Movie theater. Photo by Fin Fahey. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Technological advances have always driven major changes in the art of film making, from the coming of sound to the development of computer animation. But could the digital age render film itself irrelevant? Tribeca Film is tackling this question through a series online of video clips exploring the new documentary Side by Side.

The documentary, directed by Keanu Reeves and produced by Christopher Kenneally, deals with the effects of the digital revolution, and specifically new methods of shooting movies without film, upon traditional film making. After asking whether film can survive in its current form, Reeves explores the history of cinema and attempts to shed some light on its possible futures.

Reeves interviews a pantheon Hollywood mavens, including James Cameron, David Fincher, David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Steven Soderbergh, in his attempt to depict the monumental shift digital film-making has created at the movies .

Tribeca Film’s Future of Film blog is hosting a continuing conversation by showing daily clips featuring interviews edited out of Side by Side in the final cut. Each day features a new interview with film industry veterans and stars, including Greta Gerwig, Jost Vacano, Wally Pfister,  and Ellen Kuras, among others.

Tribeca Films will release Side by Side through on-demand platforms on August 22.  The film will also play theatrically in select cities, including Los Angeles (August 17), New York (August 13), Boston (August 23), Seattle (August 31), Chicago (September 15), Tacoma (September 15), San Francisco (October 18), and other cities to be announced.

By Clare Coffey

Penelope Cruz, Woody Allen and Greta Gerwig.

Last night The Cinema Society, along with The Hollywood Reporter and Piaget, hosted a screening of Woody Allen’s newest flick, To Rome with Love. The A-list came out in full force for the screening held at Manhattan’s Paris Theater—including the film’s writer/director and star Woody Allen; stars Alec Baldwin, Penélope Cruz, Greta Gerwig, Allessandra Mastronardi who donned a Piaget timepiece, Italian import Fabio Armiliato and Carol Alt; producers Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum and Helen Robin.

Cinema Society founder, Andrew Saffir welcomed the movie’s stars in front of a boisterous audience that was littered with VIPs including: Jon Hamm & Jennifer Westfeldt, Chris Rock—who could be heard cheering and laughing throughout, Woody Harrelson, Mariska Hargitay, Regis & Joy Philbin, Ralph & Ricky Lauren, Cynthia Rowley, Kate Flannery, Hilaria Thomas, Rachel Dratch, Soon-yi Previn, Nicole Miller, James Mischka & Mark Badgley, Scott Adsit, Julianna Marguiles & Keith Lieberthal, Dylan McDermott, Calvin Klein and many more.

After the movie—which seemed to delight all in attendance, in that way that only Woody Allen can—all mentioned above, along with yours truly, moved over to Italian favorite and celebrity haunt Casa Lever for an after-party. Though the venue boasts a fantastic outdoor section, at the risk of melting in the NYC heat wave, most ventured indoors. Chris Rock parked himself in a banquette booth that quickly filled around him–hey, live comedy show. Alec Baldwin worked the room, with one arm around fiancé (suspiciously soon-to-be-wife) Hilaria Thomas, who STUNNED in Dolce & Gabbana. “They really know how to design for a woman,” she told me. That they do. The funny kids–The Office’s Kate Flannery, 30 Rock’s Scott Adsit and SNL’s Rachel Dratch kept each other in a protracted laughing fit, while gathered around a high top table for the whole night.

To read the full article at AVENUE Insider click here.

Ralph & Ricky Lauren

Mariska Hargitay

Chris Rock

Alec Baldwin and Hilaria Thomas

A scene from Damsels in Distress.

“I like my characters to walk in clouds,” said the great comedy director Leo McCarey. “I like a little bit of the fairy tale.”

That confession well describes the McCarey classics that execute a precarious balance between realism and fantasy—The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow, Love Affair, The Bells of St. Mary’s, even his Ruggles of Red Gap (currently in revival at Film Forum)—which took a whimsical approach to the peculiarity of America’s historical identity. McCarey’s line also describes what distinguishes the films of Whit Stillman, whose new feature, Damsels in Distress, is his first movie in 14 years.

