Film Formally

We're doing two episodes on truth in cinema, starting with one on standards of reality in narrative films. Whit Stillman (The Last Days of Disco, Love & Friendship) joined us, largely to register his animosity towards the idea of making stylistic decisions based on realism, and shared his thoughts on aesthetic decline, pretension, and the meowling cat sound in Damsels in Distress.

Welcome to season 3! To kick things off, we’ve brought Duplitech Film Services Manager Blake Blasingame in to discuss film preservation and mastering for home video. Are you ready for 88 minutes of unadulterated shop talk about grain structure, bit depth, oversampling, color grading, and vinegar syndrome? Of course you are! This is Film Formally, after all.

The process of preserving and restoring films for Blu-Ray and DVD releases.

Scan resolutions - 4k, and the value of oversampling.

Vinegar syndrome: the silent killer.

How film elements are sourced for scans - negatives, IPs, IBs, and release prints.

Robert Richardson and revisionism.

William Peter Blatty and the restoration of the lost Legion cut of The Exorcist III

More audio restoration!

If you’d like to support the show, here’s a link to our Patreon.

Works discussed during this episode:

Snow Falling on Cedars

The Exorcist III / Legion

The Thing

The French Connection

The Big Lebowski

Blade Runner 2049

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Heartbreak Kid

Playtime

Tree of Wooden Clogs

Army of Shadows

Ran

The works of Wong Kar-Wai

It’s our second SEASON BREAK SPECTACULAR! You sent us some great questions, and we answered them.

Per our answer early in the pod, you can check out https://native-land.ca/ to see which indigenous territory you might live on (bear in mind it’s not comprehensive or “official”). There’s a good explanation of land acknowledgments there, too. If you’d like to support the show, here’s a link to our Patreon.

Film Formally is on hiatus, but that won't stop us from taking your questions! Take our quick survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Y7HV6CM to submit questions that we'll answer on our podcast in an upcoming episode.

Plus, Devan comes in with some HOT TAKES.

For our season 2 finale, we keep it simple and discuss none other than the use of colour across the works of Wong Kar-Wai. In particular, we discuss the use of colour to evoke emotions, mood, and symbolism in his 21st century masterpieces In The Mood For Love and 2046.

We’ll be taking a break for the holidays, but our regularly scheduled programming will continue in January 2021. And who knows, there might be some bonus episodes coming…

The different ways in which colour is utilized and created in cinema: lighting, production design, grading.

Wong Kar-Wai’s evolution as an artist and his highly instinctual and intercultural approach to colour.

Cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s approach to colour.

The new restorations of Wong Kar-Wai’s cinema, and the possible issues therein. AKA: “In the Mood For Love: was it always this green?”

If you’d like to support the show, here’s a link to our Patreon.

Works discussed during this episode:

By Wong Kar-Wai:

Days of Being Wild

Chungking Express

Fallen Angels

Happy Together

In The Mood For Love

2046

By Others:

Apocalypse Now

Dick Tracy

It’s an emergency, time for a podcast! This week, we’re discussing the sordid tale of the DC comics behemoth blockbuster Justice League. Initially released in 2017 to much disappointment after extensive Joss Whedon-helmed reshoots, it’s taken on a new life after a movement around releasing original director Zack Snyder’s preferred cut formed. What has ensued is a confusing stream of contradictory information, and we’re here to sort it out!

The mysteries surrounding the mythical “Snyder Cut”: did it ever really exist? Why does the story keep changing?

Aspect ratio revisionism and open matte versions of films.

Brian Wilsom’s sMiLe and the impossibility of truly non-revisionist reconstructions of never-completed works.

The “Black and Chrome” trend.

Devan’s controversial Letterboxd review of Rise of Skywalker.

What IS art, anyways?

If you’d like to support the show, here’s a link to our Patreon.

Will’s Snyder Cut tweetstorm.

Works discussed during this episode:

Sully

Blade Runner 2049

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice

The Mist

Mad Max: Fury Road (Black and Chrome Edition)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Parasite

Son of Saul

Brian Wilson’s sMiLe

How do we light our movies? The answer for many starts with the idea of motivation. What, within the world of our film, justifies the light illuminating our stories? In this episode we once again sit down with Paige Smith to discuss the ins and outs of lighting ideology. Most films circa the 21st century are lit in a way that prizes ‘naturalism’; we delve into the reasoning behind this as well as other ideologies, including the theatrical lighting methods that dominated early and mid 20th century cinema.

Lighting ideologies and how they can influence our creative process.

The dangers of using the words “Key”, “Fill”, and “Backlight.”

The evolution of lighting linguistics, from the birth of cinema through the era of classical hollywood realism to modern-day realism.

Gendered lighting techniques and other broken methodologies.

Gregg Toland’s groundbreaking candlelight in The Grapes of Wrath.

Janusz Kaminski’s use of ‘documentary’ lighting in Schindler’s List.

Ellen Kuras’ use of broken lighting motivation in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

James Wong Howe and Roger Deakins’ lighting seminars.

Okay, folks, it's time for blocking! The pre-planned arrangement, movement, and posturing of characters in a frame is one of a director's most artistically demanding on-set tasks, and nobody blocked a scene better than Sidney Lumet (whom we've already talked about once this season). Screenwriter and Lumet mega-fan Cameron Carpenter joined us to talk about the blocking in Lumet's swan song, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke. We also found time to talk about the film as an early example of digital cinematography, and chatted about how critics responded to the presence of a naked woman in the film (not well) and directorial batting averages.

Today we're taking a trip through a few of the wild worlds of experimental animation, to get a sense of what makes these proudly bizarre shorts — which take on or even invent processes unheard of in mainstream animated films — feel so persuasive and affecting. We're joined by animator Gil Goletski, who came with an excellent program of shorts to watch (all of which you can see for free online), and who was happy to indulge (or initiate) some digressions into comedy and experimentalism, the shame of an unseen canon, and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (and we cut far more of the latter subject than you might suspect from what's left).

There’s a new concert film out! It’s called David Byrne’s American Utopia, directed by none other than Spike Lee and shot by none other than Ellen Kuras. It documents David Byrne’s most recent tour-turned Broadway show, and it’s drawn much discussion: in particular, to David Byrne’s previous high-profile concert film, Stop Making Sense. We took this release as an opportunity to delve into the entire genre of concert cinema, and the difficulties that arise when one must turn a stage-bound show intended for a live audience into a film object. 

We also discuss Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme), Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Bert Stern, Aram Avakian), Monterey Pop (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967), Gimme Shelter (Chartlotte Zwerin, Albert & David Maysles, 1970), Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970), The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978), U2: Rattle and Hum (Phil Joanou, 1988), Bjork: Biophilia (Peter Strickland & Nick Fenton, 2014), Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!  (Adam Yauch, 2006), Berlin: Live at St. Ann's Warehouse (Julian Schnabel, 2008), Heart of Gold (2006), Trunk Show (2009), Journeys (2011) (Jonathan Demme), and Shine a Light (Martin Scorsese, 2008)