[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zwmum5_ofU[/youtube]

Astra Taylor, Canadian director of Žižek! has conquered and surpassed the traditional aesthetic realm of documentary filmmaking, by moving past the talking head. Her new film, Examined Life takes eight philosophers to the streets, placing them in non-traditional settings (Slavoj Žižek, for example, talks about the fascism of ecology in the midst of a garbage dump). Needless to say, it’s pretty interesting.

I found a really great interview with Taylor on the Spoutblog – here are a few highlights:

(On her definition of philosophy)

For me, one really simple definition of philosophy I like is that philosophers are people who persist in asking childish questions. Maybe questions that are timeless and eternal and ones in which there is no consensus on the answer. Maybe that’s why some people think it’s an indulgent, pointless exercise, but I don’t see it that way.

Spout: For a film that’s almost entirely comprised of people talking about philosophical concepts, Examined Life is quite dynamic and visually stimulating – how did you conceive the aesthetic for it?

Taylor: I became very invested in the kinetic element of filmmaking. I came to filmmaking by accident. I wasn’t schooled in it, I don’t really know any of the formal language of cinema, I don’t understand three point lighting. One of the biggest letdowns of the documentary format is that its talking heads. People never say that as if it’s a good thing. So when I decided to make an ensemble piece about philosophy, the question that concept raises is will the film just going to be a series of talking heads? So I was thinking about ways to do something inexpensive and yet still make a film that was monologue driven and mostly propelled by speech. I was thinking about different options and of course considered animation. It seems like an obvious tool when you’re making a pedagogical film. I decided I really didn’t want to do that. I decided early on I wanted to make a film devoid of any bells and whistles like that. I wanted to make something very simple and formal.

Examined Life will be screened on Friday, March 13 as a part of the Women with Vision Series in the Walker Cinema. Director Astra Taylor will be in attendance to introduce the film.

3D Sun

“I feel like I’m a woman with vision — in 3D,” says my fully dimensioned friend Melissa Butts, co-director of 3D Sun and principal force behind the Minneapolis-based Melrae Pictures.

“Where I don’t consider myself a woman with vision is in the sense of being a female director,” she continues. “I happened to co-direct this film [with Barry Kimm]. Will I direct other films? Not necessarily. It’s not my passion. But I have wanted to be a pioneer in this revolutionary field of 3D storytelling.”

Butts’s 3D Sun, comin’ at ya this weekend as part of the Walker’s “Women With Vision: Dimensions,” is a hot property in many ways, as well as the rare movie of any depth whose stated intent is thoroughly fulfilled. In the very first moments of the 22-minute film, over an eyepopping image of the titular fireball, a female narrator promises: “You are going to see a star, an astrophysical object, in three dimensions, with great resolution, for the very first time.” Ah, if only all movies offered such truth in advertising.

Visionary indeed, Butts was far ahead of the curve in recognizing hi-def 3D — the future of commercial movies, many claim — as an emerging market. Four years ago, she delivered a stereoscopic version of another outer-space documentary she made with Kimm, Future Frontiers: Mars, to the Science Museum of Minnesota, which had just installed a 3D digital projection system in one of its theaters. The challenge of inventing the wheel — or reel, virtually speaking — was precisely the appeal for Butts.

“You get intoxicated by the challenge of pushing the big rock up the hill, trying to figure it all out,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of people doing [digital 3D] then. What we were doing was more than cutting edge. It was like bleeding edge.”

3D Sun, too, has been “up-rezzed,” this time to giant-screen IMAX for its current screenings at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

At the Walker this weekend (every half-hour in the Lecture Room, from Friday thru Sunday), the film’s third dimension will emerge through the combination of two carefully synched Panasonic HD projectors, a gigantic server, and a special silver screen.

When asked to measure the film’s gargantuan size, Butts (who’ll speak in the Lecture Room at 4 p.m. on Saturday) says that she and Kimm, working in close collaboration with NASA and various computer animators from Minnesota and beyond, amassed some 150,000 .tif files — i.e., 75,000 for each eye.

