About Me

Bio and Selected Writings

Act Da Fool

September 2, 2010

Harmony Korine's new short film:

As with Kanye Wests' Power (not to mention Spike Jonze's I'm Here, among others), this is a fine example of manufacturers enabling artists to their mutual benefit, and ours. Compare this to the lyrically crass Levi's commercial, directed by John Hillcoat, which made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

Incidentally, I saw Trash Humpers on the big screen for the third time last month. I wish I could afford one of these 35mm prints.

Posted by David Lowery at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

Reference Material

September 1, 2010

We did our location scout this past Sunday. Costume measurements were taken yesterday. I rewrote the script this morning. I'm sort of preparing a shot list. And I'm watching a few movies to see how certain elements have been covered by others. Bergman's Persona, Tarsem's The Fall and maybe even Inglourious Basterds for good measure. I want to see how and when someone else would cut from this...

...to this...

...to this...

...along with all of the reverse instigation that's implicit in those three shots. I know why I would do it, but I'm curious enough this time around to cross-check my impulses.

Posted by David Lowery at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)

Missing Kubrick

August 30, 2010

This profile of Christiane Kubrick from The Guardian is sad and lovely.

One time, she and Anya spotted me riffling through one of his old notepads in the stable block. She said: "I get very upset at seeing some of his old things. The paper is so dusty and old and yellow. They look so sad. The person is so very dead."

It was at the apex of my Kubrick obsession that I attended the Berlinale Talent Campus five years ago and, along with twenty or thirty other fellows of the program, got a personal tour of the master's archives from Christiane and her brother Jan Harlan. As I recall, before we stepped into the exhibit hall, Harlan proposed that she guide half of our group and he the other; but when it came time to split up, everyone crowded around Christiane, through whom, I suspect, we all thought might all get a little bit closer to our hero. They ended up joining forces and taking us through together.

The Kubrick Collection has since traveled around the world and been viewed by many, but at that time it was an exhibit that had not yet gone public, and the fact that I'd be seeing the Star Child in person was something I was completely unprepared for. Were I to get writerly about it, I'd suggest that staring that foam rubber infant dead the eye might have something to do with why I haven't revisited any of Kubrick's work these past few years, and why he's become less of an immediate icon to me and my own processes. But that just isn't the case.

Posted by David Lowery at 1:51 PM | Comments (1)

The Fine Art Of Referrals

August 27, 2010

I wrote a brief capsule review of R. Alverson's debut feature The Builder for Hammer To Nail. That it was a capsule was not my intention, and if it seems brief, it's because I curtailed what was originally going to be an overriding theme - the concept, featured in last Sunday's NY Times, of record labels releasing independent films.

The filmmakers should take a cue from the recording industry has been a running cry these past few years, one always foiled by the fact that films, by their very nature, cannot be enjoyed in the same manner as music. What struck me when I read the article, however, wasn't necessarily the manner of distribution the labels were applying to these films, but the labels themselves. An interesting trick occurs in my head when I think about it. Drag City, for example, is a label I trust implicitly, home to my very favorite musicians. I bought more of their records in the past year than I did DVDs. Their stamp on a film automatically piques my curiosity, regardless of whether it was directed by Harmony Korine (or Michael Tully). There's some degree of novelty to it, but that novelty will wear off as more labels do the same thing, and what will be left, what was there all along, is the matter of taste.

Which is to say: it all comes back to curation. As much fun as uncharted territory and the joy of discovery can be, by and large I place great value in the fine art of referral. There's too much material out there for me to parse; I want the stamp of approval of a trusted critic, a festival programmer, even a distributor to direct my attention towards works I should be seeing. That I include distributors here may suggest that I'm casting my net too wide, or that I'm attached to an old model. But I'm intrigued by the notion of trusting a distributor (Oscilloscope Laboratories is after just that, with their Circle Of Trust program that depends on a subscriber's faith in the taste of the acquisition department). On the other end of the spectrum is a friend sending me a link to a video and telling me to check it out, but in between the two is a spectrum of possibility for getting the work out there that appeals to me in a way that self-promotion does not. A million tweets from an unknown filmmaker is not going to get my attention as much as a nod towards that same filmmaker from a writer whose opinion I hold in high regard.

I think this can work for getting the work made in the first place, as well. I attended a fundraiser party for a friend's band the other night, hosted by a friend, at her house. Any random patron who donated money that night did so not because he or she had been randomly perusing Kickstarter pages, but because the opportunity to discover the project - along with sufficient evidence as to it's worth - had been provided by a trusted confidante. Our hostess suggested that she would be holding a continuing series of such events - a philanthropic subscription service, if you will.

All of this was circling in my head as I wrote about The Builder, but none of it belonged in that review, and so I cut it short and continue it here. What I'm saying, in short, is that I'm shirking responsibility left and right, both as an audience member and a filmmaker. In the latter category, I want my the ubiquity of my voice to rapidly diminish the moment my film is over; I want to trust others to carry it forward from there.

Posted by David Lowery at 3:21 AM | Comments (0)

Callbacks

August 22, 2010

Posted by David Lowery at 1:33 PM | Comments (0)