I’m taking David Mamet’s “Master Class” right now and he had an interesting point: for him, it was always easier to perfect his written dramas when he was doing theater, because he could tell whether or not something was working by observing the audiences. If something that was meant to generate a laugh did not, he would tweak until it worked. Cinema and television, he thinks, are much more difficult because there is very little audience observation. Well last week I hosted a small gathering of trusted friends and fellow filmmakers for the very first ever screening of my feature length documentary: “The Space of Our Time,” and like Mamet, I felt like I learned a lot from seeing how the scenes were coming off to an audience, albeit a group that I know and trust. I explained beforehand that they were watching a rough cut, with the inevitable sound and picture issues, scenes that run just a little too long, and temporary music. The screening was followed by a great discussion and I thought I’d share with you guys what I came away with. I’m posting my thoughts in public like this so that you can go on the […]

One of the primary influences on my career path and my approach to film and filmmaking in general has been an annual event called The Windrider Forum that takes place at Sundance every year. Really what it does, is provide a space for people to think and talk about film in a deeper way, and providing a way for filmmakers to dialogue with film students, people of faith and educators who want to explore the spiritual dimension of the art form. I ran across this video, put out by Windrider from Destin Daniel Cretton, an independent filmmaker who himself was brought up through the Windrider program (he’d won a student film award and a trip to Sundance with them early on, and then went on to become a winner and subsequent staple at the festival itself).   This is just a beautiful little reflection on what it means to take on the task of being an artist.      

In the early 1920’s the historic Russian filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein was working as a theater director in search of realism in his plays. He liked to blur the line between the audience and the actors, choosing to stage a fight in the middle of the audience for example, or performing a play in an abandoned gas factory to give the subject matter a tangibility to the audience. When he began exploring film, he realized that this new medium had even more variables that he could play with in order to create meaning and connection. Not only could the camera move around to different locations and focus the attention of the audience onto certain elements with framing and composition, the strip of film could be cut or edited, such that certain shots would switch to others. Out of experimentation with shot selection and editing (Eisenstein called it “montage”), a “film language” emerged. The film language consisted mainly of composition (mis-en-scene) and montage. Composition has to do with what the camera frames in the scene, and montage with how it is edited. Montage gives film a unique power to create meaning by juxtaposing two elements together in order to […]

http://www.indiewire.com/2018/02/amazon-video-direct-lowers-royalty-rates-1201925708/   Here is an interesting article from Indiewire. While many say that we are living in a golden age for documentary film – for a variety of reasons – the landscape continues to evolve. In an age when it is increasingly easy to enter into production, this fact seemingly illustrating the elimination of a financial barrier, is offset by the fact that once your movie is picked up for distribution on one of the platforms, the market prices for this are going down. Amazon Prime, it would seem, has lowered their royalty rates for films that are picked up for their streaming platform.   In the past, the obstacles to getting your film out to the public had to do with the difficulties in production: the cost of cameras, lights and film stock, et cetera. However, we are entering an age in which anyone with a little bit of technical knowhow can pick up an iphone and create a “film.” This flood of content constantly vies for our attention, and the bar has to be moved, from those involving production to those involving curation. The problem of curation, I think, is quite substantial, and I’d like to explore the […]

I’m going to make it an annual tradition to provide my top ten documentaries of the year. I was prompted to do so by Elijah Davidson over at Reel Spirituality, since it is HIS tradition to provide his list of top ten movies fom the previous year around this time. So here is my list of top ten documentaries for 2017:   1. Last Men in Aleppo The war in Syria is yet another example of a modern-era phenomenon that has been going on since WWI: a peoplegroup caught unfairly and victimized as a result of the chessboard of geopolitics. In the midst of what seems like unfathomable tradgedy, a small group of selfless heroes known as the white helmets are busy pulling children out of the rubble of bombed out buildings. God have mercy on us all.   2. Faces Places Agnes Varda is 89 years old. She’s made a career out of traveling, meeting artists around the world, and reflecting on life, narrating her journeys in her native French. She’s the kind of filmmaker that will expand your perspective on the world, as her films are personal, educational and aesthetically inspiring. 3. The Reagan Show Made up entirely […]

Perhaps the earliest example of this phenomenon [the movement from copying to interpreting] comes from 1890’s in France where the Lumiere Brothers had successfully built a hand-cranked motion picture camera that doubled as a projector. Famously, they screened a short film called Arrival of a Train At La Ciotat to an unsuspecting audience, who were so frightened that they attempted to get out of the way of the image of the approaching train. The demonstration was intended to illustrate the new technology, moving pictures, and the audience was affected simply by its existence. They called these films actualities. Like the portrait painters of the past, it seemed as though a simple representation of the world was enough to dazzle audiences. However, the Lumiere Brothers were of course engaging in a host of interpretive and creative choices, such as which events to film, where to point the camera, how to compose the frame and how long to film, whether or not to instruct the people involved or whether or not to move the camera. The fact of the matter is that no film is able to completely mimic reality. I once had a great old photography professor who constantly stressed to […]

To illustrate this interplay between truth and meaning in documentary film specifically, let’s go all the way back to the beginning; to the invention of the camera in the decades leading up to the turn of the twentieth century. The realization that images could be captured with a machine on photo-sensitive surfaces effectively provoked a partial identity crisis among a group of artists who had previously been in charge of representing reality, the painters. As photography began to replace the practice of painting as a method of portraiture, many painters had to look for a new sense of value in their work.[1] If the machine (the camera) can reproduce what one actually sees in a given scene (landscape, still-life or portrait), then what was the role of the painter? The painters of the late 1800’s were thus forced to embrace the fact that there is more to the artistic enterprise than mere representation. This arguably gave rise to the impressionistic movement. Artists began painting their scenes from a wildly subjective point of view, often ignoring the reality of light and shadow, perspective and optical principle in favor of distortions or individual interpretations of reality. The idea was that it was […]