Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Charles Burnett grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the scene of the 1965 Watts Riots in which thirty-four people were killed and over a thousand people were injured. Burnett was part of a group ofRead More
This is my contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at The House Next Door. In thinking of the closeup, I almost invariably gravitate to the films of Andy Warhol, largely because so many of his films privilege this particular framing. InRead More
Apichatpong Weerasethakul has almost single-handedly brought Thai cinema to international prominence with a series of enigmatic experimental narrative films. A graduate of the film program of School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Weerasethakul is one of the most rigorouslyRead More
Following on the success of Stranger Than Paradise, She’s Gotta Have It (1986) provided American independent filmmaking with even greater momentum, adding to the consensus that a bonafide movement had begun. Like Jarmusch, Brooklyn-based Spike Lee was a NYU film-schoolRead More
1. What is Painting? (MoMA). Curator Anne Umland’s feminist-inflected exhibit provides an alternate reading of the challenges to painting’s authority over the past forty years. It begins with an assassination attempt, Vija Celmin’s “Gun With a Hand” (1964), and takesRead More
River’s Edge (1987) was produced on a budget of $1.8 million by the independent producing team of Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, who were also responsible for John Sayles’s Eight Men Out (1988) and Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985).Read More
When Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for her extraordinary performance in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), it guaranteed that the film would reach a much wider and more mainstream audience despite its controversial subject matter. The film’s commercialRead More
As a teacher of screenwriting I’m always amazed that in the scripts of my students, after setting up dramatic conflicts between characters, characters will often suddenly and abruptly reach a “new understanding,” defusing whatever dramatic tension the script has beenRead More