One thing that truly resonated for me though was Jon Jost's dismissal of the box office performance of Ramin Bahrani's, Lance Hammer's, and Kelly Reichardt's recent films. These artists, along with a few others, represent some of the great hope for American Art Film in the near future (and Jon probably raises them precisely for that reason).
It's a mistake to take the theatrical results of their most recent films as the criteria for their financial success. No one can think about a single film anymore as the litmus test. When all filmmakers still dwelled in the world of acquisitions, that way of thinking was understandable; people felt you were only as successful as your last film. What your film sold for and how it performed was all that seemed to matter. In a world where it makes less and less sense to license your film for all media in exchange for a paltry sum (should you even be so fortunate to have such offers), new ways to evaluate success are emerging.
Bahrani and Reichardt licensed each of their last films to quality art-house distributors. Hammer took another approach. Yet, Bahrani and Reichardt built on their audience from the prior film, as you can be assured that Hammer will too. These are what the music business would see as catalogue artists. Their fan base will grow with each new release. The more they are able to maintain an ongoing dialogue with their audience, the richer a dialogue they can offer, the more that audience will support them. It is not about the one-off film anymore -- nor that film's results. It is all about the community of support that artists can develop for their work. That community will only flourish to the degree that there is both dialogue within the community, and well-maintained flow of content.
Artists who maintain a rich dialogue with their community will benefit in many ways from what they have built. Some of it will be directly financial, both in terms of amount of that reward but also predictability thereof. Other ways will include increased access to audience (which has a wide and varied group of benefits), decreased marketing & distribution costs, and new streams of revenue.
The more filmmakers can think of how to maintain and deepen the on-going dialogue with their supporters the better off they will be.
P.S. I disagree strongly with Jon's comment that the aforementioned films and filmmakers don't do anything "aesthetically daring or difficult" -- but this isn't where I chose to look at such issues. But since it was raised, dare I say that whereas no one is reinventing cinema, that compared to the norms, each one went out a limb without a net -- and they flew pretty damn high when they jumped. And man that ain't easy -- and it is extremely brave is this world of ours.
5 comments:
Where would someone like Terrence Malick fit in, in this new catalogue-driven world?
Quality, not quantity.
Again, are we talking about art or just another consumer product? Sounding more and more like that latter.
My initial thought is: how? How do you maintain a genuine dialogue with your audience? I see quite a few DIY filmmakers attempting this but it often comes off as a strategy for marketing. A dialogue implies a back and forth of ideas. But what I see is Facebook messages asking me to join their Facebook group, Tweets asking me to buy their DVD, and online festival vote begging disguised as "a call to action".
I'm guilty of it too because those needs (as a filmmaker) are so immediate. But it doesn't serve to create a deep, meaningful connection to your audience-community in the way that a foundation of genuine dialogue does. And finding or building a venue for listening and sharing ideas with them is crucial. We started the Sabi Forum as a place to interact (minus the sales pitch) with fans and followers of our motion pictures. The dialogue there ranges from advice on "how to cast a film" to politics and the latest retarded youtube videos. And what I quickly learned was that we don't need to talk exclusively about our films in order to nurture and grow a community around them. Maybe by fostering a real relationship with people, and we do, they will have an investment in us that will translate to a sustainable model of creating and distributing content, once we start putting our features out there.
SIDE NOTE -- I can't think of many things more daring than stripping away the "shock and awe" of conventional American cinema and focusing on raw, minimalist images and emotions. It's very difficult to be that naked.
Well, I don't really want to get into a big polemic about all this, though I guess from long ago it is my rep to do so, but....
I occasionally get sent to me, by strangers, DVDs of their films to look at. Presumably they know a bit about me, saw a film or two of mine, or read my writing somewhere. Recently I got one, with a peppy letter,
"hope you enjoy." I watched about 10 minutes and stopped it - it was a Michigan suburbs somewhere kind of Casavettes mumblecore item about a dysfunctional upper income middle class probably jewish family gathering for a funeral (cliches anyone). It was a bit better than some mumblecore (Kissing on the Mouth) that I'd seen (part of), but that's not saying much. With the advent of DV, that largely covers most of your technical problems, it is perfectly easy and cheap to shoot in focus, exposed right, no lab crap, and make a mind-deadening by-the-numbers conventional drama acted (usually not very well) by your family and friends. I am sure 20,000 such "films" are being made each year, and most of them are not worth 10 minutes of your time. Basically we are awash with media - twitter and Facebook and myriad other ways to talk and delude oneself, and perhaps communally ourselves, that one is "doing something" and in the film biz, which is inherently self-important, something "important".
Along with the DVD's sent to me, I get purchase requests for my DVDs, from every nook and cranny in the world - russia, and some small town in the north of Sweden, UK, USA, and so on. These are from people who somehow saw a film of mine 10 or 1 years ago, and it stuck to them, and now thanks to the internet and the virus implanted by the film (which dare I say is "art") they can contact me to ask a question, buy a copy, and then usually a handful more of other films of mine. These are films that are adamantly non-commercial, and which I made with never a thought they would screen theatrically (only one ever did, VERMEERS), or be bought by TV or distribs (and handful were in Europe and once upon a time WNET in NYC bought some for pennies). The conversation with the audience though is not via our handy deluge of byte-sized telegraph toys, but by something else - the way "art" works.
