a lifesize diorama (similar to PT Anderson's 70mm work in The Master). Or using the autofocus to make a bed of video texture, or sometimes even an emotional underscore.  I saw a lot of this going on in film fest submissions this season and more often than not it was done quite well and quite intentionally! But it got me wondering...what else can a digital camera do? What other features can be brought out in the tool itself and alter the way images are made? I recently saw a short (posted below!)by a student in which they altered the code of a film to produce a color quality effect that was otherworldly and amazing (a thing I've been waiting for someone to do for awhile!)....and real auteurs, like Lars Von Trier, have been using the crazy bajillion frames per second Red One cameras to breathtaking results! Artists have been pushing the digifilm tools over the past decade & the quickly moving digi-effects used by big-budget Hollywood are quickly making new technology old and even more accessible. A weird crossover of technology between mainstream and counterculture is soon going to collide and create some seriously new results.


Here Comes the Night Time-Lapse from Claire Freehafer on Vimeo.

4. SOUND DESIGN!!!!  Like I said above, I am predicting a more artful use of technology and this isn't just limited to the visual. Better tools are leading to experimentation in sound too and I am waaaaaay excited! In my screening committee work the use of sound as a narrative, aesthetic, and emotional component was far beyond what I have seen before and it is amazing to see this area of film come back into style. When I think of it in long terms too, sound was really the last element to be added to the original film and it only makes sense that it is the newest forefront of experimentation!


Leviathan (trailer) from Cinema Guild on Vimeo.

5. Popularity of VOD making online criticism more important? I went on my mini-online critic rant earlier this year but....I was thinking about how more and more movies are simultaneously in theaters and on VOD and it's doing something interesting to the journalistic landscape: writers are all basically getting equal-ish access to the same work. It doesn't take one living in a major city or being affiliated with a major newspaper to see the latest, greatest, and, often, slighty-too-good-(or bad) for a mainstream theater work. Even though I get offered some screeners of to-be-released films (apart from the fest work of course) and I get invited to a few advanced screenings for journalists,  up until now there had been a huge limit on what I had viewing access of. But now, VOD, vimeo screeners, Withoutabox, and more (even bootlegs which I am not really for...) are leveling the playing field fir critics in a big way: anyone can basically see anything before an audience. The idea that the next influential critic could be a kid in Nebraska with high speed internet is really exciting to me & makes me feel like a proliferation of tastes, "credentials," experiences and more are on the verge of something big, something big that is going to guide more audiences to work that would never have met eyes in the past.



6. Emirates? Sooo...well, NYU opened up a campus in the United Arab Emirates & there is more money than they know what to do with there so it only makes sense that film production is the next expensive hobby of this region (did they already go through the art collecting phase?). The expanding film industry of UAE was definitely present in the productions of film fest submissions this year and...I don't know what that means exactly? Who knows how much film funding from the Emirates is being funneled into Hollywood already but the fact that a lot of indie-ish work is being produced is making me wonder if they'll be the new Greece of a few years back? I'm interested to see where this leads, it feels like there is a lot of potential when there is a lot of money in a region dipping it's toes into a new creative field and the culture is so unique & foreign that it is intriguing what might come out of it...only time will tell!

ONLY TIME WILL TELL!

Thursday, February 6, 2014

..more soon!

Right now I feel like this:



...more soon, when I feel less like that!