Conor Bateman's Blog, page 2

78/52

Walter Murch — no stranger to montage — is describing a sequence of shots. He’s matter-of-fact but speaks with a surprising curiosity. He notes an odd cut; it’s one of the famous cuts, though it’s not famous for being particularly unusual. Then he half-pauses, as if to question his own judgement. It’s a nicely observed moment, maybe even the best, in the docu-essay 78/52. Rather than have Murch continue to narrate the sequence, though, director Alexandre O. Philippe subs him out for a South...

Cameraperson – An Interview with Kirsten Johnson

One of the most striking and original documentary works of 2016, Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson takes short sections from documentary films that Johnson worked on either as cinematographer or director and collects them in a fractious collage, serving as her memoir. Johnson’s work as a cinematographer, which includes Oscar and Palme d’Or winners (Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, respectively), spans decades and continents, and what emerges in Cameraperson is noth...

Publish and Perish: Video Essays in the Age of Social Media

In 2016 I wrote a series of pieces at Fandor Keyframe about video essay form, all of which ran under the banner ‘The Video Essay as Art’. A throughline in my writing was an argument that video essays should be less didactic and more geared around a process of discovery. Videos in this vein tend to be at a remove from essays commonly found on YouTube and even those made by academics. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both of these groups want to educate their viewers in some way. YouTubers brea...

Manchester by the Sea

There’s a body in the morgue. A husband, father, brother, son. What does it matter? It wasn’t much of a surprise. The grieving has been ongoing, a decade-long drip feed into the familial bloodstream. Joe Chandler, dead in his 40s, a rare heart condition. He leaves behind an irascible sixteen-year-old son, an ex-wife who left years earlier without a trace, a younger brother who hid himself away from the world in anonymous janitorial jobs. Joe’s death isn’t an event, it’s a process. From the m...

Split

There’s a moment in Luc Besson’s Lucy where Scarlett Johansson’s titular character, whose ‘brain usage’ will go from 10% to 100% over the course of the film, sits on an operating table in Taipei. She holds the surgeons at gunpoint until they agree to cut open her abdomen to remove a bag of synthetic drugs that has given her strange new powers. While the anesthetic-less operation is underway Lucy calls her mother. The camera pushes in on her face, a blank stare that succumbs to a quivering li...

The Bandit

1977 hit Smokey and the Banditnow finds itself among the recipients of afilm-tribute documentary, the recent non-fiction trend blatantly cashing in on pop culture nostalgia. Some of these films play as intense fan-made love letters(Raiders!), others are more experimental and ambitious (Room 237), though most takethe more conventionaloral historyroute (Back in Time). The starting point for these documentaries is the idea that the film in question is so great a cultural object that a documenta...

Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids

For decades Jonathan Demme has been making what he calls “performance films”, filming live music and theatre within distinct and identifiable spaces. They’re not concert films, per se, in that they don’t aim to capture the sense of being at a concert. Demme’s performance films are about recognising the artifice in stage shows, acknowledging the collective effort involved in their creation. His most widely-known performance film isStop Making Sense, featuring the bandTalking Heads. Demme seam...

Operation Avalanche – An Interview with Matt Johnson

Operation Avalanche, Matt Johnson’s follow-up to the widely-acclaimedThe Dirties, is another fake documentary film starring Johnson and collaborator Owen Williams, once again as young would-be filmmakers. This time, though, the DV cameras and school-shooting plotare swapped out for 16mm and the faking of the moon landing. The film played at Melbourne International Film Festival this year and we reached out to Matt to talk through the film, its curious production methods and the state of film...

Tickled – An Interview with David Farrier and Dylan Reeve

One of the most widely-hyped documentaries to play this year at the Melbourne International Film Festival is Tickled, which sees New Zealand journalists David Farrier and Dylan Reeve follow the very strange rabbit hole that is competitive endurance tickling in the United States. While they were here in Melbourne, we spoke to them about the film’s production, lawsuits, and saunas.

How did you initially approach funding for the film? I know that the New Zealand Film Commission was involved at...

The Neon Demon

In 1999, Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl releasedModels,a docu-realist account of the banality of day-to-day modeling life. It’s a characteristically bleak film from the director but it is punctuated by sparks of humour and warmth, a sense of camaraderie sustained through visits to a nightclub bathroom, where the models chat about men, plastic surgery and their futures in front of theroom-length mirror. The presenceof the mirror in Seidl’s film triggersself-examination on the part of charact...