By PJ Serubbi
Used to be, an independent meant a bunch of unaffiliated directors, writers and actors coming together and shooting a movie on 16mm film. Their budget? Whatever credit line they could manage on a couple dozen Amex, Visa or Mastercards.
Today, if you name a famous, established movie star and chances are he/she has been up for an indie-award in recent years, if he/she hasn’t already received one. An independent filmmaking award on a mantle piece in the Hollywood hills is like food stamps in the wallet of a CEO. Needless, reckless, wanton greed.
Used to be, the independent movement was a forum for new talent. Hollywood types went to regional film festivals to see a new generation of developing talent. Now, Hollywood types occupy those places of new talent, even though they themselves are already established talent.
Independent filmmaking and the festivals which gave the movement a venue to be seen were the minor leagues of movie making. Now the major leagues have invaded the farm teams and taken them over, playing on the smaller regional fields along with their own big international ones. What’s next? Hollywood producers pumping out student films?
I understand the impulse. When you own most everything in a given field, its human nature to want to snap up the last bits. The problem is that Barry Bonds looks silly going up against bush leaguers and then celebrating the triumph. Time to rework this dynamic, I think. Independents shouldn’t be in competition against movie star vehicles, scraping for the few slips left vacant by Hollywood and all the nepotistic legacies that spring from that place. Independent filmmakers need their own community. In this vast, interconnected world, independent media artists of every stripe are entitled to access to the worlds eye and ear. At WWW.SECONDWINDOWFILMS.COM you’ll see award winning films, read about the artists behind the work, paroose other work product including image galleries, audio archives and other mixed media art. SECONDWINDOWFILMS.COM is the place for real independent artists who have a point instead of an entaurage.
MIXED MEDIA ART PROJECTS
CAN’T GLITZ BE INDEPENDENT, TOO?
Used to be, in independent films, you never heard of any of the people before, but they took a shot at astounding you or at least entertaining or engaging you. It didn’t always work, but it was an adventure into the unknown. The independent movement stretched the medium in directions that big budget films would be insane to attempt. That was the magic of the independent filmmakers. They experimented. They experimented with original mixed media art work projects that told complex stories, simple stories, unexpected stories. Some worked, many didn’t, but it was a hot bed of creative experimentation that is missing in the corporate/committee filmmaking concoctions which predominate in popular media today. As a rule, experiments can succeed or fail in equal measure, but the new that they can sometimes reveal make the effort exciting.
People who are willing to risk their credit rating so I have the potential of seeing something new and unexpected deserve my support. Rich powerful famous people who have long established careers and vast infrastructures and resources up the wazzoo can take care of themselves. I’ll see the rich powerful famous people’s movies no matter what. Their movies will be everywhere. They’re unmissable. How do I know this? Because they always have been and always will be. There is no excuse for their greedy usurpation of the independent moniker and the flooding of the film festival circuit with movies which will be in local movie theaters in a matter of weeks after the festivals end.
THE MIXED MEDIA ART OF THE FILM FESTIVAL
The film festival is for those films which don’t have other means of distribution. There is no need for luminaries in our culture to cannibalize what little is available to those without a forum. It is gluttony. It is an indefensible usurpation of a small and unprofitable forum. It is decidedly Un-American.
Remember Horatio Alger? Remember personalities pulling themselves up by their own boot straps? Well Hollywood and Corporate Media already owned the streets, the boulevards, the entire sweep of the country’s attention…but they wanted the boot straps, too…they wanted to own it all…they wanted to render the next generations Horatio Algers bootless, strapless and hopeless, and they have.
Un-American. Entirely Un-American. If you’re a famous artist, thank your lucky stars that you have a spot in the panoply of contemporary American culture, but it isn’t a tenured position, bucko. Earn it and keep it as long as your work works. In America, everyone gets a fair shake each time around. It is a moveable feast. If you can’t hold your position in relation to what a new, hungry, heavily mortgaged generation is bringing up behind you, then it is nothing but immoral to interdict their efforts by usurping the one, narrow means of their showing what they can do. Let the festivals go.
DOES ORIGINAL MIXED MEDIA ART WORK WORK?
Movie stars at film festivals are the fertilizer, not the crop. In a world where nothing new has room to grow, nothing does, and the fertilizer has destroyed the crops for far too long.
This is just one man’s opinion, of course, but strangling talent in its crib is silly, un-American and wrong. We always say big things grow from small. If we crush all our emerging small work to make more room for the large and ever growing Hollywood product manufactured using movie stars, panavision and scads of pricey CGI magic, then we betray our principles as a country where everyone gets a fair shake.
I love a good Hollywood flick, but there’s more out there. Don’t lets glut the system with nothing but Hollywood product.
Give us more to see.
See more at: WWW.SECONDWINDOWFILMS.COM