Monthly Archives: March 2013

is making a movie like playing in the band?

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My favourite filmmakers use the same crew for every film. Do yours?

For example, I am Thinking of John Cassavetes, actor -director who shot many of his films inside his own studio-house. He cast his wife Gena Rowlands and his best fiends in every picture.

Each new movie was a challenge to a familiar formation of artists. The scripts went directly to the actors, not to outside casting agents or on-shot producers. The movies were not easy to make and the edits ignored audience tastes. The film “Husbands” was cut long and much less of a comedy than the studio insisted on, costing Cassavetes and his “band” pretty pennies, but resulting in a one-of-a-kind film. (the plot? three friends go to a hotel in London after the funeral of their best friend in the U.S.)

But like a band that plays every new song different, John Cassavetes played film different. He changed the rules of a game that has today changed even more.

Especially if you are making short films, your filmmaking is already like playing in a band. An adventure with friends.

The name of the awesome band in the clip is VIDAR. Worth keeping an eye on.

The dark shines: Alumbramiento

“Alumbramiento”: a family faces the last night of its eldest member, showing their different ways of dealing with a life’s ending. In a surprising manner, overcoming fear and taboo, one of them will guide the passing” (from website, Arrivano i corti film festival, Italy)

This short by Eduardo Chapero-Jackson is a powerful almost static cinematic experience, simple yet unpredictable. The surprise, as the title suggests – delivers in a new light the big unanswerable question. Where does life go?

Now we’re in a car, slicing through a yawning sequence of on/off lamp-posts, flashing like low-energy question marks

It’s a  journey. No peace of mind. The man drives, focused, spent. Eyes gripping the road, his mind taking logical stabs at the scarcity of solutions

His woman sits by him, navigating feelings. She offers a hand but he refuses, they don’t hold together. Pain and fear creates distance, Uncured it can be fatal. The director frames them separately, two broken halves in silent visuals of the hallucinatory real.

The dawn is further away. Can life be fixed?

Scant dialogue, surgical.
120 seconds into the film we are immersed in an amniotic texture of lucid confused re-investigation of a dead-end relationships and memory.
(what city are we in? where are they going? who is sick?)

A dark bedroom engulfs and suppresses our resistance. We witness magnetized, polarized spaces. Bare practical lights. Devastating narrative undercurrents: life is weaker or stronger, uglier or more beautiful when death arrives announced? We spend ten minutes in this bedroom. It feels like forever.

The forces of life assemble around each other’s weakening pulses, matching optimism against pessimism. “She will make it. She always makes it”.

The son-who-is a-doctor directs a nurse in the technical requirements of tonight’s pain-aversion attempts. He tries to appear in control as his woman observes. Cutaway characters come to life as pairs of silent eyes.

The old woman on the deathbed: childish, angelic. Wrapped in breathing tube and coughing all she seems to have left inside, with resistence. Time and place is now, morphine. Sister morphine.

In “Alumbramiento” the passing on of the old mother is a childhood song, not the end of the story. The doctor’s wife now replaces human logic with a peaceful caresse and a simple imperative: – Breathe, you did well in life. Just breathe.” She removes all power from the predictable. Two plain beats open “Alumbramiento” to emotional heights: fear becomes love, shared experience, forgiveness, of life as it was. As it is.

Eduardo Chapero-Jackson is the director of “Alumbramiento”, it means in Spanish both “illumination” and “delivery”.

Gracias, Eduardo. Looking forward to working with you some day.

/ daniel alegi

This txt article appeared in full length in “P.O.V.” A Danish Film Studies publication edited by Richard Raskin, now online as Short FIlm Studies.

The OpenWritersRoom at BBC – until 3.28.2013

You know how, well, access for writers is still kind of a problem? You write the script and it takes 2 years and nobody loves you anymore and all the lost sleep and still you can’t get good readers you can trust, industry folks who care about your work?

In the US you have to find an agent who guarantees that :

a) your script is not stolen, “plagiarised” or “inspired” by someone else’s.
b) can get into a decent pitch meeting (executives are always in a hurry).

In the UK the BBC has re:opened the writersroom doors again!

Here is what you do:

1. Find your masterpiece from last year. (It’s holding up the blue chair)
2. GO in to BBC and plop your script on the pile, digitally speaking.
3. Relax. You got nothing to lose.

What? you don’t believe it?

Real experts will read it, merit will shine, and the bells may toll for you.

go to the BCC.co.uk site or get more info at the awesome mediamuppet.co.uk

if you need to do a rewrite, or your movie was about phone booths and polaroids, stop in our twitter @cinemahead.

Dust dust off those rusty scenes just one more time. Let them shine!

Free Scene Feedbacks from the cinemahead forum You got it, free script consulting until, well, April st1 2013.