Film Formally

What does it mean to write for documentaries? Alison Duke of Oya Media Group takes us through her experience co-writing the television documentary Mr. Jane and Finch — a process that netted her the Canadian Screen Award for Best Documentary Writing. 

We went in-depth into her commitment to honoring the truth of her subjects, the challenges of structuring a story as it unfolds in front of you, and some of the ethical quandaries that come with non-fiction filmmaking.

There are a million ways to make an independent movie, and today Dan Sallitt came on the podcast to tell us about the one he chose to make Fourteen. The film's story spans many years, and was shot in several separate periods in 2018 and 2019 — yet it was precisely planned and plotted from the start.

That topic winds up leading us to personal discussions about how our own personalities, anxieties, and circumstances dictate how we make movies and how we compare ourselves to other filmmakers. Dan winds up offering a pretty candid portrait of his feelings and personal philosophies, a great example of the personal side of production methods.

Author and critic Mike Thorn swings by to talk about Prince of Darkness, John Carpenter's 1987 horror film, and how it both expresses and interrogates the subject of epistemophobia — the fear of knowledge. It’s a great movie to go into knowing little, so be aware that we spoil the entire plot in this episode.

We get into how the film withholds or ambiguates information for the audience, the film's balance between pessimism and intellectual humility, and its place in Carpenter's "Apocalypse Cycle" of movies.

USC Postdoctoral Fellow and Cinephiliacs host Peter Labuza joins us to dissect the history of montage. Specifically, we discuss the use of montages in Pre-Code Hollywood cinema.

In the brief period between the introduction of synchronized sound and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production [AKA Hays] Code, artists like Slavko Vorkapich pioneered the use of montages: sequences which condense time and space to convey story beats, emotional states, and break the rules of conventional realism.

Independent filmmaker Gloria Mercer joins us on this one to talk about movies made for the Hallmark and Lifetime TV channels. The focus is on their best-known output, their romantic comedies, and we had a lot of fun chatting about how and why they’re made, their style and structure, their politics, and what we can learn from them.

If you're curious to check them out for yourself, the two movies we dive deepest into are The Flight Before Christmas (Lifetime) and Bottled with Love (Hallmark) — both can be rented or purchased online.

 We’re excited to host filmmakers Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers & Kathleen Hepburn, who join us for a discussion about long takes — shots that last for an extended period of time without cutting — and, in particular, their groundbreaking use of an 90-minute long take in their 2019 feature film The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. Shot entirely on 16mm film, Hepburn and Tailfeathers collaborated with cinematographer Norm Li to overcome the format’s limitations to achieve this aesthetic feat.

Today we jumped into one of our favourite topics — the overuse of super a super-wide frame, i.e. cinemascope, in contemporary movies. The Hunger Games is our unfortunate case study today, but the conversation touches on everything from the ratio’s rise to multiplex dominance to whatever the heck Michael Bay is doing with aspect ratios in his Transformers movies. Seriously, what is going on there.

Today film critic Ryan Swen joins us for a double header discussion of King Hu's Dragon Inn and Legend of the Mountain and how they reflect the evolution of Hu's editing style, an aesthetic marked by an extraordinary evocation and emphasis of motion.

This time around we tackle the way Altman's process and worldview effected his famous use of lengthy zoom-ins and zoom-outs. We touch on a glut of films and side-topics, (hopefully) befitting the master of meandering ensemble narratives.

Filmmaker Paige Smith joins us to talk about the animated psychological horror film Perfect Blue and its copious use of self-reflexivity — when a work openly acknowledges itself, forcing the viewer to recognize the trappings and mechanics of the movie they’re watching.