The volunteering girls at Seven Oaks College in Damsels in Distress occupy a peculiar world, set apart from working life. They walk in the clouds of the privileged pursuits of youth, enjoying the leisure of education and idealism about politics, romance and religion—in that order of importance, though not obviously so.

Violet (Greta Gerwig), a tall, healthy sophomore, is full of private tastes and philosophies—suicide prevention and tap dancing are her causes. She’s lucky enough to head her own beautiful-girl clique, a group who support each other and invite newbie Lily (Analeigh Tipton) to join them. They’re a bouquet of eccentrics, with names like Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and archly syllabic speech. Yet, like the vulgar beer-and-cocktail boys they are attracted to, each is so pretty and engaging she conveys Stillman’s fascination with the same human qualities and conflicts that made McCarey’s films so moving.

Damsels in Distress is Stillman’s youth movie. His previous films, Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, surveyed young folk verging on the complications of adulthood, but his long absence has added charitable distance to Stillman’s take on maturity. This is, in part, his response to Mumblecore and the opportunity that movement provided for his brand of non-commercial class comedy, but Stillman is too focused and articulate to be mistaken for Mumblecore.

His awareness of class has always made him the most idiosyncratic indie. Whereas Mumblecore directors take their social advantages for granted, Stillman makes those advantages crucial to his characters’ spiritual struggles. (It’s in their romantic gamesmanship and political one-upsmanship, as when Violet jousts with the campus journalist.)

Seven Oaks is a Cloud Cuckoo Land version of a WASP enclave, the class and ethnic milieu that is now so foreign to mainstream comedy. Its identifying characteristics disappeared from view with the ’60s’ social upheaval (a loss addressed by a character in Stillman’s Barcelona, who reproves the vulgar ending of The Graduate). This setting allows Stillman to observe and conserve the moral process of people fighting off their anxieties and pursuing contentment, the telling niceties of socializing that once belonged to that forgotten genre, the comedy of manners.

By bringing a sense of manners back to the chaos of modern social license, Stillman could inspire Mumblecore to rethink itself in less slovenly terms, as a true aesthetic. (The already iconic Gerwig displays more delicate facets here than her exploitation in Greenberg.)

Stillman’s eloquent aphorisms and terse epigrams, too funny to repeat here, are spoken in an atmosphere of serenity and halation (photographed by Doug Emmett) that both satirizes and idealizes Ivy League seclusion. It is a world Violet and her gang long to escape by improving, bringing civility and joy in the courtly form of dance. This recalls how The Last Days of Disco, Stillman’s richest, deepest film, dared to look back to the waning disco era as a modern pilgrimage.

That was Stillman’s version of McCarey’s whimsical approach to the peculiarity of America’s historical identity. His youth movie hopes strongly for our present.

By Mara Siegler, for AVENUE Magazine

Actress Greta Gerwig got her start in the mid aughts as the sweetheart of the awkwardly dubbed ‘Mumblecore’ movement, a low-budget film genre marked by stripped-down realism, trailing sentences, and a do-it-yourself ethos. Slowly evolving into more mainstream fare, the 28-year-old has impressed even the toughest critics with The New York Times speculating she “may well be the definitive screen actress of her generation.” It’s a grand statement, but with upcoming roles in films by upper crust chronicler Whit Stillman and New York’s hometown auteur Woody Allen, she seems poised to prove it true.

Working with such quintessential New York directors seems a perfect match for Gerwig. The sandy blond Sacramento, California transplant came east to study English and philosophy at Barnard, graduated in 2006 and decided to call the city her home. “New York gave me my direction and purpose,” she gushes. “This city lit me on fire! My dad spent some time working in New York when I was a child and on one of my trips to visit him I saw 42nd Street on Broadway. That was it for me. Nothing else would compare. Acting and New York were tops.”

Being the type of woman that can say “tops” with no trace of irony is part of what makes Gerwig so endearing. Whether she is sitting in a bathtub with a friend wearing goofy goggles in the relatively obscure cult film Hannah Takes the Stairs, receiving the most uncomfortable oral sex ever filmed from Ben Stiller in Greenberg, or playing across Russell Brand as the quirky girl with an unabashed love for Grand Central in the big studio remake of Arthur, she exudes a sort of nuanced innocence and authenticity. She has brushed off the ‘It Girl’ label confessing, “I don’t even really know what that means,” and remains nonplussed about the recent attention she’s getting for her upcoming roles and new leading lady status. “I feel pretty good in general,” she says.

