Video Essay – Page 8 – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Brutal Style, and How It Evolved

Nicolas Winding Refn is a Danish filmmaker responsible for some of contemporary cinema’s most brutally stylish films. Refn’s parents also work in film—his father is a director and editor and his mother is a cinematographer. His parents found their inspiration in the French New Wave, which Refn compared to the antichrist. He was quoted saying, “how better to rebel against your parents than by watching something your mother is going to hate, which were American horror movies.” He found his own inspiration to become a filmmaker after watching the 1974 American horror film ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’

After seeing what Kevin Smith was able to do with his extremely low-budget 16mm comedy debut, ‘Clerks,’ Refn decided to make his first film, titled ‘Pusher.’ Like ‘Clerks,’ ‘Pusher’ was shot on 16mm and filmed in real locations with a shoestring budget. ‘Pusher’ would eventually become the first installment in a trilogy of films about a drug dealer with the next installments being completed nearly a decade later.

His second film titled ‘Bleeder’ is another hard-hitting crime drama—this time, about a group of friends who work at a video store in Copenhagen. His next film, and first English language film, is titled ‘Fear X.’ It stars John Turturro as a man trying to solve his wife’s murder. The film was not well received and was a financial failure and ultimately caused Refn’s production company, Jang Go Star, to go bankrupt leaving Refn over a million dollars in debt.

But Refn made his comeback with a film titled ‘Bronson’ in 2008. The film stars Tom Hardy in the titular role as a famous English criminal in prison who spent many years in solitary confinement due to his outrageous behavior. The character was loosely based on real-life prisoner Michael Gordon Peterson— named one of the UK’s most dangerous criminals. He followed ‘Bronson’ with ‘Valhalla Rising’—a Viking film shot in Scotland that follows a warrior named One-Eye.

Several of these films reached some level of acclaim, but they were mostly unsuccessful financially. It wasn’t until 2011’s ‘Drive’ that Refn became a major player in contemporary American cinema. ‘Drive’ is a highly stylized modern day noir film about a Hollywood stunt driver who finds himself up against some of Los Angeles’ most dangerous gangsters. The film really struck a chord with American audiences who praised Ryan Gosling’s silent tough guy protagonist and the 80s synth pop aesthetic. ‘Drive’ ended up winning Refn the Best Director prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

He teamed up with Ryan Gosling again for his most recent film, titled ‘Only God Forgives,’ which he characterizes as a western that takes place in the Far East. The film was shot entirely in Bangkok, Thailand and follows a man coaxed by his mother into taking revenge on an almost supernatural police lieutenant who was responsible for the death of Gosling’s murderous brother. Refn takes the hyper-stylized aesthetic of ‘Drive’ even further in ‘Only God Forgives’ with an intensely powerful soundtrack composed by Cliff Martinez and highly saturated yet brooding neon colored lights, which is possibly related to his colorblindness.

Refn’s next feature, titled ‘The Neon Demon,’ is set to be released in 2016 and I, for one, cannot wait to see how his creativity continues to evolve.

Tyler Knudsen, a San Francisco Bay Area native, has been a student of film for most of his life. Appearing in several television commercials as a child, Tyler was inspired to shift his focus from acting to directing after performing as a featured extra in Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come. He studied Film & Digital Media with an emphasis on production at the University of California, Santa Cruz and recently moved to New York City where he currently resides with his girlfriend.

Watch: Vancouver Has Stood In for Many Cities, But Rarely Plays Itself

Moviegoers are, by definition, trusting souls. When a film begins, we block more avenues to skepticism than we could possibly imagine. We believe that animals talk, aliens burst from people’s stomachs, and giant, strangely human-looking gorillas crush skyscrapers–or at least we want to believe these things. We also believe that if a film tells us it is taking place in Chicago, boom: we ‘re in Chicago. If it tells us we’re in New York, voila: we’re in New York, in the middle of Bronx traffic. And yet, as this new video essay by Tony Zhou points out, often, we’re actually in Vancouver. The piece is one part homage, one part truth-telling mission, as Zhou goes through all the different films that have used Vancouver as their backdrop while calling it something (or somewhere) else: everything from Christopher Nolan’s ‘Insomnia‘ to Mike Nichols’ ‘Carnal Knowledge.’ Take a look, and see how many films you recognize–or, as it were, don’t recognize.

