Tired Moonlight and the 16mm Vogue

"In general, shooting on 16mm in a world where digital is far more readily available means accepting—or, in these filmmakers’ case, embracing—roughness. This is all well and good; like many cinephiles who’ve grown into a landscape where the opportunities for such pleasures were already diminishing, I enjoy admiring the textures of cheaper celluloid stock, particularly if a perfunctory use of slick HD is the alternative. But what I’m starting to suspect is that the materiality of this medium (which, tellingly, is on the brink of extinction) is taking precedent in this wave of narrative films over how it’s being put to use through visual language. To say that these filmmakers are choosing 16mm and calling it a day aesthetically is definitely overstating it, but I do wonder if there’s not a certain degree of slackness seeping into the process—a disregard for the craft of artificial lighting or a wily-nily approach to framing, for instance—in lieu of simply admiring the way the medium is capturing reality." For MUBI's The Notebook, I wrote about the recent surge, spawned by Sean Price Williams, of 16mm production in independent filmmaking, a trend that informs Britni West's new Montana community portrait, Tired Moonlight.

Douglas's Dissolves

It's been a while since I've written for MUBI's Notebook (a week short of being exactly a year, actually), but I'm happy to announce a new piece on Douglas Sirk's crafty use of dissolves in his lovely suburban melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955). The post syncs up, quite serendipitously (at least on my end), with Criterion's announcement of a Blu Ray/DVD reissue of the film this spring, the cover art of which looks typically exceptional. In that sense, I guess there's no better time to acquaint oneself with this work of art, an impeccably constructed indictment of repressive social mores in 1950s small-town America.

The Deathmaker

I've written a piece for Mubi.com on the 1995 German film The Deathmaker, which dives into the extensive single-room interrogation of Fritz Haarmann, the serial killer first dramatized in 1931 by Fritz Lang with M. The film's directed by Romuald Karmakar, a filmmaker that too few cinephiles are familiar with. Head on over to The Notebook to hear about why I find this spatially limited film so damn compelling.

On Showboating, Oblivion, and Tom Hanks

If you've seen the fascinating disaster that is Cloud Atlas, you may be interested in my new review over at The Daily Notebook. This is one of those films where the fact that nothing "works" is exactly why it works. Genres, plots, and images collide, converse, and ultimately crumble, and A-list actors engage in a dress-up party. What's not to like?

New MUBI Posts

I have two new pieces up at The Daily Notebook...

1.) A tribute to the great cinematographer Harris Savides (Van Sant's Death Trilogy, Zodiac, Greenberg, Birth, among many others), who passed away far too soon on October 9th, 2012, leaving behind a mountain of some of the last two decade's most unforgettable images.

2.) A close reading of a powerful orchestration of scenes in the middle of Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna which incorporates the color red in multifaceted ways.

MUBI and other news...

I'm proud to announce that I've started writing for MUBI's The Daily Notebook, which I've always considered to be one of most insightful sources of film criticism on the web. To write alongside such a forward-thinking team of critics and other writers including Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, David Cairns, Ryland Walker Knight, Adrian Curry, Adam Cook, Fernando F. Croce, Michael Sicinski, and of course editor Daniel Kasman (who I met this past May in Cannes and who assisted me in developing the erratic thoughts that have led to my first post), among many others, as well as for a website that has spearheaded a new and fruitful approach to online film-viewing, is a massive honor.

My first piece, on a certain visual trend in Michael Mann's filmmaking in recent years that involves putting emphasis on the ear, is live now, and you can read it here. It's a continuation of a column called The Details that was inaugurated by Kasman himself in 2009, and my work for the website, as far as I can tell for the near future, will mostly be in this arena. The column is simple and self-explanatory; as Danny puts it, "a column that catches the small within the big, focusing on the individual elements that make cinema so expressive." It will be a nice opportunity to diverge from the more macro focus of this blog and a chance to indulge in my formalist side. Writing for MUBI will obviously take away from my time writing here, but I still plan to post several times a month, in addition to linking to the articles that are published there.

In other news, I am moving to Los Angeles for a three-and-a-half month semester, which for all intents and purposes is totally irrelevant to all of you, other than for the fact that it may both put a strain on my mental capacity (I already feel allergic to all this traffic and beautiful weather, though there's an undeniable charm to California as well) and influence the kind of writing I do and the films I watch (three examples that have sprung up already: 1) yesterday I saw a man in a cowboy hat disappear behind a very Bottle Rocket-esque motel building while appearing to look at me, making me feel for a second that I was in a Lynch movie; 2) driving through the dusty, barren hills of wine country had me thinking a lot about Kiarostami; and 3) as I write, I'm in a Santa Barbara hotel room where one member of the considerable Mexican population in California is cleaning my room, giving me the unsettling feeling that I'm one of the targets of Lucrecia Martel). Alas, before I know it I'll be back in Boston and out of this strange dream world. Hell, maybe writing for MUBI's not even real.