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The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part Four

THE DIGITAL ERA: REAL-TIME FILMS FROM 2000 TO TODAY 40 years before, in 1960, lighter cameras enabled a cinéma vérité-flavored revolution in street realism. By 2000, new digital cameras suggested a whole new set of promises, including telling stories that would have been unimaginable within minimum budgets for features even ten years before. In 2000, …

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The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part Three

THE POST-1960S, PRE-DIGITAL AGE: REAL-TIME ONE-OFFS, 1975-1998 British filmmaker John Byrum is responsible for the first (and in some ways only) real-time period film. Inserts (1975), set in the early 1930s, is about a Boy Wonder movie director (called Boy Wonder, played by Richard Dreyfuss fresh from American Graffiti (1973) and Jaws (1975)) now washed …

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The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part One

What do film directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Robert Wise, Fred Zinnemann, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Roman Polanski, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Richard Linklater, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Sokurov, Paul Greengrass, Song Il-Gon, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro Iñárritu have in common? More specifically, what type of film have they directed, setting them …

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Interview: Michael Lacanilao and Building a Modern Myth

I spoke with Michael Lacanilao, the creator of the clever Stairwell video that’s been making the Internet rounds, about short-form filmmaking, YouTube videos, and realism. You can support Michael’s project via his Kickstarter page. Neal Dhand: Your film is, in so many ways, a product of the YouTube generation: short attention spans and immediate payoff. …

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Shot Block: Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Gravity’

Now that Alfonso Cuaron’s long-in-the-making sci-fi spectacle Gravity has smashed its way through Venice and TIFF (it’s astounding), its detractors have raised two major objections: first, that its spectacle comes at the expense of its emotional content; second, that its lengthy, whirling camera movements are self-conscious and barely motivated, summarized by Nick McCarthy for Slant …

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