Watch: David Fincher and Bong Joon-Ho: Two Directors Obsessed with Perspective

In one sense, and a very large one, in fact, a story is only as good as the perspective from which it is told. Great Expectations might be a lesser tale without the semi-annoying Pip to tell it. Think of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl without the author’s relentless play with points of view. Lewis Criswell’s video essay not only shows us how Bong Joon-Ho’s ‘Memories of Murder‘ influenced David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac‘–and convincingly, given that, as presented here, the one often looks like a blueprint for the other, down to characters’ facial expressions–but also that stories like the one told by both of these films, in which the center of the story, the serial murderer, remains elusive, must rely on the perspectives of their tellers, the characters within the story. Reliable or not, the individuals wrestling with the problem at the story’s heart become our guides through the film. If the mystery remains unresolved, so, too, do the characters remain unresolved or unreachable within viewers’ minds.

Watch: Before ‘Everest’: The Allure of the Mountain Climber’s Tale

In his review of Franc Roddam’s 1992 mountain climbing movie ‘K2,’ Roger Ebert wrote: "If I ever fell off a mountain, I would shout ‘Stupid! Stupid!’ at myself all the way down, for having willingly and through great effort put myself in a position to fall to my death." I thought about that line as I watched the trailer for the new star-studded film Everest, which traces the real life events—and lives lost—from the disaster at Mount Everest in 1996. ‘Everest‘ is a film that I find of particular interest: a red-blooded survival tale set in one of the world’s most unforgiving, freezing and deadly mountains. There’s no doubt I will be engrossed by the setting of this film alone, but Ebert’s blunt take-down of the genre—and of the real life mountain climbing sport in general for that matter—made me revisit some favorite mountain movie titles from my childhood, such as ‘Cliffhanger‘ and ‘Alive.’ Those were two films about two very different sets of people stranded in the snowy mountains: one concerns heroes who are professional mountain climbers fighting armed henchmen and the other recreates a bizarre, true story survival tale of a Uruguayan rugby team that resorted to cannibalism after their plane crashed in the Andes mountains. I thought about the films’ differences in regard to their respective plots and what was at stake—but this consideration was soon eclipsed by the bigger, more worldly theme of mortality. At the end of the day, these mountains serve as domineering and unnatural environments for us; we probably shouldn’t be up there climbing in the first place. No matter how different one mountain-climbing film is from the next one, they all share the same absolute truth, in that we are deeply humbled by how deadly these snowy wonders of Earth are. And when some of these films look at a mountain’s visual majesty as a means for spirituality, they only get to that personal epiphany after putting their protagonists through tragic loss or defeat. The mountain is supposed to represent life’s hurdles, life’s challenges. Even when we reach the top of the mountain, we are reminded of how small, frail and, in some instances, alone we are in the grand scheme of things. And there’s a terrifying beauty and an unapologetic humanity in that. So if one were to look at it that way, maybe falling from the mountain is an act of humility; it’s the most outward physical gesture that proves we tried elevating ourselves in the first place.

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 NOWwhich boasts the tagline: "Liberating Independent Film And Video From A Prehistoric Value System." You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

Watch: Sergio Leone’s Western Journey

How could it be that one of the greatest directors known for directing films about the American west was not an American himself?

Sergio Leone was born in 1929 in Rome, Italy to parents already working in the silent film industry—his father was a director and his mother was an actress. He became inspired to start a career in film himself after visiting his father’s film shoots. He met his frequent collaborator, Ennio Moriconne, at a young age while they were classmates in school.

At 18 years old, he got his first job in the industry as Vittorio de Sica’s assistant during the classic film ‘The Bicycle Thief.’ After a period of writing screenplays, he went on to work as an assistant director for more than 30 films including the 1959 William Wyler epic ‘Ben Hur.’ He worked on many epics similar to ‘Ben Hur’ as an assistant director, but when he worked on a film titled ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ he took over the job as director when the original director got sick during the beginning of production. He continued working as an assistant director after this, but soon these “sword and sandal” epics (as they were called) started flopping at the box office. Because of this, the Italian film industry decided to switch to making westerns, after the westerns coming over from Hollywood started to gain popularity. So, the Italian film industry started to produce films in Italy about the American west and had their directors use more American sounding names to try and trick Italian audiences into thinking that they were authentic Hollywood westerns—and thus began the era of the “Spaghetti Western.”

