anne thompson's one of the few real reporters on the film business, indie and otherwise. she says the festival sale paradigm is utterly over - but some comments are less despairing (see below)
from ed halter
http://www.artforum.com/film/id=23763
(ed being one of the few people who uses the word 'multi-channel' correctly :)
including the sideline - art/experimental film wrap up - and he - adn the festival, apparently - make this distinction between the 'art/installation' work, which he foudn weak, and the more traditional abstract 'experimental ' still-shooting-on-film work, as in the kind of thing i saw last night -
"Easy to miss beneath these several layers of hubbub is the fact that TIFF—unlike Cannes—also sustains a less flashy but undeniably healthy subculture devoted to experimental cinema. It’s six-show Wavelengths sidebar feels like its own festival-within-a-festival, consistently packing the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall with disciples of formally rigorous fare: Wavelengths-goers this year included programmers from simpatico events—like Toronto’s Images Festival; Windsor, Ontario’s Media City; and Sundance’s own experimental New Frontier section—and curators from MoMA and the Pacific Film Archive, in addition to numerous like-minded filmmakers. Though multi-format, 16 mm is the series’ ruling gauge, with most entries functioning well within the neo-structural-materialist aesthetic that seems to currently define so much of the celluloid-centric avant-garde: In addition to new work by heavyweights like Harun Farocki and Jean-Marie Straub, lesser-known standouts included Karl Kels’s 35-mm rhinoceros strobe Käfig (Cage, 2009); Coleen Fitzgibbon’s restored optical-printing palindrome FM/TRCS (1974); and Klaus Lutz’s Titan (2008), a marvelously designed silent triple-superimposition seemingly time-warped from the age of Tzara and Huelsenbeck. (Sadly Titan’s maker, a New York–based Swiss expat artist, died only days before the film’s premiere.)
Less cohesive was TIFF’s Future Projections slate, an uneven selection, scattered throughout the city, of moving-image work from the art world. Though there were some successes—notably Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s mysteriously quasi-allegorical Phantoms of Nabua, keenly black-boxed at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Candice Breitz’s artist talk previewing her new multi-channel work Factum, which premiered at her solo exhibition at the Power Plant later in the week—elsewhere, there were oversights in execution. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s video from his installation Picture Start, an already-dubious best-of reel from his work with Wong Kar-wai and others, looped in a curtained corner of INDEXG gallery off of a defective DVD, its image streaked with horizontal distortions. To draw attention to Bell Lightbox, planned as future TIFF hub, artists’ videos were screened nightly on the construction site with weak and ill-placed projectors that rendered the minute details of Marco Brambilla’s intricate Civilization, for instance, all but impossible to discern."
from anne thompson comments:"the paradigm needs an overhaul. how can you make non-commercial films for tens of millions (sometimes pushing 100 million) and expect to turn a profit?
have not seen it but would point out ‘creation’. here is what is certainly a beautifully made movie that couldn’t draw an audience if you gave the popcorn away free. it probably costs several millions (at the very least) and may never play. how can anyone have thought a movie about darwin and his wife would fill seats?
grab a digi-cam and some actors and make your movie for pocket change. if you can get some investors, great. otherwise, start with a good script, work for nothing, turn in a good movie that’s really truly scary, funny, moving, whatever it is you’re going for (as long as it’s commercial), and pull in an audience, with, hopefully, a modest profit in the end. repeat as necessary.
posted by Alan Green on September 20, 2009 at 8:44am PDT
and this is also true:
The problem is that none of these movies are actually “independent films.” Yes, they might have been funded independently, but they were created with sufficient budgets with the intent that a major corporation would distribute. Well, what exactly does that mean? It means that these are small-scale studio pictures that the studios didn’t have to take a funding risk on, that’s all.
Independent film got bloated. The budgets went too big. The movies became too commercial.
Instead of independent film being the incubator of new hungry talent and independent voices, it became a place for established talent to make smaller films that get them awards and “street cred.” In other words: it stopped working because it got its priorities mixed up.
posted by Edward Wilson on September 20, 2009 at 12:09pm PDT"
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