Joining Reel Works as a mentor

I am excited to join the Reel Works team as a mentor for a young filmmaker. During the next 6 months I will be paired up with a young filmmaker, and help them develop their film from start to finish. The film will premiere at the end of the season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Hope to see you there!

Here’s some more information about Reel Works:

Reel Works mentors, inspires, and empowers underserved NYC youth to share their stories through filmmaking, creating a springboard to successful careers in media and beyond. Reel Works matches teens 1:1 with professional filmmaker mentors to tell their stories and have their voices heard. It’s a powerful combination that changes young lives and creates films that have been seen by tens of millions of viewers worldwide.

Presenting Godard's Notre Musique

"Humane people don't start wars, they start libraries."

This Wednesday, September 1st at 7 pm, I will be presenting Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique at Woodbine, an experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens.

See details and RSVP below.

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In Notre Musique, Godard investigates the aftermath of war atrocities and genocide in three chapters: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.

Notre Musique begins in the aftermath of Sarajevo, and moves to an investigation of the reaction shot. When atrocities occur, whose reaction do we seek? How does this reaction shot create the story surrounding the atrocity? The Palestinian - Israeli conflict and the genocide of the indigenous people of America become focal points with the appearances of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (playing himself), Leticia Gutiérrez, and George Aguilar.

Notre Musique references thinkers & artists ranging from Hannah Arendt to Dostoevsky to Howard Hawks to Emmanuel Levinas. We will have a lively discussion afterwards, working to recognize and connect all the thoughts in the vast canvas of Notre Musique.

Please join us and RSVP here.

Joining Filmshop - NYC Filmmaking Collective

I am honored to join the ranks of Filmshop!

Founded in 2009, Filmshop is a nonprofit collective of independent filmmakers committed to developing new work through peer support and collaboration. Chapters in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Los Angeles and New Orleans meet weekly to workshop projects, offer constructive critique, and incubate new ideas.

Collaboration and teamwork are essential to me. The larger and more intimate my community is, the better the work I can do. I find the best way to enrich my community is to help with other productions. I am honored to join Filmshop, where I can throw myself into a community of diverse artists and activists, helping them as much as I can, learning from their insights, and growing our projects together.

Filmmaking is expensive, and this leads to a fear of experimentation and innovation; a group like Filmshop provides a safe space for artists to practice the experimentation that makes really great work. I am thrilled to join where this community, where I can help others and be helped in turn. One of the joys of working in The Acting Studio is helping new playwrights discover what is truly unique about their newborn projects. In my practice, I have learned to give feedback based on my experience of the artwork, rather than my opinion. Now I can bring that practice to the art that my heart lies closest to - filmmaking. When I think of great movements in storytelling, like the French New Wave or The Group Theater, I think of a community like Filmshop, gathering artists together and helping each other grow.

Training with Intimacy Directors & Coordinators begins

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Today marks the beginning of training with Intimacy Directors & Coordinators. As a director, I want to make sure that whatever I’m making, I’m fostering an environment of collaboration and discovery. The work I’ve already seen at their webinars shows me what a great tool the 5 Pillars of Intimacy is. Something I’ve thought about when I’ve worked as a technician on set, is that we could use the same sort of consent practices when we’re doing potentially dangerous work, as is being asked of for actors when they are approaching emotionally charged scenes. I work to make my sets fair, safe and consensual sets.

I first heard about Intimacy Directing and Coordinating in this article by Rolling Stone. Hope you enjoy.

Watching Terrence Malick & Reading Martin Heidegger

Did you know that Terrence Malick began as a translator of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, before he became a filmmaker? If you start to read Martin Heidegger, I think you will see the influence he has had on this most spiritual filmmaker — especially in the film The New World. The New World is, among many other things, an attempt to show an indigineous people becoming Westernized. One of the great tasks of Heidegger’s thinking is the deconstruction of Western philosophy, in order to expose Western thinking’s roots and to explore what was left unthought by Plato, Aristotle and even the initiators of Western thinking: Parmenides, Heraclitus and Anaximander. What Heidegger, and Malick, find is a more poetic way of being.

Aside from filmmaking, my great passion is to work through Heidegger’s thinking, particularly his attempts to translate the thinking of the Greeks from the Greek language into the German. Below is an attempt, guided by my mentor and friend, Professor Jim Bradford, to translate Heidegger’s German into English. This is no small task, because the ‘ideas’ here are so new and difficult to think through, that even a word like “idea,” which is loaded with the meaning of the Platonic ideal, cannot truly translate Heidegger’s thinking.

In the following video, Jim leads a consortium of people from both sides of the Atlantic through a few sections from Heidegger’s “Basic Questions of Philosophy,” which is a lecture course corresponding to Heidegger’s “Contributions to Philosophy.”

Copyright © Hal Carlton-Ford 2024