The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences has, since 1972, recognized student filmmakers with their very own Award. For a young film student, this is literally their Oscars. Unsurprisingly, many have gone on to the biggest stage of them all, amassing 43 Oscar nominations, directing two films that received the Academy Award for Foreign Language Film, received a Special Achievement Oscar, and won or shared eight Academy Awards.
This year’s winner for the “alternative” film category is Israeli director Tal Shamir, a student at New York’s “The New School.” His work, “The Vermeers” focused on the work of famous Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, taking his work and transforming it into a 21st century, state of the art movie trailer. We sat down with Mr. Shamir to ask him where he came up with the idea, and you can see the trailer below.
QUESTION: What is your background when it comes to the arts? Did you approach this project from an art history background? And do you mean when you talk about the “iphone generation?”
TAL SHAMIR: My experience mainly lies in film and Media production (directing, shooting and editing). My background in Art history is humble, but I was lucky enough to collaborate with Ruth B. Shamir, (the Art director and producer for the film), who has a PhD in Art History.
Our approach was to try and allow a different and a new engagement with Vermeer’s paintings. Our main goal was to be loyal to the source, but true to the technological evolution. We tried to let the viewers experience Vermeer’s paintings through the perspective of the digital media influenced generation (or the iPhone generation). By this we mean the desire for fast-moving visuals, multiplicity of screens, the need for large amount of information in a short amount of time and so on. This was the main reason we chose to make the film in the format of the film-trailer, which is one of the most watched and popular media formats today and represents these properties.
Q: Why Johannes Vermeer?
SHAMIR: We chose Jan Vermeer mainly because we really adore and love his paintings.
Furthermore, Vermeer’s paintings and in particular his treatment of light is extraordinary and has a huge influence on the history photography and cinema. Although he painted more then 200 years before the invention of cinema he is very cinematic. There are many fantastic film references that we love and helped us prepare for the film, such as the Girl with the Pearl Earring (Peter Webber, 2003), All the Vermeers in New York (Jon Jost, 1990) and many of Peter Greenaway’s films and installations. All of these naturally led us to choose Jan Vermeer, and although it was a conceptual and artistic challenge, production wise we believed that we could do it.
The film is also part of a larger digital project on Jan Vermeer that we are working on. We are now finalizing the installation part of this larger project. The goal of the (three video screens) installation is to take Jan Vermeer’s paintings through a digital evolution process, (which is inspired by a biological evolution process). We are looking forward to see what kind of digital entity emerges from this attempt.
Watch his acceptance speech here, and check out the trailer for the film below:
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