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Jonas Mekas
Writing in his film column for the Village Voice in 1963, Mekas predicted that “the day is close when the 8mm home movie footage will be collected and appreciated as beautiful folk art, like songs and...
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Robert Altman
On first glance there’s no reason to think we’re watching anything achieved so differently than the loose jamming of Nashville and Kansas City, the controlled chaos of A Wedding and Gosford Park. What...
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Steven Soderbergh
Soderbergh uses video as a medium of unbridled confession, a unique outlet for furtive unburdening. Full Frontal was even heralded as a kind of spiritual sequel to sex, lies, and videotape, and while...
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William Greaves
A craftsman of nonfiction with a multidisciplinary arts training, Greaves wields his self—his professional, racial, artistic identity—and his apparatus with graceful force in Take One; in this...
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Michael Mann
Where Collateral draws a single night out, stretching time forward, Miami Vice says “Time is luck” and stretches time in every direction, forcing viewers to play catch-up from the get go. The frame is...
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Chris Marker
The digital daemon, on both the filming and viewing side, is only the latest in a long line of developments that lay dormant for years until a certain set of conditions allowed them to bedevil our...
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David Lynch
Part of the obsessive, almost stubborn linearity that Lynch employs in telling his Straight Story—what Alvin himself refers to as “a story as old as the Bible”—stems from the director's own former...
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Robert Zemeckis
Spectacle has always been a driver for the art form, but the breathlessness in the face of it has most often come from the tension at having the unimaginable made visible by human hands (and the...
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The Kuchar Brothers
The "film versus digital" hand-wringing, of the object (the tangible, analog, 35mm filmstrip) opposed to the algorithmic concept (the data file, an intangible string of digits) is a monster indigenous...
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Terrence Malick
Sound and image conspire to upend our sense of time and story in The New World, as they did in Days of Heaven, but here it is less linear, more textured. Abrasive jump cuts and unmotivated insert shots...
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Ingmar Bergman
Startling as it was to see Josephson and Ullmann together after three decades—like encountering one’s high school enemies after years of separation—their appearance on HD doubled this perverse...
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David Fincher
In ten years time, we may well look back at Zodiac as a landmark evolution in shooting (in) the dark—a problem that cinematographers have never adequately solved. Silent cinema’s blue-tinted frames and...
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Jean-Luc Godard
With his underappreciated masterwork In Praise of Love (a somewhat misleading title, translated from the French Eloge de l’amour), Jean-Luc Godard celebrates the limitations of both mediums. Two-thirds...
View ArticleThe New World: Reverse Shot Goes Digital
In recent years, film trade magazines, blogs, panels, and the like have devoted themselves ad nauseam to discussing the implications of the digital on our beloved art form. Most obviously...
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