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Truly Free Film

Hope For The Future pt. 2: Building The List

We started the list here (click to link).  Now we continue onwards.  We will only get to 52 with your help.  What else gives you reasons to be hopeful for film culture?

5. Giving it away for free is good business.  Anderson’s essay is required reading.  Look at Google who gives away 90% (est.) of what they create (the search engine) and drives a good advertising business in the process.  For years The Greatful Dead were one of the top grossing concert acts, driven in a good part by their willingness to allow their fans to “bootleg” their concerts and “distribute” them themselves.  The question is what do you give away and what do you use to produce revenue.

6. Film Festivals are evolving.  Local film fests have already identified the core film lovers in every region.  For decades these festivals have been content to live in a single period each year, overloading their audiences with too many choices come festival time.  Now festivals are giving theatrical bookings as awards (help us build a list of these).  Some are moving to a seasonal subscription model.  Some are even paying significant screening fees.  And then there are the cash awards (those are still around somewhere, aren’t they?).

7. Internet Streaming is being used by filmmakers to build A WORLD of Word Of Mouth.  Slamdance has announced that they will stream films right after the festival.  For years we have know that word of mouth is the primary way that a specialized film succeeds.  But it is costly, but now that has changed.

8. 2008 is the strongest year for under $1M EVER.  I have seen almost 20 films this year by filmmakers who clearly will develop a great body of work.  Only a few were at Sundance. They keep on coming.  They may still be hard to find, but the films are out there and at a quality and quantity  as never before.  Check out Hammer To Nail’s list of top 13 films of the year and get watching.

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Truly Free Film

Chesanek’s Counterpoint (Part 3 of 6)

Personally, I was initially resistant to social networking for a couple reasons. One was that it feels like a celebrity culture or popularity contest. I can see that my friends have hundreds and hundreds more Facebook friends than I do. So I see their friends count and think, wow, they should make a movie instead, since they have more people who’d go see it. Only it’s usually superficial friendship, just as popularity and celebrity appeal is. So then I think, is this person I’m asking to be friends with really my friend, do I really want to catch up with them after ten years out of high school, or am I only requesting their friend status because I know that once my film comes out I can put a message on their Facebook wall? If I want to be honest with myself, then how do I come to terms with having to strive for superficial popularity, something I jettisoned in high school as I was, well, coming to terms with not wanting it and forming my artistic temperament? Is this still a world where the most popular people are offered the widest financial rewards and/or avenues of self-expression, just like Hollywood, television, and high school? Is art film no longer a venue for the introverted artist seeking personal expression in a way that maybe socially he or she could never achieve? Isn’t that the core of art and artistic language? Aren’t a large amount of artists poor with social skills–choosing to express themselves other ways–probably for a reason that manifests itself in their work? Do we not care to hear their voices? Of course we do, but if this audience building is truly as it is shaping up to be, how do these artists with less than impeccable social skills compete?

As a viewer I’m not a populist. I seek out artists and works with dexterous intent, control over form, style, and content that shows the artist knows his or her stuff as well as has a distinct individual voice. How do we preserve and embrace our individuality if all we’re doing is becoming advertisers who seek popularity? If auteur-driven films is one’s passion, audience participation in their creation is a tough sell at any meaningful level. I’ll see Lance Hammer film or a Bresson or a JP Melville film, but not a crowd-sourced film because of what it will lack: a singular honest soul.

I guess the point here is, how do we clearly, firmly, and concisely establish that the net should not be determining the content nor the artist’s temperament, that films like Ballast will always have a market, that artists are always needed and appreciated for their individuality? The fear and resistance comes when feature length art-house filmmakers start hearing their content must be dictated by a market and then their film is only valid if they’re famous in some way.

-Brent Chesanek
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Truly Free Film

More On How It Feels From The Front

Brent Chesanek continues his reflections on the NYC DIY Days Dinner:

I see Stephen Rafael’s point when he said “Make a good film.” I think you do too while you acknowledged the trouble with that statement. I also agree with what you said about the The Pool. But I think everyone at that table has the resources and could contact Chris Smith directly, or invite him and the handful of other directors of the movies you loved this year to a private roundtable. But why did you shoot this and put the video on the web for everyone to see it? (I know why, but hypothetically.) The people who are accessing this video are just as likely to be making bad films. I feel like, if someone makes a worthwhile film and has the necessary industry awareness, they can get it to you or Raphael or Jay van Hoy and Lars or someone else who can help them formulate their distribution models and make connections.

