Press Play Video Blog

Watch: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Very, Very Independent Roots

Watching a director in their earliest attempts can be highly enlightening about their future methods and work, as shown in this new video essay in the Raccord collective’s excellent Directors Series, made by Cameron Beyl, about the starting years of Paul Thomas Anderson. Not only do we glance at ‘The Dirk Diggler Story,’ the very cheaply made short that blossomed into ‘Boogie Nights,’ but we also take a look at ‘The Hard Eight,’ the gorgeous gambler drama that would give Gwyneth Paltrow one of her great early roles. Enjoy.

Watch: Michael Mann As a Master of Digital Filmmaking in ‘Public Enemies’

In this installment of "The Unloved," a series of video essays for RogerEbert.com on films which didn’t necessarily find widespread critical acceptance on their delivery, Scout Tafoya takes up ‘Public Enemies,’ Michael Mann’s voyage to the 1930s gangster universe of John Dillinger and his ilk. Tafoya emphasizes the degree to which Mann made digital cinematography his own in the film, an interesting point and one which, if applied properly, could be a mind-changer in looking at this less popular of Mann’s films. At the time the film was released, Press Play published Nelson Carvajal’s gangster movie homage, whose text accompaniment a skeptical eye on the film’s chances—this video piece by Tafoya might encourage those who shared that skepticism to give the film a second look.

Watch: The Doorway Shot in Film Points Outwards and Inwards at the Same Time

https://vimeo.com/145742541

If a director places a figure standing in a doorway, looking off into the distance, where does the viewer’s gaze go? Invariably, it will both go through the doorway, towards all that lies beyond it, but it will also, in a strange way, go back inwards, towards all a character may be turning away from or leaving. This new video compilation by ever-prolific Jake Swinney for Fandor takes us through doorway shots from cinema history, starting with John Ford’s ‘The Searchers,’ which contains the grand-daddy of all doorway shots, and then moving on to directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and others.

Watch: Buster Keaton’s Immortal Gags, and Their Influence

With expected aplomb and sensitivity, Tony Zhou’s newest piece gives us a peek inside the mind of Buster Keaton. Not satisfied with merely stringing together a group of gags, which would be cinematic nourishment enough in and of itself, this video essay breaks down some parts of Keaton’s gags, such as the action performed within them, the importance of the camera angle for a gag’s humor, and the physical rules of the world in which the gag occurs, while also looking at Keaton’s influence on directors such as Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola. Because of the nature of Keaton’s humor, knowing these things about his jokes doesn’t ruin them–on the contrary, it makes them richer and stranger. And it doesn’t hurt to learn that he did so many of his own stunts…

Watch: For Christopher Nolan, The Image Comes First, Then the Film

https://vimeo.com/146475708

To say that Christopher Nolan’s films emphasize the importance of the image is not a tautology. Some filmmakers might take us on a thrill ride, filled with jumpcuts, closeups, and other visual grace notes that cause us to focus on action or plot events more than the images moving across the screen. Nolan, though, wants viewers to linger. Think of these things: Robin Williams running across logs in the water in ‘Insomnia.’ Heath Ledger’s Joker standing at a corner, head down, mask in hand, facing us as Ledger faces away in ‘The Dark Knight.’ The collapsing landscapes and cityscapes in ‘Inception’–any of them. The beauty of these moments is that they move you through the film but they also hold you in place. This excellent new Art of the Film video essay casts a new light on an extremelywell-covered director, but one from whom attention may not diverge for a long, long time.

Watch: How Did Batman’s Gotham City Develop?

In his latest video essay, Evan Puschak, aka "NerdWriter," has taken on a potentially unwieldy subject: Gotham City. When we casually refer to "Gotham," we tend to mean a whole world of things, all centering around the crucial idea of urban corruption through political machinery. As Puschak indicates, though, the concept of Gotham City has gone through many changes from its earliest days in the Batman comic books to its re-imaginings in the hands of Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, and the Fox Network, and at this point, if we say that Gotham City is itself a living, breathing character, we’re not necessarily spouting a cliche; the city Puschak describes here has drawn the imaginations of many for decades, and will probably continue to grow as films, books, and television shows proliferate. We just can’t get enough of it.

Watch: In ‘Breaking Bad’ the Wide Shot Is the Gateway to the Soul

Have you ever been to New Mexico? If you have, you would know why the wide shot is so crucial to ‘Breaking Bad.’ A story set there simply could not be filmed without giving due to the landscape’s expansiveness, to the sense that it could, in reality, progress forever, and that beyond whatever edge of the horizon you might see is not a different state, or other kinds of terrain, but just more of the same, onward and onward. For the purpose of the show, the desert wide shot reflects not so much self-realization as self-confrontation, a grappling with inner impulses, desires, and stresses uninterrupted by distractions from the world of common morality. Jorge Luengo’s newest compilation, a moving one, shows how the careful visual planning by Michael Slovis and John Toll serves to intensify and develop Vince Gilligan’s creation.

If you’d like to see other arresting video homages to the show, check out Dave Bunting’s work here, here, or here, for starters.

Watch: Sam Mendes Is a Visual Completist

https://vimeo.com/144534729

You may, with my blessing, comment on the inconsistency of Sam Mendes’s films, possibly proposing that many of them are all dramatic onrush, without payoff, or ‘American Beauty‘ is a high point to which his other films do not much up, or asking why ‘Road to Perdition’?, or what’s up with ‘Spectre’? Good thoughts, all. However, one thing you cannot say is that Mendes spares one ounce of effort, one kilowatt of creative energy on the lush and detailed settings of his films. Art of the Film‘s new video piece takes us through some of these settings, from the drab London of ‘Skyfall’ to the simmering domestic order of ‘American Beauty’ to the deceptively bucolic suburbs of ‘Revolutionary Road.’ Praise goes to Roger Deakins, Mendes’ frequent collaborator, for surrounding us; equal kudos, though, to Mendes for wanting to surround us in the first place.

Watch: What If Paul Thomas Anderson’s Films Are All Reincarnations of Each Other?

As a filmmaker accumulates a body of work, it is inevitable that elements will recur, echoing each other and possibly growing in significance over time. Jeremy Ratzlaff proposes something slightly different about the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, suggesting that in fact his stories are all variations on each other, not an indicator of unoriginality but of symphonic intelligence. What if the tortured relationship between Daniel Plainview and Paul Sunday in ‘There Will Be Blood’ was reborn in the warped instructor-pupil relationship between Lancaster Dodd and Freddie Quell in ‘The Master’? What if the drug-addled protagonist of ‘Inherent Vice’ is actually Freddie Quell reborn? This is a finely made and meticulous consideration of an ancient truth.

Watch: Sidney Lumet’s ‘Twelve Angry Men’ Tells a Silent Story

Although obviously dialogue is crucial to Sidney Lumet’s classic ’12 Angry Men,’ Filmscalpel‘s newest piece raises the following question: how crucial is it, exactly? To find out, the editors at Filmscalpel have removed the dialogue, offering us instead a series of silent scenes that tell just as compelling a story…