His first “Spaghetti Western” was titled ‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ which was only produced as a way to earn back money spent on a larger film titled ‘Guns Don’t Talk.’ ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ would cost much less money to make because it would use all the same sets, costumes, and other materials made for ‘Guns Don’t Talk.’ However, A ‘Fistful of Dollars’ was significantly more successful than ‘Guns Don’t Talk’ and it ended up becoming the first “Spaghetti Western” to make it to America. Because of this, Leone was able to use his real name.

‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ which would become the first in a trilogy that also contained ‘For a Few Dollars More’ and ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,’ was more or less a reimagining of an earlier Akira Kurosawa samurai film titled ‘Yojimbo.’ Clint Eastwood, who played the protagonist of ‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ was relatively unknown at this time ,and Leone actually discovered him as a cast member of a television show called ‘Rawhide.’

Directly after the ‘Dollars Trilogy,’ Leone started another trilogy—the first installment, an epic titled ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ shocked audiences with Hollywood ‘good guy’ Henry Fonda cast as a brutal child murderer. The next installment, titled ‘Duck, You Sucker’ (also known as ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’ or ‘Once Upon a Time… the Revolution’) takes place during the Mexican Revolution. It would be Leone’s last western film.

The third installment (and Leone’s last film) was released 13 years later and is set in New York City during the prohibition era. This would be the first and only time that Leone would work with Robert De Niro who played the lead character, Noodles. What binds these three films together is the greed and corruption in the shaping of America from the turn of the century up to the 1960s. Each takes Leone’s personality and style to an even grander scale and reveals the breadth of his artistry. Even though ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ is not a western as many of his iconic films were, it was a beautiful and fitting end to a remarkable career.

Clips used:

‘The Bicycle Thief’ (1949 dir. Vittorio De Sica)
‘Ben Hur’ (1959 dir. William Wyler)
‘The Last Days of Pompeii’ (1959 dir. Mario Bonnard, Sergio Leone)
‘The Searchers’ (1956 dir. John Ford)
‘A Fistful of Dollars’ (1964 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘Guns Don’t Talk’ (1964 dir. Mario Caiano)
‘For a Few Dollars More’ (1965 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ (1966 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘Yojimbo’ (1961 dir. Akira Kurosawa)
‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘Duck, You Sucker!’ (1971 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984 dir. Sergio Leone)

Watch: Wes Craven’s ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’: A Journey Through Sound

The ears are gateways to the emotions as frequently as the eyes are, though culturally, no one dwells on auditory phenomena as much. The ever-more-prolific Jacob T. Swinney has put together a short but telling homage to late horror director Wes Craven’s use of sound in his masterpiece ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street‘ that is as tight as a drum. Watch–but also listen.

Watch: The Early ‘Star Wars’ Images Predict the Later Ones

Taking its inspiration from a quote by George Lucas in which he compares the way images echo each other in the ‘Star Wars’ films to the way they correspond in poetry, Pablo Fernández Eyre has produced a very persuasive video essay; watching the images cycle and reiterate themselves between the 1970s films and those of more recent times is a thrill. Enjoy!

Watch: Why The Coen Brothers’ ‘A Serious Man’ Is Their Most Profound Film To Date

There can be no doubt that ‘A Serious Man‘ is the Coen Brothers’ most profound film. It’s not their funniest film (that honor goes to ‘The Big Lebowski’). It’s not their most complicated film (see ‘Miller’s Crossing’–scratch that, memorize ‘Miller’s Crossing’). And it’s not their most outlandish film (hello, ‘Raising Arizona’). But it is the film that grapples most extensively and most compellingly with huge, near-imponderable questions, most notably one we ask all the time, but rarely have a conclusive answer to: What’s going on? Also addressed: What is the meaning of existence? What unifies all events on Earth? And, last but not least, or easiest: Why are we here? Evan Puschak, or "The Nerdwriter," as he calls himself on YouTube, has been making a remarkable series of video essays for quite some time now, on a range of subjects: his latest discusses the crucial question at the heart of the Coens’ most understated, but also most gravitas-infused, movie. For anyone who wants to know more about the Coens’ work–or, in fact, how to close-read a film–this piece is invaluable.

Watch: Meet Jean-Pierre Melville, Cinematic Dreamer

[A transcript follows.]

