You know how when you are too close to something you can’t even see it? Sometimes I find myself in a movie and I miss the true glory of a particular scene. Taken out of context, some work shines even brighter.
I love this scene.
To me it is “Desire”. I watch it and I hear Bob Dylan’s album and the whole Rolling Thunder tour (or at least the recordings of it that I have heard). I love the longing, the inexplicability, the recognition, the silliness and the passion. And the song is great too.
Sometimes it serves us to let our dark paranoia run rampant. I have always had a love affair with conspiracy theories, but it is one of longing more than indulgence. If only governments and people in general cared enough about other people to actually strategize to the extent needed to control things to the level most conspiracy theories fantasize. But maybe instead of politics and community being the focus, the conspiracies exist in the pursuit of profit. Sometimes looking at the result of business structures as their intent instead of their coincidental effect sheds further light on a complicated situation.
We all know that there is a substantial flaw to our film infrastructure: artists and their supporters are not rewarded for the work they generate. I speak of this as a problem. If the industry actually tried to make sure that the people who made the work benefited from the work, we’d have more money in the system, and it would probably be smarter money (that knew enough to let the filmmakers have creative control — or at least more of it) at that. But all evidence points to the fact that the film industry wants to prevent creators from financially benefiting from their work. We can change that (and I am going to try), but that’s for another post about why I have chosen to work for a not-for-profit.
Let’s let our dark side work for us for a moment: if the model is not broken, but actually works, what is it trying to do? Why would the film business not want creators to benefit? Is it to give more people the opportunity to become filmmakers and investors since the current system virtually drives out all the experienced filmmakers and investors? Ah, alas, much evidence exists to show that access and opportunity is not of interest to film business leaders (like the disproportional representation of white males — such as myself). So what could it be?
What happens to those that survive in the film business? If filmmakers can’t survive by making feature films, how do they survive? There’s been one business strand that long has been there with a helping hand to the creative class and it seems like even our greats have long had to indulge in their offerings. Is the whole of film culture designed to create cinematic masters who then must be slaves to Madison Avenue and their international equivalents?
Fellini:
Evidently these bank commercials were the last films Fellini ever made, and they aired after he died.
I don’t think commercials kill directors, but I do think
The SF Film Society Event for the French Film Festival of San Francisco from LaFrenchTV on Vimeo.
My enthusiasm cup runeth over.
Contests can be serious drivers.
Picture a world where the only movies are either: 1) Large Multi-National Media Corporations’ Costume-clad Franchise Tentpoles; 2) Government Supported & Ordained Nationalist Culture Initiatives; 3) Micro0budget Amateur Hobbies. Sucks, right? No diverse talents reaching higher and further to help us recognize the full expansiveness of humankind (with the necessary budgets to support them). Well, that world is the one we currently reside in. Now picture where we may be ten years from now. Truly sucks, right?
How do we prevent that?
Imagine a world without the work of Agnes Varda, Ang Lee, Catherine Breillat, Christopher Nolan, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Gus Van Sant, Kathryn Bigelow, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodovar, Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Takashi Miike, The Coen Brothers, Werner Herzog, Wes Anderson, and Wong Kar-Wai.
By Roger Jackson
Previously: Ranking System for Indie Films?
Twice as Fast
We’ve made big strides at KinoNation over the past week. Klaus has been pulling late nights building the cloud-based Transcoding Engine. This automatically encodes films to the specs for each of dozens of VoD platforms. It’s complex work that’s normally done manually at encoding houses — and costs several hundred dollars per film. It’s a non-trivial challenge, so I was pretty psyched to see it working — and to see how fantastic the encoded films look! Not wanting to get too techy, but this means the huge ProRes files being uploaded by filmmakers are auto-checked on completion, queued and then transcoded into the Preview version that VoD platforms can watch and review.