I know the distro process must be democratized, and I know that in the scenario above, you and the other guys listed are also gatekeepers who would essentially dictate a filmmaker’s ability to reach an audience, but does this make sense? If all 4950 films that didn’t get into Sundance or any other festival or aren’t distributed were as good as The Pool, then everyone would just be watching this DIY Dinner video to find out what to do next and there’d still be a glut in the market. But most of them should be focusing on where they’ve taken missteps earlier on.

This discussion was feeling a bit like: find an audience, then make a film to profit off them by giving them what they say they want, regardless of whether or not you’re making a film that has any merit or personal distinction. So many of the bad films that actually do get distributed are rehashes and remakes, unoriginal but based on successful formulas (essentially, they’re crowd-tested). Here, I know the discussion is about distribution, but so much of it just leads right into: Here’s how to harness an audience to make money off of regardless of the quality of your film. And I think what Rafael may have been thinking was that this discussion was often putting the cart before the horse–more geared as a way to get exposure to the glut of films that aren’t distributed regardless of quality, because that is still the problem–most films are indeed not worthy. But the ones that are worthy are having trouble. This needs to be stressed more and more until it becomes a given. I think there is common ground between your point and Rafael’s point: First make the good films. You picked up on that later in the video talking about the lesbian film. (I originally thought you were talking about Working Girls, but that was about prostitutes).

All Facebook pages look the same. After 3 years, so many films will be Twittering it will be total overload and audiences on Twitter and Facebook will not see a difference in these methods, they won’t pay attention to what’s being said in any of them, and the mechanisms themselves won’t be any newer or more special than television commercials or trailers, and certainly no more effective (Twitter is less invasive–a short text message–so it requires an active audience to respond to it. But how can one in fifty of them from different films be effective when the content drives the audience to the film? At least a trailer offers a glimpse of the actual film that can hook a passive audience member). So we will have an over-crowded marketplace of bad films that are Twittering and crowd-sourcing and all this stuff, and again, like Lance Hammer asks Arin, “How do you cut through the noise?”

So much of the talk about social networking and going viral and doing all this stuff ignores the notion that you have to really really really kill yourself making a distinct film first. The glut of films out there is a problem first of quality in development and production, not distribution. Quality, not execution of the methods. That’s what’s scary. You mentioned on some blog somewhere that despite digital video and computer-based editing, there is still the same number of new voices emerging as there was 20 years ago. Will a glut of new distribution models really bring about new voices? [I think you know the answer is more about salvaging the new voices, preserving and exposing them to audiences via new methods, but this point mustn’t be under-stressed.] We need to focus on nurturing the voices.

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Truly Free Film

How Does All Of This Make YOU Feel?

Before The Economic Collapse, Before The Obama Change, And Before The Sky Is Falling, I was just thinking, looking, and wondering, how come it wasn’t different?  

How come when all the tools were available, when the means had become so inexpensive, when the information had been demystified, and the hordes had been well trained, how come their was no true alternative to the mainstream film culture?  Granted, a lot has changed since then and we have real reasons to hope, and reasons for concerned.  But what else is new?

