The Night

   

Cinedelphia.com presents Eyam, one night only!

As someone who gets a lot more festival rejection than acceptance, it's no little thing to report that Eyam will be the first of my movies to ever play a proper theatre. For one night only, Saturday July 21st at 7 PM Eyam will play the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art in, of all places, Philadelphia. Following the film there will be a reception and Q and A with myself and some of the cast (I think Sophie Chernin, Jacq Voegtlin, Stephie Ulm, Lina Pearson, Alex Heim are semi-confirmed at this point. Unfortunately Josh White is still living in the midwest (how I miss him) and Jack Farrell is going to be in Vermont that weekend. Brett...who knows what that fellow gets up to on Saturday nights!) to be conducted by horror writer and Cinedelphia contributor Lucas Mangum who I have to thank for setting this up. He's a champion and I owe him a good deal. I also have to thank Eric Bresler for working with me on this and to everyone at PhilaMOCA and Cinedelphia for supporting the screening. Please come by if you can and ask us anything you like! I can't wait to show this film to you.

The Riverbed - 2012 Redux

I've finally done the thing I should have done a long time ago and re-edited The Riverbed, my first feature, shot in 2009, into a silent film. I'll leave the sound version up as a curio, but frankly it just looks terrible by comparison. It helps that I stole a lot of music I don't own/have the rights to, but I'm not selling this film so I don't feel bad. Also, these songs are only here because I love them and because they are (or were the product of) some of the greatest works of art of all time. It's an essay on the history of film music, now, as much as an homage to silents, with music cribbed from the Hammer Back Catalog (God bless you, lads), as well as established unmissable composers like Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. The point is to see what music with such specific origins does in strange contexts. Everyone knows Beethoven's 7th, so what I thought I'd do was put it in a very conscious reference to what is, to me, it's finest use in history, that beautiful dolly montage in Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat, only putting a person in the frame. But enough of that. Also worth noting is how well the performances translate to silence. I have once again to thank my close friends who put up with my amibitions at the expense of potentially looking silly. Sarah, Nick, Sebastian, Tucker, Maggie, Tim, Laura and Lina put an awful lot of confidence in me that I think I'm finally able to reward. The real thing to take away is that you can save anything. I'm now totally at peace with this film. When I released it in three very spotty parts last year, I wrote the following thing, which needless to say, is still true:

I know so much about myself and about filmmaking that I never could have learned if I didn't go out into the woods with my friends and just do this. If we'd never made The Riverbed, there'd be no A Knock At The Door, To All My Friends On All Their Birthdays, No Fourth Wall nor my (then) latest film I Need You. I'd be nowhere if I'd never made this movie. I'd be nowhere if I didn't have friends willing to take a gamble on me. I just hope that I haven't let them down.

Damnesia

Between now and House of Little Deaths, we've made another film, a feature called Damnesia about the tiny moments that make up the life of a 16 year old girl. Its roots are in the history of avant-garde film, from the silent films of Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac to the artistic vanguard that stormed the most recent Cannes film festival. Its proof for potential backers of House that we can do this for nothing and will, but with a little financial support, we can do more.  I'm incredibly happy to be working with Theo Blasko on a feature length film, and there's going to be a lot of cameo appearances by close friends, many of whom I've never worked with before. It's an unimaginably exciting project and I can't wait to show it off. Additional cast includes Nick Smerkanich, Ash Redbone, Cooper McKim, Missy Rebovich and Ashley Tryba.