Features
Touching the Screen
The way we see a game—whether we can control the camera or not, whether the frame moves or is static, how the frame moves—is an artistic quality as important as (and often interlocked with) its interface, its methods of immersion...
A Few Great Pumpkins
Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Mask, Arrebato, The Stuff, Cuadecuc, vampir, Tall Shadows of the Wind, Drag Me to Hell.
Although shot in 2000, Frailty heralds themes that would trouble the coming era (and its cinema): Christofascist warfare, “cleansing” the region of unsavory figures, the son split between patriarchal fidelity and his own scruples.
Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. The story of the Jordan family being forced by harsh economic realities to give up the farm they''d worked for decades is a poignant and beautiful epic in miniature.
The Featherweight actively engages with core ideas behind direct cinema and verité, residing in a blurry middle ground between the two genres, that is between minimizing a documentarian’s presence and actively participating in the action.
Everything in documentary filmmaking is an ethical question. Every placement of the camera. Every question you ask or don't ask is an ethical choice. But the hardest choices are made in the cutting room because that's when you really are saying, this will be seen by the world.
The narrative framing echoes that of Lake Mungo and other mockumentaries, the events having already taken place, the yarn unspooled by an unseen director and editor, with the found footage elements appearing less as real-time documentation than forensic evidence.
Like all cultural practices, film acting is a historical palimpsest: new affects, tones, and gestures jostle with older ones, and what makes something feel contemporary is often a matter of some contingency.
For the third year, Museum of the Moving Image film curators have visited the Cannes Film Festival and have engaged in a dialogue about the films on offer.
If consumers are paying the big bucks for a game (especially one they have technically already played), what are they actually getting? Padding is, unfortunately, almost always the answer, but Rebirth takes it one step further by padding an arguably padded extension of a fragment of an existing game.
The film is another of brothers Bill and Turner Ross’s immersions in the regional euphoric...The filmmakers are after a kind of Herzogian ecstatic truth, often to be found in the kinds of spaces where someone is likely to be rolling on literal ecstasy.
The strange metaphysical mingling of ersatz furniture and moments of raw human authenticity on game showsfeels like a rupture. These programs are traversable on-ramps for real people to appear as real people in the big leagues of television.
These are films about transients and transience, punctuated by soft dissolves and ellipses; sometimes people fade out of the frame like smoke, or vanish and reappear further away. Shimizu’s formalism and his humanism go hand in hand.
For Hurston, it was most important to define Black culture in continuity and coherence; but even as she nobly destabilized the disingenuous objectivity and authority of the discipline, she does not quite upend the colonial configurations of an institution that has generally pathologized Black life and transformed it into spectacle.