Alas, the numbers of 3D filmmakers aren’t so evenly proportioned when it comes to gender.

Butts was one of only three women presenting work at 3DX, a film festival held in Singapore last November. The others — Catherine Owens (co-director of U2 3D) and Charlotte Huggins (co-producer of Journey to the Center of the Earth) — realized the extent of their minority and, as Butts recalls, said to her, “Is this crazy or what? There are only three women here — us!”

Even having two female colleagues is rare in a milieu where, Butts says, “you kind of get used to being one of the few women in the room.” A Parisian woman whom Butts met at a festival in France last summer suggested they form a Women’s Stereoscopic Society by way of banding together.

“3D Sun was screening at this [French] festival,” Butts says, “but there were no women presenting content to the audience, no women talking about their role in digital cinema, 3D or otherwise. We all noticed it.”

Which, Butts agrees, is another way of noting the continued necessity of a women’s film festival.

Examined Life

Not to get all Bill & Ted in this excellent adventure, but what would ol’ Socrates have made of 3D Sun?

Beyond the near-certain probability that the flick would’ve flipped his wig, we can’t know how the ancient philosopher (“The unexamined life is not worth living”) would have reviewed it. But thanks to Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, screening March 13 at “Women With Vision,” we can study Martha Nussbaum’s take on social democracy, Peter Singer’s meditation on the (im)morality of conspicuous consumption, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s ode to human evolutionary cosmopolitanism, and Cornel West’s theories of death and desire. Slavoj Zizek, star of Taylor’s earlier doc Zizek!, appears in the film beside a garbage heap as he recycles his own notions of ecological ideology.

As I wrote in Variety from Toronto last fall, Examined Life serves as a playful riposte to the idea that movies are mainly for turning one’s mind off. The same could be said of the other “WWV” films I’ve seen and loved, including Claire Simon’s reproductive rights tract God’s Offices (a suitably unplayful riposte to Juno, one could say) and Katia’s Sister by Mijke de Jong, who trains a piercing lens on a Russian emigrant girl’s rough acclimation to life in Amsterdam in a manner that recalls Rosetta.

Before you say there’s nothing new under the sun, examine how life in these distinctly Dardennes-esque dramas appears different for having been captured not by brothers, but sisters.

In an attempt to conjure up one word to describe So Yong Kim’s second film, Treeless Mountain, I immediately came up with melancholic. The story, based loosely on So Yong Kim’s childhood, revolves around two children, Jin and Bin, who in essence are abandoned by their mother when she places them in temporary holding with their aunt, referred to as Big Aunt.  With the summer ending and their mother still gone, the girls are moved to a farm owned by their grandparents.

Treeless Mountain

 The visual component of the film surpasses the singular description of melancholic. Alone, melancholic sets the viewer on the wrong foot, the wrong emotional key upon viewing.  Clearly one adjective cannot describe Treeless Mountain; indeed it needed at least two words. Within the story So Yong Kim tells, an almost lush array of visual undertones surface. Jin, the older child in the Treeless Mountain (played by Hee Yeon Kim), doesn’t do much in the traditional sense of acting. Most of what Jin portrays is a simple, natural performance of a child. It is here, in the captive space of So Yong Kim’s observational camera, where the story truly begins to surface and the second description of the film became apparent-wistful. There is a softness in the long takes and thoughtful close-ups of Treeless Mountain. Because the lens is focused on the methodical yet unscripted movements of the children, the film captures the sincerity of youth.

Throughout Treeless Mountain, the sisters work together, perhaps not intentionally, to not only to survive but to fill a void in each other. There is no music in the film, which lends to the wistful style of So Yong Kim’s cinematic eye, to enhance the interactions between the siblings. It is here that the bond of the sisters shines through, and made clear that by surviving and taking care of her younger sister, Jin has filled the missing component in her heart.

 Treeless Mountain marks the first film of the Walker’s Women with Vision series. Director So Yong Kim will be in attendance on Friday March 6^th in the Walker Cinema to introduce the film.