I’ve been impressed, though, with what The Auteurs is doing with online video. Their catalog caters to cinephiles, and their site’s design and interface encourages people to pay attention to the videos they’re watching. So I’m happy to say that my short film Gina, An Actress, Age 29, was recently selected for the site. It’s just gone “live”, and the timing is fitting, as the film premiered around this time of year in 2001, at Sundance.

Click on the image to view Gina, An Actress, Age 29 on The Auteurs.

For now, the film is free for the first 1000 viewers. Spread the word, tell your friends, and become a fan of it if you like.

One way or another, if you do watch it, I hope you enjoy it!

Rohmer was one of the great filmmakers, and his films have been a deep source of personal and professional inspiration to me. My personal favorites are My Night at Maud’s, Autumn Tale, and part one of Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. In the last of these, the climax of the film has two young women awaking at dawn to listen for “the blue hour” — a possibly-mythical moment of absolute silence in nature. It is a moment that, for me, is the essence of Rohmer’s art.

If you are a fan, I recommend Colin Crisp’s superb book, Eric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist, which, in addition to Crisp’s observations, contains many passages of Rohmer talking and writing about his filmmaking practice.

Instead, I offer up 30 films that meant something to me over the past decade…. as well as a few other lists.

I make no claim that the thirty films listed immediately below are the “best” films of the decade. These are the films that meant the most to me, either because they were fabulously entertaining, deeply moving, unforgettably thought-provoking, personally inspiring, or professionally inspiring to me as a filmmaker. In some cases, a film might have been all of these things.

Top 30 of 2000-2009 (chronological, then alphabetical order):
Beau Travail (Denis, 2000)
Croupier (Hodge, 2000)
Chuck and Buck (Arteta, 2000)
The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000)
Yi Yi (Yang, 2000)
Mulholland Dr. (Lynch, 2001)
The Poor and Hungry (Brewer, 2001)
About a Boy (Weitz Brothers, 2002)
Adaptation (Jonze, 2002)
Far From Heaven (Haynes, 2002)
Raising Victor Vargas (Sollett, 2002)
Ten (Kiarostami, 2002)
To Be and To Have (Philibert, 2002)
Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, 2003)
The School of Rock (Linklater, 2003)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004)
Sideways (Payne, 2004)
War (Mahaffy, 2004)
I am a Sex Addict (Zahedi, 2005)
The Puffy Chair (Duplass Bros., 2005)
Dance Party USA (Katz, 2006)
LOL (Swanberg, 2006)
Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro, 2006)
Frownland (Bronstein, 2007)
Ratatouille (Bird, 2007)
There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)
Zodiac (Fincher, 2007)
The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008)
The Wrestler (Aronofsky, 2008)
St. Nick (Lowery, 2009)

+ 2 BBC documentaries (These aren’t films, but I watched them under film-like circumstances and without interruption.)
Planet Earth (multiple directors/BBC, 2006)
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (Curtis/BBC, 2007)

In addition to the films listed above, here are just a few of the acclaimed films from the past decade that I’ve not seen — many of which sit next to my DVD player. I expect that after watching these more than a few will wind up on an amended version of the list above:

In the Mood for Love, Platform, Syndromes and a Century, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, In Praise of Love, The Son, Kings and Queen, Werckmeister Harmonies, Waltz with Bashir, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Tropical Malady. Making this list has pushed me to make watching these films a priority.

From 2000 to 2009 I saw dozens of great films made before 2000 for the first time. Here are a mere half dozen that meant the most to me:

Ruggles of Red Gap (McCarey, 1935)
Winter Light (Bergman, 1962)
The Parallax View (Pakula, 1974)
The Whole Shootin’ Match (Pennell, 1978)
The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1981)
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Herzog, 1997)

I also saw a lot of movies that I disliked a lot or even hated. Listing the ones that everyone else thinks are trash isn’t worth the effort, so here are my least favorite acclaimed films — the “Bottom 10,” as it were:

Ghost World (Zwigoff, 2001)
What Time is it There (Tsai, 2001)
Gangs of New York (Scorsese, 2002)
Finding Nemo (Stanton, 2003)
The Life Aquatic (Anderson, 2004)
Last Days (Van Sant, 2005)
Little Miss Sunshine (Dayton and Faris, 2006)
Man on Wire (Marsh, 2008)
Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Butthole (Fincher, 2008)

And, finally, in case you were wondering, here are my two favorite films produced from 2000-2009: Yi Yi and Mulholland Dr.

Or is it?

One of the issues, of course, about shooting tapeless formats is what you do with the data. While editing with tapeless footage, of course, I keep lots of backups on drives in different locations. But after the project is completed, using hard drives to archive the footage is not a reliable solution. Of course, I’ll confess that this is what I’ve done in the past. But as my hard drives age, and as I amass more footage that I’ll want to hang onto, I know I need to find another solution. Most pros will tell you that solution is (wait for it)…. tape. Specifically, LTO or “Linear Tape Open.”

Luckily, for us Mac users out there, Helmut Kobler recently did us all a service by summarizing how to get started with LTO4 tape archiving on a Mac. Kobler estimates the low-end price tag for a Mac-compatible LTO system as $3300.