Here's a note I got from a young friend in rural Missouri, who has made now 3 16mm films, none in my view quite getting there, but he has talent and drive, and if he'd just quit wasting money on celluloid and give himself more time to work by using DV, he'll come around and click. He read the stuff here and sent this:
"The list he puts up is all the work a distributor would do! That's just to get considered by a distributor? I'll say it again: since when do filmmakers have the time and money after finishing their film to do all this shit? Not just that, but the finess. How? Filmmakers aren't publicists and never have been! And since when (a year or two ago??) did playing too many film festivals become a bad thing? WTF? Nothing makes sense anymore. Video revolution fucked it all up. Period. And in less than a motherfucking decade!
What am I making movies for then? So I can loose another couple years' wages because I didn't follow all the rules, like having several different posters ready, clips and a trailer online, manufactured a dvd that has great packaging, or (the dumbest thing on that list) identified the critics who I think will like the film. Are you fucking kidding me? FUCK YOU!
FUCK THIS BULLSHIT. Nobody ever helped me. It doesn't look like anyone ever will. Fuck 'em. (And I would NEVER write a fucking blog!)"
I can't say I disagree with him. Though I do write a blog, but some of us like to write, and some not. All's OK.
I have been around the film-fest-arts world now a fair while (45 years). I find most of those who had a flashy film or two, and were good at the hustle, were there like a flash. A few years and then off the radar. Most of them, in my jaundiced view, were not very good filmmakers or artists, they were "fashionable" and fashion is very fickle. I could list you some names (if I could remember them) but you could, say go through the Berlin Forum catalog of the last 3 decades and find a mess of them. And then I met the hustlers - people who were not good filmmakers, anything but artists, but had the slick smooth-talk down, could raise money, schmooze and booze, and make some bad films, and then find some better con for their lives. The film biz is full of these folks.
Frankly a big part of this is luck. Luck of where and when you were born (most of the big european artistic filmmakers had they the misfortune to be born in the US would have found themselves snookered into the same corner most US avant-garde-artsy-experimental filmmakers live in - off scraps, teaching, and would never have been able to make the films that got funded (once upon a time) in Europe. Ditto the more recent Asian films - do you really think Wong Kar Wai, or Hou Hsou Hsien would get a dime in the USA when they started? And I could make a long list of other such filmmakers elsewhere who similarly are in the little warp in their culture that lets them work outside the commercial straight-jacket. In the USA either they would have bent to commercial demands, or been consigned to the tiny corner of DIY options.
"Again, are we talking about art or just another consumer product? Sounding more and more like that latter."
That is really the question. There is very very little talk about "art" in the film biz anymore, and most of it is a lame attempt to elevate commerce into some seemingly higher plane when the facts on screen don't warrant it.
I'll try in the next days to tackle this all a bit more coherently at www.cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com
Thanks for the thoughts Jon.
I thought it was obvious by the blog's subtitle and what I point out as the inspiration/point for the blog, but maybe I have to go further: TFF was never intended to be about the "art" side of filmmaking, but about the infrastructure and practice needed to reach audiences. Please head on over to "Let's Make Better Films" at www.HammerToNail.com for some of my thoughts on the art of it all. I am confident you will find even more for us to debate there.
Granted there are a lot of benefits to other countries' film industries and cultures, but even where there might be some great artists who get funded, it still doesn't mean they are being seen. Financing bodies have as much of a dictatorial hand -- if not more so -- than that of a wide commercial marketplace. Industries that are supported by subsidies for approved artists may have an easier time for funding the ordained projects, but the workforce historically limits itself to full fee endeavors, making those that work outside the accepted norms unable to fund the labor behind the camera.
I would argue that our culture and industry actually generates the most diverse cinema worldwide. Granted well funded art film is incredibly rare here, but so is the audience for it.
Filmmakers can complain all they want about the system, or about how hard it is to reach an audience, but it is akin to childish whining unless you do something about it.
As my six months on this blog attest, I am excited about the potential a more direct and regular relationship between audience and artist offers, both in terms of content and support. But it certainly is not the only model for either. The reduced cost of production certainly allows filmmakers to go off by themselves and to shoot and create and evolve. And maybe some more great artists will emerge that way. But the few distribs that still exist in this country aren't in the business of creating a relationship between audience and the art, so unless the filmmaker has also been at work on that front, or they make the most commercially accessible work, they are going to have a very hard time having their work seen.
Here at TFF, I am simply trying to provide some advice to filmmakers on how to reach their audience and avoid being exploited.
"TFF was never intended to be about the 'art' side of filmmaking, but about the infrastructure and practice needed to reach audiences."
1) It seems to me that few, if any, truly independent filmmakers can formulate and maintain a sustainable business model on their own while hoping for a distributor to pick up the slack from then on. They're artists, not businessman. It's like asking plumbers to build houses...so they can then fix the kitchen sink. It's not for nothing that even Andrew Bujalski is taking Hollywood adaptation work.
2) The best way to for indie filmmakers to "reach audiences" is to make audiences WANT TO SEE challenging art films. So perhaps, one could say that expending this much energy on the business side of indie film is misguided. Either a distributor should do the work they're supposed to do (that to-do list from your earlier post), or if they can't (which is understandable), then we need to focus on making audiences hungry for non-Hollywood or Indiewood fare.
I mean, to use a political analogy, the main reason Obama won (and won big) was that people were hungry for change. As The Onion hilariously put it, "Country Finally Shitty Enough to Elect First Black President." It's sad but true -- he was clearly the better major party candidate IMO, and yet he couldn't have won if the political climate wasn't so icy for Repubs.
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