Category: Truly Free Film

We are on the verge of a new film culture and infrastructure.

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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

Outsourcing The Process

One of the questions that comes up a lot is “How am I going to manage and afford all the additional marketing outreach that is required to be a Truly Free Filmmaker?”.  I don’t have a good answer for that beyond teamwork.  I have always wondered why so many film school grads want to jump right in and make a first feature.  Why not make mistakes on someone else’s movie?  Why not learn by watching others make a lot of mistakes?  Isn’t that part of what teamwork is?

Seriously though, how can you get it all done? That is the question.  There was that article and podcast I heard about the guy who outsourced his life completely.  It made for a good story, but it has haunted me in a good way too.  I still have not heard any stories of filmmakers trying some of these techniques.  That would make for some good stories too.
Sunday’s Maureen Dowd Op-Ed piece in the NY Times “A Penny For My Thoughts” brought it all back home.  She covers the outsourcing of local reporting; it’s funny and horrifying and the same time.  But maybe it is also an answer to some of the problems we are having.  
I raise this while at the same time I take some pride in the fact that they I have never taken a production out of the country to save money.  I have always found that you can make a film just as cheaply stateside where the filmmaking team is more invested in the success of the film — and believing that communal spirit begets a better movie.  Which isn’t to say that the right film couldn’t achieve the same thing overseas.  But production and outreach are not the same thing.  It would be an interesting experiment to see what could be achieved.
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Truly Free Film

"I am committed to destroying the myth of the starving artist"

In reading the recent NYTimes article “Shifting Careers – Making Artistic Careers Lucrative”, it feels like a revolution is taking place in the art school curriculum — a transformation akin to what will transform the Independent Film Community into a Truly Free Film Culture.

I have wanted to start an ongoing column “If I Ran A Film School…”.  I had been thinking I would post it over at LetsMakeBetterFilms since a lot of my concerns are on an aesthetic level, but truth be told you can never separate the art from the commerce when it comes to filmmaking.  And further, and more to the point, I just haven’t found the time.
That said, where is the film school that is going to start to provide courses designed to enable this step to Truly Free Film?  Any film school that doesn’t have mandatory classes on DIY marketing, entrepreneurialship, cross platform cohesion, and basic Web 2.0 skills is just not preparing their students for the real world.  In fact, if you ask me the whole general film school curriculum needs a drastic overhaul.
I love the sound of what Larry Thompson (that’s his quote titling this post) is doing at Ringling College of Art and Design.  I would love to see what that class structure looks like.  To start with, it sounds like the film schools should try to adapt it for their students.  It’s also great that they are in Sarasota; I got to visit the film festival there last year and was very impressed with the programing and community support.  With forward thinking institutions like this in place, you have to imagine that a vibrant film culture could grow there.  But I digress…
Regardless of the film schools though, stories like this, of Claudine Helmuth, are an inspiration and we should look at them for clues for not only survival but transcendence from having to create for the current mainstream outlets and demands.
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Truly Free Film

Tips From The Gotham Breakthrough Directors

Scott Macauley of Fimmaker Mag Blog moderated a discussion between the The Gotham Awards Breakthrough Director nominees. They are a great group of directors and a great group of films. Many of them also made the Hammer To Nail list too. They all had different approaches to their filmmaking. 

We don’t usually focus at all on production related issues here at TFF as our efforts are towards finding a new way to get films to audiences (and how that in turn will shape the film you make). I have been preparing a post on all you need to do when and, well, it is surprising how much of it needs to be done even before pre-production and continued into the production and post process. 
I wasn’t at the panel so I can’t vouch why the same concerns did not appear to reach these filmmakers – maybe they did and you needed to be there. I wish the IFP put video of these events online.  Nonetheless I like the takeaway synthesis Scott put together. It clarifies that really is no common template.  Read about it here (click to link).
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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

Art House Theaters Unite!

In order for a Truly Free Film Culture to take hold, independent theaters have to organize and work together.  Well, guess what?  Good news!  It’s already happening.  

Imagine if a whole bunch of great theaters got together and decided they would accept bookings from independent and TFFilmakers.  Sounds logical, right?  But ask a DIY filmmaker turned distributor if they were able to get bookings beyond NYC’s Film Forum, The Laemmle Sunset, and The Walker & Wexner centers, and I will know that the filmmaker hustled and hustled some more for each and every one of those bookings — virtually to the point of collapse.  The sad truth is that currently to get bookings for legitimate theaters, most filmmakers have to hire an established booker to ink the deal — and man, that ain’t cheap.
But now it looks like that stranglehold may finally be broken.  And guess who’s shattering these chains?  Sundance!  Freedom is looming.  Three cheers for Sundance!  Truly:  hip, hip and hooray!  A convergence of art house theatres from across the nation is to be held January 13-15, 2009 in Salt Lake City, Utah.  And from the sounds of it, Indie/TFF/Arthouse exhibition is going to take a great leap forward.
The Sundance Institute Art House Project is a partnership with art house cinemas nationwide to build audiences and develop a supportive community of theatre owners committed to independent film. Wow. Not that we can relax just yet, but this project is a great thing for both filmmakers and filmlovers alike.
The Art House Convergence is presented in cooperation with the Sundance Institute. At the Convergence, Art House theatres from all over the U.S. will gather just before the Sundance Film Festival (January 15-25) providing a rare opportunity for art house theatres to network and discuss successful marketing, programming and business models as well as current issues facing independent theatres.

John Cooper, Director of Programming, Sundance Film Festival, explains “Our organizing principle is to increase the market for film exhibition by expanding the number and effectiveness of community-based, mission-driven theatres in local communities, large and small, nationwide.”

So who are these theaters?  Mark them down, and then add to the list!

BAM, New York, NY, www.bam.org
Belcourt Theatre, Nashville, TN, www.belcourt.org
Broadway Centre Cinemas, Salt Lake City, UT, www.saltlakefilmsociety.org
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA, www.coolidge.org
Enzian Theater, Orlando, FL, www.enzian.org
Hollywood Theatre, Portland, OR, www.hollywoodtheatre.org
International Film Series, Boulder, CO, www.internationalfilmseries.com
Jacob Burns Film Center, Pleasantville, NY, www.burnsfilmscenter.org
The Loft, Tucson, AZ, www.loftcinema.com
Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, MI, www.michtheater.org
The Music Box, Chicago, IL, www.musicboxtheatre.com
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK, www.okcmoa.org
The Palm, San Luis Obispo, CA, www.thepalmtheatre.com
Pickford Cinema, Bellingham, WA, www.pickfordcinema.org
Rafael Film Center, San Rafael, CA, www.cafilm.org
Ragtag Cinema, Columbia, MO, www.ragtagfilm.com
Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville, ME, www.railroadsquarecinema.com
The Screen, Santa Fe, NM, www.thescreen.csf.edu

The conference will include a keynote address by John Cooper, Director of Programming for the Sundance Film Festival, as well as panel sessions on:
– How to use the not-for-profit business model to grow audiences for Art House films
– An exploration of new film distribution paradigms (participating in these panels will be Bob Berney, formerly of Picturehouse and Peter Broderick, Paradigm Consulting, Ted Hope, This Is That Productions — that’s me!)
– Innovative marketing and showmanship techniques
– Tutorials on emerging film exhibition and Art House theatre operations technology