By Elias Savada. Here’s a thought. Flip through the opening lines of an imagined screenplay for The Wolfpack…. It’s dusk. The Empire State Building centers the landscape, but a chain link boundary obscures the view. It’s a prison metaphor, and the film’s principals, the brothers of this stranger-than-fiction tale, liken […]
Content and Technique in Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns
June 19, 2015
By James Knight. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965), Jean-Paul Belmundo turns to man at a party and says, “you seem to be alone.” The man is of course Samuel Fuller, the writer and director of Forty Guns (1957). Via a translator Belmundo then asks Fuller what exactly cinema is, […]
The Trials and Tribulations of The Three Hikers (2015)
June 19, 2015
By Elias Savada. World premiering as part of the Washington Post Film Strand at this year’s AFI DOCS is The Three Hikers, the freshman feature from rookie director Natalie Avital, an actress known or unknown for appearances in dozens of short subjects, supporting roles in the slow-burn horror entry Shallow […]
Onward from the Editing Suite: A Conversation with Andrew Hulme
June 17, 2015
By Paul Risker. The magical touch of film editing, seen and yet often unacknowledged, is similar to putting a jigsaw puzzle together to create a narrative and aesthetic flow between the multitude of shots and scenes. Emerging from the confined and hidden space of the editing room, Snow in Paradise […]
The “Stagecoach Ride” of Seeds of Time: An Interview with Director Sandy McLeod
June 16, 2015
By Jude Warne. Sandy McLeod is more than familiar with the art of documentary filmmaking. After all, she has worked with the great Jonathan Demme on the 1984 Talking Heads classic Stop Making Sense and the 1987 television documentary Haiti: Dreams of Democracy. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her 2003 […]
Highlights from the 20th San Francisco Silent Film Festival
June 16, 2015
By Michael T. O’Toole. So, 20 years on and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) is still proving their commercial knack for showcasing movies that cover the timeline, genre gaps and stylistic stamps—not to mention innovative presentations and musical accompaniment that breathed new momentum into previous released material and […]
True Tête-à-Tête: Best of Enemies (2015)
June 15, 2015
By Elias Savada. Oscar-winning (2013’s Twenty Feet From Stardom) documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, a Grammy Award winning writer, author, and filmmaker, collaborated back in 2007 on the film Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, which later (2013) became a 463-page book by Gordon. A new version […]
The Human Imperfection of The Falling
June 14, 2015
By Paul Risker. Worlds continue to merge as Carol Morley instigates an ongoing collision between narrative fiction and documentary within her young oeuvre. But with her most recent narrative fiction film The Falling (2015), this collision extends to the very fabric of the film itself. Beneath the surface of its […]
There is No “There” Anymore: Shin Su-Won on Madonna (2015)
June 14, 2015
By Amir Ganjavie. What is particularly amazing about new Korean movies is their ability to be simultaneously popular and very critical of Korean society. We have already see this in masterpieces likes Memories of Murder (2003), a touching detective story that probes its social milieu throughout. Madonna, directed by Shin […]
“Thinking as Negation”: Adorno, Vertigo, and the Paradoxical Promise of Popular Cinema
By Benjamin Bergholtz. “Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them.” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002 [Dialectic of Enlightenment]: 99) Few critics have sought to bring the ideas of Theodor Adorno to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In itself, this is […]