This blog is only a few months old now.  I started it to focus on the tools, methods, and apparatus needed to bring about a Truly Free Film culture.  I have been neglecting the blog Let’s Make Better Films that I started at the same time to focus specifically on the content of those films — yet I hope to pay more attention to that in the months to come.  I also have promised Michael Tully, the editor over at Hammer To Nail to deliver my list of qualities of ambitious film for that site, which will delve into a similar area.  All of it will reflect on what I encouraged in the slowing down when I gave the “Thousand Phoenix Rising” speech at Film Independent.  Quality rises when we focus deeper and slow it down, although it is certainly not the only way to increase quality.  As the Hammer To Nail Awards list indicates this has been the strongest year in history for under $1M budgeted film in this country.  Quality is rising  and provided audiences can access this, the culture and it’s apparatus should improve too.
I get very inspired by all the new methods filmmakers are utilizing to access audiences and strengthen their relationships with the audiences.  But I know it can be daunting.  I know it feels  like a whole new slew of things we have to learn.  I also know it can be liberating.  But I also have been wondering how it makes filmmakers who are just starting out on the journey feel.  Luckily some people let me know.
Several years back I was surfing the web and came across the John Vanderslice video for “Exodus Damage” .   I was impressed and sourced out the director Brent Chesanek.  I found more of his work on the web and contacted him.  I suspected he lived elsewhere; little did I know he lived just across the river.  We met and I was equally impressed with him as I was with his work.  I look forward to his first feature ” Tall Slender Trees” — of course he needs to raise money for it first.  Maybe you can help?

Anyway, after watching the DIY NYC Dinner, Brent wrote me with his thoughts.  I will be posting them over the next several days as I think it adds another layer to the dialogue.
Brent writes:

I consider myself an art-house filmmaker and filmgoer. I am not so much interested in the farm league of independent film, as you astutely put it, nor am I interested in the new media methods of storytelling. I don’t even consider myself a storyteller. I see it more specifically and will try to be clear: art-house narrative feature filmmaker–there is a story involved, but with images and sounds overriding plot or character even, seeking the advancement of the film language through means exclusive to the the cinema. I will try not to separate myself as a viewer from as a filmmaker when I write this–I will try to keep my interests aligned and speak of my opinions as such, as they cannot be mutually exclusive in the pursuit of personal expression. Thus I assume there are other viewers and filmmakers with ideas on the same wavelength about what a film can be. (I know Lance Hammer is one filmmaker).

From my self-described perspective, I can think of two or three themes of the discussions as a whole these days, which arose in this dinner as well, that I think are off-putting to some art-house/auteur oriented filmmakers and thus maybe inhibiting growth and development in this area:

– 1 –

When it becomes implied that new media dictates the content, I feel art-house filmmakers feel repressed or excluded–just as they would in a studio or other non-independent world. If we’re not careful, these discussions can lead to a message that something rather than the artist’s vision should be dictating the form, story and style of a film. Some of these discussions then become advocates of an anti-auteur film culture–suddenly we’re supposed to contradict the intentions of our career, or single film, or carefully nourished ideas on how a story can be told, or what stories are told. Contradictions which are essentially the nemesis of the independent filmmaker.

Stephen Raphael is right–there is a still a market for feature films as they are if they are as good as Ballast, and as long as discussions veer off into talks of how a film has to become an everlasting exposè into is myriad characters’ lives, providing alternate and unlimited content and so on, filmmakers and people like myself and Raphael will feel outcast and resistant. The beauty of Ballast and the films I cherish is their restraint. It goes back to something Bresson said: it’s what we don’t learn of characters that often makes them intriguing. To cast aside these ideas of restraint may be seen as nullifying film culture, language, and style of the past 100 years. The film many of us love and cherish IS in fact that passive thing that seems to be getting a bad rap the way the term elite has. Passive is not a negative term by default, and just as many people do not play fantasy football yet watch the game.

I’ve spent my adult life working to be a feature length narrative filmmaker with these ideals, and to hear that artistic path is no longer viable doesn’t automatically transform my ambition into being a webisode maker or a professional crowdsourcer who creates something in whatever media is new solely to feed an audience. Those things aren’t interesting to me personally, and if it’s a question of adapt or die, well, if what I love doing has to go away then what’s the point in adapting? If I transform into the storyteller using whatever media and marketing is the next big thing, then I’m doing something I don’t enjoy, and no audience will enjoy it either. We have to nurture and respect an artist’s choices and passions.

Musical content didn’t change because of the internet. Before and after there was a market for albums-pop, classical, jazz, hip hop, world, ambient, etc. Singles were always most popular, but all the internet did was ease access to one’s taste. The internet makes it easier to find the single and preview it, but I think the majority of people who recognize the artistic merit of an album will then gravitate towards experiencing that work as a whole. Those who did not care for albums and just wanted Top 40 have it better. Radiohead fans don’t care about owning just the single, they want the album, and the internet didn’t change that, nor did the internet nullify the album as an artistic expression. That market is still there. That part of the music/film analogy fits with films nicely. Too much talk focuses on altering one’s content when it should focus on distro.

