I think one serious point that Walsh misses is the commercial control and reality of the filmmaking process itself.
I'm a filmmaker and we recently finished a feature for under $100K. This was completely self-funded by the writer/director from his savings. We had no name actors and it was a family type drama.
Basically, unless we receive excellent critical reviews from prominent critics (think spending tons of money on a creative marketing campaign in the process) we can forget about ever obtaining theatrical. Hell, we'd even take scores of bad reviews!
An option is to four wall a theater (pay big money $5,000 -10,000 or more to show it for a week in NY or LA or another market) but this means nothing unless you spend even more time and money marketing within the city.
Also, due to a lack of government funding for the arts in the US, private investors seem to be the go-to people and they usually prefer to have a shot at making some of their money back. If of course they are not into film because they want to go to parties, have a place to hide their money and/or hook up with beautiful people. Typical investors: lawyers, doctors, real estate moguls, privately wealthy entreprenuers, hedge fund managers...You get the point...
So, filmmakers - under duress think of subject matter that will curry to this expectation (horror, comedy, thrillers/neo-noir) seem to be popular, overworked genres for a multitide of reasons - usually derivative and highly stylized for hipster consumption with cool indie music.
No wonder so many who want to do serious work nowadays focus on documentaries or even animation.
In the case of mumblecore - even if these films are apolitical and navel gazing - the fact that they are made outside the rules of the system, break the traditional narrative commodity straightjacket and distributed on their own terms is radical enough for me. There is nothing really sellable - no hook - about these types of movies which make them quite authentic to many high profile critics.
Ironically, for studios many of the future filmmakers directing Kate Winslet or Brad Pitt come from the "supposed art house cinema scene". and mostly coming from abroad. These directors who once offered so much promise are rewarded with a Faustian deal to direct the next big budget Super Hero movie or routine romantic comedy. How else will they keep on working?
Think of film school as a place to get trained on the technical matters of filmmaking. They are under increasing pressure to insure that grads obtain actual jobs in the industry so film theory and criticism usually diminishes in importance.
Think of the indy film world as an expensive and grueling graduate school or unpaid intership for potential future employment. Now imagine all of the competition!
Our film was nominated for Best Picture (against films with stars and bigger budgets) at a known regional festival but we quickly realized that there were no industry people present to "pick up" our movie for distribution nor to meet with us back in LA about potentially representing us for future work.
Actually, there were barely any industry people or known film critics present at all! If you want access to the people that make it happen, you must find a way to become accepted into the top tiered festivals (Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, etc) and then you must go up against films which have famous stars, political connections to festival programmers, publicists or maybe the festival has an agenda in terms of the types of films it selects to enhance the reputation of the festival or city itself. And many of those films which do have these attributes continue to have problems attracting a deal! Oh, and the costs to enter the festivals are very high.
And due to the risk averse nature of Hollywood productions as nothing more than massive advertisements for technological advancements an abundance of famous writers, directors, producers and actors are falling into independent film and TV for higher quality material. So this cuts into the pie for serious and struggling independent film artists - who are usually the people with nothing to lose and will attack the rotting edifice.
Nowadays - artists either willfully choose or are compelled out of necessity to self distribute their own work in order to get noticed. The idea is to build up a fan base by creating an event out of the film premiere or to chop up the rights and attempt to sell it off bit by bit (foreign TV, VOD, DVD, etc). Gone are the days when studios and/or their now defunct indie spectialty divisions can offer minimum guarantees and decent promotion and advertising to get a career kickstarted. Gone are the days when an unknown director has a chance to presell their film idea and rights to foreign distributors and attact a bank loan based on the interest of name actors alone. All of this can also be empowering, but if you know you're going to spend 3-5 years making and promoting a project, you want to make sure that it is something that you believe in, but also something that has a chance of becoming noticed.
This is a long arduous process of self-promotion that never stops. Many filmmakers want to keep making films and hope that the sacrifice taken up front will mean someone substantial down the line. In this care - hoping that someone from within the industry will notice (a known producer, financier, actor, agent) and want to continue working with them to fund their next project which will usually for various obvious factors be less risky venture. Imagine a business plan which attempts to sell to an investor the potential financial gains from making a film against capitalism!
