Holly Willis

The City in Motion

Holly Willis
“I want to do motion.” Skinny and sweaty, the 20-year-old snapped the clasps open on a shiny silver portfolio case and hauled out sample letterhead and brochures, careful not to smudge the surface or dent the edges of the expensive paper. “You fold this right here,” he said, nimbly tucking......

Ad Libs

Holly Willis
A guy pulls up in front of a café in a sporty little black VW. People chat, waiters scurry, a woman cuddles her baby. Cut to a medium shot. Holding his hand up, the driver, possibly Middle Eastern, slowly and deliberately pushes his thumb down on a detonation device, and......

Billboard Oases

Holly Willis
"When I see something in the urban landscape that isn’t about advertising, it gives me a sense of relief," says 36-year-old media artist Julia Meltzer, who decided to offer a similar sense of respite to the rest of us with a series of billboards that are about provocation rather than......

Cinetheque Paradiso

Holly Willis
Photos by Virginia Lee Hunter Say it out loud: Paolo Davanzo. The name circles around your mouth, rolls down over the tongue and finishes off with a triumphant, three-syllable flourish. A grand appellation, to be sure, and when you hear its bearer pronounce it, you know the dude’s got character......

Time, Movement, Space, Memory

Holly Willis
While the fashion industry has zealously ransacked the 1960s and 1970s, making the old new all over again, U.S. cinema has, for the most part, left those decades alone, preferring the illusion of ceaseless perfectibility. Yet the underground filmmaking practices of what was known at the time as the New......

Hear No Evil

Holly Willis
Josh Aronson and Roger Weisberg‘s poignant, award-nominated Sound and Fury addresses the controversial cochlear implant, a device that’s surgically embedded under the skin behind one ear to stimulate undamaged nerves and thereby create sound for deaf people. This apparently desirable option is responsible for a deep fissure among the deaf,......
(function(r, d, u) { var s = d.createElement(r); s.async = true; s.setAttribute('data-cfasync', false); u += '&cb=' + Date.now() + Math.random(); s.src = u; var n = d.getElementsByTagName(r)[0]; n.parentNode.insertBefore(s, n); })('script', document, '//engine.laweekly.com/?221982862');

Beautiful Dreamer

Holly Willis
Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay has it backward. In Ratcatcher, her debut feature, the 30-year-old director puts the climactic scene of the movie right at the beginning, neatly contravening basic rules of story structure. Her tale, about a working-class family‘s struggles, would be perfectly suited to the gritty social-realist look that......

Lost and Found

Holly Willis
Sifting through the past, reading symptoms and letting subjects reveal themselves are the strategies of psychoanalysis, but they‘re also the tools of found-footage filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, whose body of extraordinary short films, which screens this weekend at UCLA, is testament to the power of close scrutiny. It comes as no......

Double Vision

Holly Willis
As he stands in the back of a movie theater behind his Nervous System, an unwieldy contraption made out of two single-frame projectors, avant-garde-film icon Ken Jacobs looks a little bit like the Wizard of Oz. He fiddles with the knobs on his projectors, caught in a trancelike state of......

From Saigon to Silicon Valley

Holly Willis
Photo by Anne FishbeinIN RECENT YEARS, THE VIETNAM THAT INHABITS the popular American imagination has morphed from the war-torn backdrop for the martyrdom of veterans like Born on the Fourth of July's Ron Kovic and the heroic antics of fighting machines like Rambo, to the luxuriously exotic destinations of films......