Video Essay – Page 4 – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: RIP Haskell Wexler, 1922–2015

Watch: RIP Haskell Wexler, 1922-2015

‘Medium Cool’ is probably my favorite Chicago movie. I remember learning about it in college and then frantically seeking it out on DVD; at the time it was a hard film to find. (This was before it got the Criterion release.) I eventually got my hands on a burned DVD copy and watched it several times. For those unfamiliar with the film, it tells the story of a TV news cameraman (Robert Forster) who gets swept up in the melting hot summer of 1968 in Chicago, climaxing with the riots at the Democratic National Convention. The film had a cinéma vérité-style look to it, with many handheld shots that punch in on the action and moments of high drama. It’s an immersive experience, that is documentary-like at times, with the success owed directly to the film’s writer, director and cinematographer, Haskell Wexler. It’s amazing that Wexler pulled this all off, too, considering that he actually filmed it in the summer of 1968, placing his lead actors right in the middle of the riots as they were happening. When I learned of Wexler’s passing on Sunday afternoon, I was visiting some friends just down the street from Grant Park, where the climactic and stirring riot footage of ‘Medium Cool‘ was filmed. I couldn’t stop thinking about the film as I took the "L" (our elevated transit train in Chicago) home that night, looking out the windows, seeing all the city landmarks that Wexler shot with his camera. I then remembered a special evening back in 2010, when I attended a small screening of ‘Medium Cool’ at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. Wexler was in attendance, and afterwards he discussed the film in front of the cozily seated audience. I leaned forward in my seat for most of that discussion, studying this accomplished cinematographer, who wore a baseball hat and leather jacket. He spoke with an insight devoid of cynicism. It was just plain, simple diction, but still full of depth and takeaways. I later learned that he was also a two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer (for ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ and ‘Bound For Glory’), who, in addition to working on big Hollywood films, also made a laundry list of commercials and documentary short films. This was in addition to his passion projects (like ‘Medium Cool’) which he funded by working on those bigger feature films. He even photographed what looks to be at least half of Terrence Malick’s ‘Days of Heaven’—but bizarrely only received an "additional photography" credit (the Oscar for that film would go to director of photography Néstor Almendros). Even today I’m still learning more about the endlessly fascinating and unquestionably prolific Wexler. Revisiting just a fraction of his filmography in my video tribute to him, I can only begin to scratch at the surface of how great his eye for images was. And now that he’s gone, his films will continue to live on, and Wexler should find peace in knowing that "the whole world is watching."

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW which boasts the tagline: "Liberating Independent Film And Video From A Prehistoric Value System." You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

Watch: Was David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’ A Dig at Oliver Stone?

Every work is, whether it knows it or not, a comment on another work. The filmmaker, the poet, the songwriter may pray for originality and often the prayers are answered. But, the work produced will always be the product of all the works that have come before it, absorbed and re-emitted by the artist. Sometimes the work will comment on other works, either slyly or openly. Take, for example, ‘Lost Highway,’ David Lynch’s 1997 tale of crime and loss. This video essay by Jeff Keeling takes a close, methodical look at the film’s potential commentary on two works by Oliver Stone–‘Natural Born Killers‘ and ‘Wild Palms‘–for which Stone received a tremendous amount of acclaim. The similarities and points of careful divergence are striking; the films’ casts overlap (Robert Loggia and Balthasar Getty), and certain scenes from Stone are quoted by Lynch, but the dialogue is significantly different. What do you think?

Watch: Alfred Hitchcock’s Editing Mastery in the ‘Psycho’ Shower Scene

While it’s perfectly conceivable that someone might create a scene with as much tension and suspense as the famous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho,’ there’s a level of panic to the scene that would be hard to match, created primarily with Hitchcock’s cuts, the swoops he makes from one perspective to another, the shifts, the disjunctures. This video essay by "Love of Film" shows us Hitch’s cuts, arranged in a nice, boxlike organization, which actually makes the method and strategy employed here quite clear, from the start of the shower to the screaming from the Bates house. Take a look…

Watch: ‘The Force Awakens’ Meets ‘Please, Mr. Kennedy’

Watch: ‘The Force Awakens’ Meets ‘Please Mr. Kennedy’

Nelson Carvajal likes to put pairs together. Usually, it’s pairs; sometimes, he might add an extra element. I first became aware of this tendency when I saw his match-up of ‘There Will Be Blood’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ after which the thunk my jaw made as it hit the floor could be heard across the Hudson. Now, he’s mixed and matched ‘Please Mr. Kennedy,’ a ditty from the Coen Brothers’ ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’ with scenes from ‘The Force Awakens.’ Does it work? Yes it does. The swooping nature of the song, goofy as it is, syncs beautifully with the gestural, sinewy visuals of J.J. Abrams’ film. Just watch!