So, the pressure is on to make something more commercial - meaning something that will sell - not something that is critical of the establishment the way David Walsh suggests. These are some of the internal dynamics at play that are influencing the content problem.
In Solidarity,
Paul
> From: cgrimes at rawbw.com
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:20:58 -0700
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] the Kultur Krisis
>
> These are unprecedented events. They haven't gone entirely unnoticed
> or uncritiqued, but, one must say, in relation to the depth of the
> transformations, the artistic response has been entirely inadequate,
> statistically almost insignificant.
>
> In our view, the artists have proven ill-equipped, unprepared
> intellectually for the developments....
>
> If one compares them, as a body, with Apocalypse Now, or even Platoon,
> for all its histrionics—the latter were movies that attempted to make a
> broad statement about American involvement in Vietnam, to paint it as a
> crime, as an imperialist crime....
>
> --------
>
> Notice the dates for Apocalypse and Platoon, 1979 and 1986. AN was set
> in approximately the 67-9 era of the war. Platoon was during the search
> and destroy phase, which I can't remember when (66-7). There was also
> Full Metal Jacket (Hue 68), which came out in 1987 and the more recent
> The Quiet American 2002 which was the pre-amble during the 50s. The
> point is that all these movies came out ten years or more after the
> events depicted.
>
> I personally feel much worse about the list of recent events rattled
> off, from the absurd impeachment up to Obama's extension of everything
> Bush set in place. These are certainly worse than anything going on in
> the Vietnam era or its brief aftermath in Watergate.
>
> We've been through some fifteen years of high speed historical
> transformation and we are not going back. With the exception of the
> pre-war demonstrations in February 2003(?) which had good turn outs in
> SF, there has been no resistance to subsequent events.
>
> There's been plenty of writing about what has happened, but little `art'
> about it. So the question is why? That's tough to answer, although I
> understand something of the reasons. The events have been abstractions,
> distant from everyday life which superficially remains the same quiet,
> disparate and alienated grind from these larger flows of history. And
> then too, the political system has virtually shut off channels to any
> meaningful response.
>
> The visual arts need concrete images to work with, and except for
> propagandistic news video, there are no concrete images. For example,
> during the Vietnam era the bay area was a transit point, some local
> industries were booming, sailors and soldiers were commonly seen in bus
> stations and airports, the area was home to giant military bases which
> were the launch for major navy and army operations. All of that is gone,
> plus of course the draft.
>
> When I started in on anti-war paintings in grad school, I faced a
> strange problem, because most of my image bank, running in my head was
> from WWII history, photographs, and films. There was no WWII painting
> directly related to the war, except the photographic documentary of
> death camps and bombed to ruin cities. That iconography had nothing to
> do with Vietnam. So I had to invent and much of the invention was not
> very successful in terms of painting. Part of the trouble was that wars
> cry out for the documentary, and not the symbolic laden imagery that
> most painting indulges. On the other hand whole push in reality outside
> the medium is toward a hard realism, stark, barren of most recognizable
> emotive registers.
>
> Well, with the photograph we have an instant cultural record, but it
> takes time to build up a cultural system of symbolic forms that can
> reach far beyond the simple record of an event. For instance, consider
> Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus was an example of such a system of symbolic
> form that attempted to get at the heart of what happened to German
> culture that lead to the vast destruction of Germany and much of Europe.
> The currents and themes of the Faust legend run deep into the
> intellectual history of modernity, and it was those currents that Mann
> wove together to make the novel a vast allegory of the interwar and WWII
> period.
>
> For the visual arts, the best example of how to construct these symbols,
> allegories, and metaphors, is found in Goya's painting and prints, the
> May paintings, the Disasters of War, the social commentary of the
> Caprices and Proverbs and certainly the prisoner series. Because of the
> heavy Moorish influence in Spain, the over all look of Goya's people and
> places have a startling similarity to people and places in Iraq and
> Afghanistan, minus the cars, planes and cell phones. So I would be
> tempted to start with this not entirely fortuitous similitude.
>
> You could even make a pretty standard mainstream movie of the historical
> events that Goya depicts. If written and directed right, the story could
> be designed to read by an attentive audience as an allegory of the US in
> the lands of Islam---while pretending to be a well crafted historical
> drama. The public image of the French might go down a few notches among
> the wine and cheese crowd...
>
> CG
>
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