Jean-Pierre
Melville was a French filmmaker celebrated for some of France’s greatest crime
films. He was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach on October 20^th, 1917. He
chose the last name ‘Melville’ after notable author Herman Melville, most famous
for writing the epic tale of the sea ‘Moby Dick.’ He started using the name
‘Melville’ as part of the French Resistance during World War II in Nazi
occupied France, in which he fought in an Allied invasion of southern France
called ‘Operation Dragoon.’

When he was only six years old, he was given a small hand-crank camera, which
is when he says that he decided that he wanted to be a filmmaker. He became a
lover of film as a child—citing the first time he saw a talkie called ‘White
Shadows in the South Seas’ as the day he fell in love with cinema. He spent
most of his youth watching around five movies a day.

After World War II ended, he tried to become an assistant director to no avail,
so he started his own studio and made films independently. The genre that he
seemed most comfortable in was noir gangster films—his first being a 1956 film
titled ‘Bob le flambeur’ (or ‘Bob the Gambler’) about a gambling addict who
aids in a casino heist. The film used a great deal of hand-held camera work and
location shooting, which caught the eye of then film critic Jean Luc Godard.

Melville was an early hero to the champions of the French New Wave because of
his aesthetic and is penchant for shooting on location with natural light.
Godard drew a great deal of inspiration from ‘Bob le flambeur’ and Melville
even had a cameo in Godard’s first feature film, ‘Breathless.’ Allegedly, it
was Melville who suggested that Godard use jump cuts in the film which went on
to be one of the film’s most memorable features.

‘Bob le flambeur’ would become one of the main films to incite the French New
Wave—a film movement that strived for truth in the image by taking a documentary
approach to filmmaking. However, Melville once said,

“All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first
and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an
exact recreation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me. I move
from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.”

This does not only pertain to subject matter, but production technique as well.
Melville was one of the first to move effortlessly between soundstage shooting
and location shooting.

Perhaps Melville’s most famous film and most influential is 1967’s ‘Le
Samouraï’—starring Alain Delon—about a hitman who lives the code of the Samurai. ‘Le
Samouraï’ is a beautiful convergence of the Hollywood noir with the Japanese
samurai film and all against the backdrop of 1960’s France. Delon’s
intensely cool Jef Costello character has been credited as the inspiration for
the protagonists of such films as ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,’ ‘The
American,’ and ‘Drive’ to name a few. ‘Le Samouraï’ displays Melville’s mastery
of style and tone and has deservedly earned its cult status.

Melville’s entire filmography is a treasure trove of French cinematic
greatness. Whereas there wasn’t enough time to go over them all, no doubt
whichever you pick, you are in for something special.

Credits:

‘Les Enfants Terribles’ (1950 dir.
Jean-Pierre Melville)

‘Bob le Flambeur’ (1956 dir. Jean-Pierre
Melville)

‘Léon Morin, Priest’ (1961 dir. Jean-Pierre
Melville)

‘Le Doulos’ (1962 dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)

‘Le Deuxieme Souffle’ (1966 dir. Jean-Pierre
Melville)

‘Le Samouraï’ (1967 dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)

‘The Army of Shadows’ (1969 dir. Jean-Pierre
Melville)

‘White Shadows in the South Seas’ (1928 dir.
W. S. Van Dyke, Robert J. Flaherty)

‘Breathless’ (1960 dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’ (1999 dir.
Jim Jarmusch)

‘The American’ (2010 dir. Anton Corbijn)

‘Drive’ (2011 dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

Watch: A ‘Bourne Supremacy’ Shot Breakdown

It’s all so quick. A face is spotted on a computer screen, interest is roused, research is done, and a connection is made. The whole transaction takes a few seconds–and yet it’s a few seconds in which you may be so absorbed that you forget to breathe. Or at least this is the desired effect, in Paul Greengrass’s ‘The Bourne Supremacy,’ as CIA officer Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) begins to piece together who Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is, and what his significance might be. This would be a difficult moment to narrate, given its complexity and also the need to move the plot forward at a consistently breakneck speed. Corey Creekmur’s excellent video essay breaks the short sequence down into 39 shots–of files, computer screens, and Landy’s facial expressions–all of which speed us onward as they blend together seamlessly. The piece is dedicated to critic and scholar David Bordwell, an homage to his idea of "intensified continuity," or the trend in recent filmmaking to speed up and amplify the cutting and editing techniques that have been used for decades in Hollywood films.