That figure may seem like a lot to independent filmmakers. (I wonder how many fewer Panasonic HVX200s or Sony EX-1s would have been sold if this cost was factored into the purchase price?)

In the end, whether to spend this kind of money amounts to questions about risk and value: How much do you value your data? And how much risk are you willing to take that your data might be lost forever?

For me, that $3300 is starting to look like a decent value. Long live tape!

The United States of America

I’ve been looking over Ted Hope’s blog lately and one thing he keeps returning to is the idea that in order for cinema to be truly free (i.e., liberated), we have to do our part to help film culture. I agree.

That’s part of what this blog has always been about. One of the reasons I began this blog was to champion filmmakers working regionally.

But now I’d like to undertake a concrete project specifically dedicated to spotlighting filmmakers that live around the country. To do that I need your help. Not a lot of help, mind you — just a few minutes.

I’m calling this undertaking 50 States, 50 Filmmakers.

It will probably end up being a series of discussions with filmmakers working around the country. I hope to talk with others about why they live and work where they do, the challenges and opportunities they face, the resources available to them, and how they support their work. Ideally, these discussions will include links that allow you to watch or purchase their work. And I’d like to do one for each state, in case the title didn’t tip you off.

So, to restate, to do this project completely, I need your help.

I want you to tell me who you think is living and making interesting films outside of New York or Los Angeles. The films can be feature films, documentaries, or short experimental works. I don’t care. “Interesting” and “not-New-York-or-Los-Angeles” is all I care about.

If you want to nominate a filmmaking team or filmmaking collective, that’s cool. I’m open to doing a few historical surveys, too, so if you prefer to nominate someone deceased (say, Eagle Pennell of Texas or Colorado’s Stan Brakhage), go for it. I just want some interesting ideas.

So, without further ado, CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY.

Don’t know 50 filmmakers in 50 states? That’s okay. I don’t either. That’s why I’m doing the survey — to fill in some blanks and to get some good ideas for this thing. Just take the survey and give suggestions where you can. You don’t have to provide nominations for all 50 states.

And please pass this along to your friends. I’d like as many people throwing out ideas as possible. I’m going to leave this post up for a couple of weeks, after which I’ll start compiling replies.

Again, here’s the link to the survey.

After a few years, I really started feeling the limitations of my abilities, so I decided to dig into some tutorials. For whatever reason — probably because I’d seen a few for free online — I chose Larry Jordan’s Lynda.com video tutorials. These helped me immensely with everything from media management tips to techniques that greatly reduced the time I’d spend fumbling through FCP’s interface.

Even if you don’t need to teach (or re-teach) yourself Final Cut Studio, I highly recommend that you check out Larry’s free Monthly Newsletter. Among the tips this month:

Startup Mode Selector, a free application that helps Snow Leopard users learn more about, and harness, 64-bit technology without use of the terminal…

Ken Stone’s excellent iChat Theatre tutorial…

and Apple’s substantial (40pages) white paper on Customizing Final Cut Studio Blu-Ray Disc Templates.

Enjoy.

Recipients and summaries of the projects:

ROOFTOP FILMS AND THE CHICKEN & EGG FUND SHORT FILM GRANT
+ Sara Zia Ebrahimi: Norman Schwartzkopf Made Me Gay

ROOFTOP FILMMAKERS’ FUND SHORT FILM GRANTS
Underwritten by Cinereach

+ Moon Molson: Crazy Beats Strong Every Time

+ James M. Johnston: Knife

+ Dustin Guy Defa: We Have No Home

Way to go Sara Zia and James — and congrats to all!

More details about the grants and the projects selected for funding here.

As you can imagine, the keywords tend to be most useful. The beauty of using Filemaker Pro (as opposed to a library-designed data management software or, even worse, paper-based finding aid system) is that I can create ways to look for and quickly find what I want in a way that make sense to me. It’s also one of the most affordable solutions I’ve found.

Of course, I quickly discovered I would need hard drives and backups of those hard drives for all the data and the video files, and when you’re dealing with hundreds of hours of footage, it’s quite an investment. I’ve found this brand to be especially reliable and affordable. As part of the “best practices” I’ve adopted, I always keep one copy of master tapes and hard drives with data in a separate, secure, climate-controlled location (e.g. not in a basement, attic, or anywhere subject to big temparture fluctuations or humidity). I also set alarms to remind myself to power up and spin the heads on the harddrives at least once every six months. Failing to do so can mean a total loss of data.

**

Even for filmmakers who aren’t interesting in shooting small format or working with family archives, home movies have a lot to offer. As opposed to much archival footage that comes with hefty fees (my searches online yielded rates ranging from $25 per second to $350/second and up), home movies often come free for the taking (with attribution) or for a song at garage and rummage sales. More than that, I believe there’s something inexplicably beautiful in these smaller than life versions of everyday scenes. Maybe it’s because small things distill life to its essence…or maybe it’s because the world seems so big and wonderful when things appear so small. Whatever the reason, if you come across orphan or neglected home movies, I hope you’ll consider preserving and using these beautiful artifacts or donating them to an archive near you.

In the next making of For Memories’ Sake post, I’ll share how I scanned and catalogued 30,000+ photographs without taking too many years off my life.

Still from Angela Singer's 8mm home movies.