This month, Gerwig takes the lead and shows off her comedic and tap dancing skills in director Whit Stillman’s  Damsels in a Distress, his first film in 13 years. Known for focusing on the “urban haute bourgeoisie” with Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998), his new movie focuses on a group of preppie women promoting hygiene and dancing at a suicide prevention center as they desperately try and cope with the male population at their cloistered college.

Later in the year she will follow in the footsteps of Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow and Scarlett Johansson and many other beauties in the role as Woody Allen’s muse in Nero Fiddled, playing alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Alec Baldwin and Penelope Cruz. Fresh off Allen’s Oscar-winning and box office success, Midnight in Paris, the film was shot in Rome and is set for theaters this June.

The roles are a perfect fit for Gerwig. “In a way, New York City is the reason I wanted to be an actress. I was in love with the city through films —Woody Allen especially,” she exclaims. “I adore them both [Allen and Stillman]. I want more. If I could, I’d spent a few years making films only with them—perhaps alternating.”

It is sure to be a whirlwind year for the rising star who is already signed on for the 2013 HBO adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, but we are convinced she won’t let fame get to her head. When asked what she loves in the city, she told us unaffectedly, the subway. “Especially where all the subways converge at Times Square. There is an area where everyone is running from the NRQ to the 123 to the Shuttle – it is my favorite. It makes me feel alive and calm and part of something just by living here.”

Greta Gerwig in Damsels in Distress.

Whit Stillman’s Damsels in the Clouds

“I like my characters to walk in clouds,” said the great comedy director Leo McCarey. “I like a little bit of the fairy tale.”

That confession well describes the McCarey classics that execute a precarious balance between realism and fantasy—The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow, Love Affair, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Good Sam, even his Ruggles of Red Gap (currently in revival at Film Forum)—which took a whimsical approach to the peculiarity of America’s historical identity. McCarey’s line also describes what distinguishes the films of Whit Stillman, whose new feature, Damsels in Distress, is his first movie in 14 years.

The volunteering girls at Seven Oaks College in Damsels in Distress occupy a peculiar world, set apart from working life. They walk in the clouds of the privileged pursuits of youth, enjoying the leisure of education and idealism about romance, religion and politics—in that order of importance, though not obviously so.

Violet (Greta Gerwig), a tall, gangly-when-not-graceful sophomore, is full of private tastes and philosophies—suicide prevention and tap dancing are her volunteer causes. She’s lucky enough to head her own beautiful-girl clique, a group who support each other and invite newbie Lily (Analeigh Tipton) to join them. They’re a bouquet of eccentrics, with names like Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and archly syllabic speech. Yet, like the vulgar beer-and-cocktail boys they are attracted to (their “distress” Ryan Metcalf, Adam Brody, Billy Magnussen, Jermaine Crawford), each is so pretty and engaging she conveys Stillman’s fascination with the same human qualities and conflicts that made McCarey’s films so moving. His bouquet of eccentrintrics defines itself when one girl sees artichokes for the first time and exclaims”They look so weird!” (Those who don’t catch Stillman’s humor are likely to say the same.)

Damsels in Distress is Stillman’s youth movie. His previous films, Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, surveyed young folk entering the complications of adulthood, but his long absence has added charitable distance to Stillman’s take on maturity. This is, in part, his response to Mumblecore and the opportunity that trust-funded movement provided for his brand of non-commercial class comedy, but Stillman is too focused and articulate to be mistaken for Mumblecore.

His awareness of class has always made him the most idiosyncratic indie. Whereas Mumblecore directors take their social advantages for granted, Stillman makes those advantages crucial to his characters’ spiritual struggles. (It’s in their romantic gamesmanship and political one-upsmanship, as when Violet jousts with the campus journalist. Her pursuit of humanism and a perfect relationship is explained by Heather: “Only excellence can glorify the Lord”).

To read the full review visit CityArts by clicking here.