There is still a market for feature films in their entirety between theatrical and ancillary outlets. I am only 28 and know plenty others and know there are teenagers who, like me, enjoy uncut feature length art films, so the market is not disappearing anytime soon. Too much of this talk assumes that. Too much talk is of the vanishing market and the falling sky in content. The market is vanishing because most films are over-budgeted, thus the market to recoup these funds is vanishing. I don’t think it’s because no one wants to watch films in their entirety. The emergence of television must have created similar discussions–the assumption that all must now make and aspire to television instead of how can film embrace its differences from television. The art film audience often enjoys these films because they can run counter to the lifestyle of absorbing six IMs and 50 emails (as mentioned at the dinner) and real-time stocks and daily breaking news events on CNN, (as Christopher Buckley recently mentioned)–endless filler and distractions disguised as content. An acute audience, often those arthouse films are seeking, are likely people who are aware of the rapid lifestyle and seeking a world of alternate leisure to counteract it. Art-house films have always been counter-programming to something, and the more they stay focused on that characteristic the better the films will be, and then the stronger the audiences will be.

The point should be made right away and strictly adhered to that the content and the art-house film will always have a market and all this discussion is done so in a way to validate these films rather than dictating their form or content. It’s taking too long to get there and there is too much dwelling on the alternate storytelling methods.

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Truly Free Film

Hope For The Future: Starting The List

What can I say?  I love lists.  I maintain many: My favorite things; Directors I want to work with; 100 Ways To Make A Million.  I am sure you’ve got own.

One of things on my List Of Why I Love Lists is that it is so easy to forget, and with forgetting can come despair, that is until we re-cognize what we already knew.  Lists lift us out of this swamp.  I don’t despair. I HOPE.
If this was the year that everyone believed the sky fell (and it did in terms of the unregulated greed based economic system our world has embraced for far too long), it will hopefully be recognized as the moment when we really entered the Free Culture Era.  But the hard things, the bad things, still attract our attention.  We will remember that 2008 is the year no one could sell their film.  We will remember that 2008 is the year that labor strife and cooperate greed conspired for a work shutdown.  I will certainly remember that it is the year that I did not have a film in production for the first time in 20 years.
But that is not the memory I want to have.  I want to remember 2008 as the year that everything started to change for the better.  We need to look and recognize all the positive signs for change that are out there.  
Let’s build the list of the reasons TFFilmmakers have HOPE FOR THE FUTURE.  Let’s make the list at least 52 entries long so we can get through this next year.  
Share with me some of your ideas.  Here’s my start (by no means in the order of importance):
  1. It is so easy to blog that everyone could have their own page in a matter of minutes.  I thought about having a blog for several months before I made the leap and then I was up and on it a matter of minutes.
  2. The more people are exposed to quality films (and culture in general) the more their tastes gravitate towards quality films.  I would love to see an actual study on this, but I was told it by one of the Netflix honchos in that their members gravitate to the “auteurs” the longer they’ve been a member.
  3. Committed Leaders To A Open Source Film Culture have emerged.  I have been incredibly inspired by all the work that those I have labeled as Truly Free Film Heroes have done.  Even more so I am moved by their incredible generosity in their sharing of all they have learned.
  4. The Tools To Take Personal Control are available, numerous, and fun.  There are more than I can list (but the TFF Tools List is a pretty good start).
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Truly Free Film

NYC DIY Dinner Conversation Concludes: Part 2

The wine flows, and the blab goes on.  See and hear and embed it here.

Or watch it right here right now right below.

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Truly Free Film

NYC DIY Dinner Conversation Continues: Part 1

How will the “indie” model change?  Why is it inevitable? Hear the scoop here.  You can see it there too.  Will the truth be told before too much wine is consumed?  You be the judge.

Will Christine’s prediction be true?  I think I let the others get a word in edgewise.  Granted some of my rant is recycled from some other events, but the others are pretty fresh I think.