“This is Not a Keynote”: Amy Dotson’s SIFF Catalyst Speech

IFP Deputy Director and Head of Programming Amy Dotson gives a keynote (or not!) speech today at the Seattle International Film Festival’s Catalyst brunch. She has kindly provided the text to Filmmaker, which we are printing below. You are not a filmmaker. “The Treachery of Images” was a painting by Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. The picture he painted was simply of a pipe, with a rally cry of a scrawl below it reading: “This is not a pipe.” His paintings were an attempt to understand the impossibility of reconciling words, images and objects and challenged the very notion of what […]

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Watch: Tony Zhou In Praise of Chairs

Video essayist Tony Zhou recently griped about the preponderance of Fincher, Scorsese, Anderson, Nolan, etc. dissections, and has since turned his efforts to more unusual facets in film history. His latest video, for instance, explores the role of the chair — or, an extension of the production designer — in storytelling. With a wide range of clips, he interrogates the furniture as a conduit for a person, a situation, and the filmic context.

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Feminist Pornographer Jennifer Lyon Bell on Silver Shoes, PinkLabel.tv, and the Holy F*ck Film Festival

I’ve known Amsterdam-based, San Francisco-bred, Jennifer Lyon Bell ever since we met over half a decade ago at Brooklyn’s much beloved Monkey Town — back when a DIY, Williamsburg performance space could afford to host a Sunday brunch for CineKink Film Festival award winners. (Bell’s Matinée took the Best Narrative Short prize, while Un Piede di Roman Polanski, an homage to Roman Polanski’s foot fetish I co-directed with Roxanne Kapista, nabbed Best Experimental Short.) Since then Bell’s films have been both banned (Matinée from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival by the Australian Film Commission in 2009) and celebrated, most recently […]

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Aloha/Defending Cameron Crowe

If you’re a dedicated Cameron Crowe fan, you may have been forced to spend part of the last 15 years repeatedly explaining why. Since Almost Famous, Crowe’s non-documentary feature output has included two movies instantly/violently rejected by both critics and the public (Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown) and one semi-soft family film that got a parody Twitter account and endless derision months before release solely due to the admittedly risible title We Bought a Zoo. His latest, Aloha, also has a dumb title and arrives savaged by Amy Pascal in emails made public as part of the Sony hack and ominously unscreened for press until the week […]

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“I Fantasized About Being a Glamorous Drug Addict”: Director Adam Baran on His Twin Peaks-centric Documentary Northwest Passage

In the late ’80s, a troubled gay kid named Travis Blue stumbled upon a film production in his sleepy hometown of North Bend, Washington. Fascinated, Blue watched as they transformed a local restaurant into a place called the Double R Diner. The production was for a television series titled Northwest Passage, later renamed Twin Peaks. When it aired in 1990, David Lynch’s cult masterpiece became for Travis not simply an obsession, but a world he wanted to literally inhabit. Taking Laura Palmer as real life role model, Blue spent the next decade lost in various underworlds and struggling with his own […]

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TransFatty Lives Forever: How Director Patrick O’Brien Documented His ALS

Waiting to see TransFatty Lives at the Tribeca Film Festival, I was in line behind a woman who didn’t know what she was waiting to see. The couple in front of her were filling her in, telling her all about the filmmaker/subject of the film, Patrick O’Brien (once known as DJ TransFatty), his “journey” with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) and how the terrible disease had affected their own lives. It wasn’t a downbeat conversation in the slightest. They had discovered O’Brien through his online videos, posted over the course of ten years, documenting his worsening condition not with depression and […]

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The Safdies + Karl Ove Knausgaard on the Film Society’s Close-Up Podcast

Over the last several months, the Film Society of Lincoln Center has launched one of the better film podcasts out there, with guests including Paul Thomas Anderson, Olivier Assayas and David Cronenberg. (The podcast can be subscribed to on iTunes or listened to on Soundcloud.) But today’s doubleheader is particularly great and more than worthy of its own post. Sharing the episode are Josh and Benny Safdie, whose Heaven Knows What is this weekend’s must viewing, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, who has just released the fourth volume of his autobiographical magnum opus, My Struggle, here in the States and who […]

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Trailer Watch: James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour

Here’s the first trailer for James Ponsoldt’s David Foster Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour, which picked up several nice notices out of Sundance, if not from his family and literary estate. Starring Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as the Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky, the two-hander winds through a leg of the former’s book tour for Infinite Jest. A24 will release the film on July 31.

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AJA Drops Price of 4K CION Camera Significantly

AJA has slashed the price of their 4K CION camera in half to $4995. It’s part of their “Summer of Savings” promotion, which they say will run through the end of the summer. Other price reductions announced: Ki Pro Quad (their 4K recorder) is now $2995, Ki Pro Mini is $1495, Ki Pro is $2495, and Ki Pro ND is $2295. AJA customers who purchased the CION production camera before May 26, 2015 will receive two AJA Pak 512 SSDs for free, directly from AJA (valued at $2495). AJA is well known for their video hardware, and the Ki Pro file-based recorder, […]

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“The Need to Crowdfund is a Major Curse, Indeed”: The Yes Men on the Changing Funding Landscape

Over at the Creative Capital blog, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men post a sober essay about the changes they’ve seen in the documentary funding landscape since 2000, when they received one of the organization’s first grants for their feature, The Yes Men. Two films and 15 years later, the two are still at it — creatively agitating for social change while producing actions and making documentary films. Their latest film, The Yes Men are Revolting, directed with Laura Nix, opens June 12, and it mixes their trademark anarchic political humor with more ruminative passages reflecting on […]

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