Watch: Chantal Akerman’s ‘Jeanne Dielman’ Is a True Action Movie

In Chantal Akerman’s ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,’ a series of mundane actions are transformed into hugely communicative gestures that keep the viewer suspended between a place of understanding the main character’s inner world and a place of total ambiguity. Akerman establishes a routine and then uses variations and interruptions in that routine to expose the protagonist’s psychology. Tasks such as cooking and cleaning become pure narrative, events in sequence moving forward in a suspenseful and ominous arc. In reducing a film to such actions, and imbuing them with meaning, these otherwise dull activities become compelling. Actions speak louder than words, and ‘Jeanne Dielman’ is cinema’s purest action movie.

Adam Cook is a Vancouver-based independent film critic, editor, and programmer. He is a regular contributor to Cinema Scope and a columnist for Little White Lies. He has written for, among others, Sight & Sound, Cineaste, Film Comment, Fandor, Indiewire, and Brooklyn Magazine.

Watch: What’s the Body Count in Quentin Tarantino’s Films? Warning: Not Safe for Lunch

Watch: What’s the Body Count in Quentin Tarantino’s Films?

https://vimeo.com/148832585

One of the things Quentin Tarantino’s films are known for, aside from their film references, their dialogue, their story structure, their resurrection of actors’ careers, is, of course, their violence. In his newest piece for Fandor, an effort which took him three years to complete, Kevin B. Lee has counted the number of deaths that have taken place in Tarantino’s films to date, to as close a degree of accuracy as anyone could reach. The answer? You’ll just have to watch for yourself.

One thing: don’t watch this while you eat.

Watch: The ‘Star Wars’ Climax and the Movies Behind It

It’s hard to watch the climactic scene in ‘Star Wars: Episode IV’ without breaking a sweat. Why is that? Is it the stakes involved in the story at this point, in which Luke’s quest to destroy the Death Star would read to anyone who had been paying attention as the one thing that could save all human and non-human life? Is it the pacing of the scene? The jump cuts? The constantly changing perspective? Or George Lucas’s shrewd assimilation of myriad influences into one burst of cinematic energy? Julian Palmer has chosen this scene as the final episode in his ‘Discarded Image’ series with 1848 Media, and fittingly: by the end of the scene, one really does feel stunned, wiped out, and, optimistically, gratified, to a degree with which few films of its era could compare. Palmer does an excellent job of exploring the scene, getting under its hood and finding out how it works, and, by extension, telling us quite a bit about Lucas himself, as well as the film’s historical context, in this piece: I look forward to seeing what Palmer will do next.

Watch: In ‘Hannibal,’ The Script Is Only the Beginning

The script is everything and nothing at the the same time. In this video essay, Vashi Nedomansky runs the script for the ‘Hannibal‘ pilot below 5 minutes of the actual episode. And what do we learn? We learn that, to work with Bryan Fuller’s script, DP James Hawkinson had to listen to it. David Slade, the director, could only help him so much–and the vision Fuller might have had in mind was only as executable as he made it on the page. We can see, from the samples we have here, that the script was explicit–but we can also see that scripts don’t move or make noise. For the show to come to terrifying, pristine life, as it has, the visions of the DP and director had to catch fire, somehow. And, judging from the show we have in front of us, that fire was one that would burn for a long time.

Watch: What Makes a David Lynch Film So… Lynchian?

https://vimeo.com/147956910

If you ask me the question What makes a David Lynch film "Lynchian"? And I answer, If I have to explain, you probably won’t understand it, I’m not being as obnoxious as you might think. There is a quality to Lynch’s films that resists understanding, description, summary, analysis, or any of the other activities we engage in to make artworks more palatable. This excellent new video essay by Kevin B. Lee for Fandor, using text from Dennis Lim’s book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place comes as close, really, as one might ever get to characterizing Lynch’s work, with some surprising cameos. Susan Boyle? Lynchian? Perhaps. You be the judge…

Watch: Brian De Palma’s Split Diopter Shot Creates Worlds Upon Worlds

https://vimeo.com/148122285

Because Brian De Palma is fascinated by the inherently Byzantine nature of human activity, be it war, detective work, murder, or espionage, it makes perfect sense that he would be drawn to the split diopter shot, which uses an attachment that gives equal focus to both close and distant objects. De Palma doesn’t want us to miss anything. Even as Caruso sings on stage, the murderous Al Capone sits a matter of feet away from him, in ‘The Untouchables‘; even as a drone scratches his head in ‘Mission: Impossible,’ a stealthy thief hangs above him; even as a blond, all-American teen boy sits bored at a classroom desk, a tortured girl writhes inwardly not far away from him in ‘Carrie.’ What’s the effect? It’s a tightening in the chest, it’s a sense that there’s something we missed previously, it’s the feeling that something bad is about to happen, or could. This video by Jaume Lloret is a tight visual hymn to De Palma’s famed use of the shot–watch it, and see if you don’t feel uncomfortable afterwards.