The news [of speciality divisions shutting down] has inspired passionate response, as well as the usual gloom and doom. Certainly it is bad news for those who have lost their jobs, but I’m not persuaded that it means all that much for true independents, those who have never worked inside the studios, never wanted to and probably couldn’t if they tried. I don’t think it means much for Kelly Reichardt, who made the lovely independent film “Wendy and Lucy,” and is unlikely to direct the next comic book blowout, because her aesthetic sensibility and worldview are of no economic use and interest to the studios or to most audiences either. That’s not a bad thing, not even remotely, especially for those who think films have worth beyond their box office returns.

I suppose my immediate response is that I hope that more of these kinds of films can be nurtured and encouraged because it seems to me that it is awfully hard to make a living on the truly indie end of the spectrum. Is this the price we pay for trying to make films that mean something or are we just buying into outdated ideas about “suffering for our art”? Artists contribute to the economic health of the communities and societies that we live in more than we perhaps realize (see Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class) and in our haste to avoid being seen as crassly commercial or financially driven we accept that we will never be able to pay our rent if we want to make these kinds of films. I’m over-simplifying the case somewhat but this is what I often see and hear when I talk to real, live filmmakers in the real, live world that I live in and to be honest I veer between delighted optimism (exciting technology, brilliant filmmakers, innovative thinking) and crashing despair (debt, endless work, debt) in the work that I do.

Rather than debate business models, this poster said, why don’t filmmakers just focus on making a good picture? He (or, perhaps another anonymous poster) wrote, “I don’t see distribution as the thorn in indie’s side. I see quality as its biggest shortcoming. Seriously. Where are the filmmakers with the ambition to makes sex, lies & videotape or She’s Gotta Have It or Reservoir Dogs or Clerks or Gas Food & Lodging or Blood Simple or Stranger Than Paradise or Pi or whatever else?
 Those movies weren’t just made for nothing (though the budgets and name actors varied), they were GREAT MOVIES made by directors who really had personality and style.”
My response was that if the above films came out today, half wouldn’t get theatrical distribution and of the ones that did, half of those would be IFC releases. And I also think that bringing the conversation down to a basic question of “good films versus bad films” is too simplistic. In fact, I think the one of the biggest challenges for the independent scene right now is to come up with new notions of “what’s good” that we can all agree on and share among ourselves. I think there’s a relationship between viewing platform and one’s impression of a film. Buying a ticket and seeing something in a theater places you in one kind of critical mindset while clicking on a website and sitting through three bumper ads while watching a streamed film places you in another. Is “what’s good” when discovered through one experience the same “what’s good” that’s discovered in another? And does the price leveling effect of the Internet, Chris Anderson’s dictum that everything wants to be free, apply to quality as well? Will the dog on the skateboard – or the Burger King employee in the sink – always trump the well-crafted narrative? Lots of people – everyone from Josh Whedon to struggling indies who are dicing up their unsold features into five-minute webisodes – are trying to figure this out.

I think that it is absolutely true that context changes our viewing experience in very important ways. If you are watching something at home or in the office (especially if you are watching it on your computer with other applications open) you will often be in a state of continuous partial attention. Kathy Sierra’s Twitter Curve gives us some idea of the contemporary assault on our attention:

I think one of the wonderful things about going to a movie theater is that it serves to remove us from the world of cell phones, IM and Twitter for a couple of hours – in theory at least (and hardly ever in press screenings!). All we need to do when we go to the cinema is sit in a dark room and watch the flickering screen – like an updated version of sitting around the campfire and listening to stories – and this experience fulfills a primordial need in us. Nicholas Carr’s recent Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? made me think about the parallels between deep reading and deep cinema experiences:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

I’m not claiming that watching a movie will do what reading War and Peace does to our brains but there is something thoughtful and contemplative about the space of the cinema (although perhaps not The Dark Knight at 7pm on a Friday in Union Square!) that you simply cannot get when you’re at home surrounded by technology and other distractions.

I’m not a luddite. In fact, the older I get the more I love to delve into the possibilities of technology. I even have aspirations of geekdom. But I am becoming more and more aware of how much the space and context of a viewing experience affects my feelings about the film I am watching. This was one of the many things I really appreciated about the Flaherty Seminar that I attended back in June. It was simply a huge pleasure and privilege to watch films in such a highly-curated atmosphere, where we were introduced to the bodies of work of directors and given time to talk to the filmmakers and to debate and think about what we were watching. I feel a connection to all the films I saw at Flaherty as a result, even the films that I didn’t much like and I have a much deeper appreciation for filmmakers like Pedro Costa, Bahman Ghobadi, Oliver Hussain, Syliva Schedelbauer, Alison Kobayashi and Ursula Biemann, many of whom I wouldn’t have known about if it hadn’t been for Flaherty and the excellent curation of Chi-hui Yang.

So what is my argument here? I guess it is just to say that I absolutely agree that the way we live digitally now is opening up all sorts of exciting possibilities – and it is a given that new distribution models will have to be figured out because the technology is going to continue to change, and us along with it. But the medium is still the message and I still long to be thoroughly immersed in films. Long, difficult, beautiful films that I pay money to see in a dark room full of strangers. I don’t want everything to be reduced to “content” because this obfuscates the very different experiences we have when we watch work in different contexts. And I don’t think it is anti-progress, or anti-technology, to argue that spaces for deep-viewing, deep-thinking and deep-curation are perhaps more important now than ever.

Croquet on the Quad

The Bollywood Brass Band

Heather Croall, James Mullighan, Charlie Phillips and other peeps sipping G&Ts on the lawn

Ryan Harrington and Debra Zimmerman

Blurry distribution: Matt Dentler (Cinetic), Tim Sparke (Joining the Dots TV), Jess Search (moderator), Jamie King (Steal This Film) and Matt Elek (Vice)

I definitely plan to attend this because I know many of the people involved and I’m sure it will be a really useful and inspirational couple of days. Plus I’m determined to be looking forward, not back, as we figure out how to live digitally as artists (who need to eat and pay rent!)

I am consumed with how to get from here (between past and future models, looming recession, endless noise, very little signal, embattled communities) to there (is there a there there?) I know this is all terribly obtuse but I’m figuring this stuff out too! Bottom line: I know that organizations like Shooting People are going to have to be at the forefront of experimentation, community building and innovation. It’s daunting but I know so many amazing people working hard to figure this out and we have tools and resources like never before. As William Gibson said: “The future has already happened, it is just unequally distributed.”

And I just gotta throw in this clip too. All the internet stars waiting to collect their money. Priceless!

Substantial amounts of film, video and media arts remain “stuck on the shelf,” inaccessible to large segments of the public. Sometimes this is due to rights-clearance issues, but more often it is because of the high cost to convert to digital formats that would allow for broad circulation. Even media that is available for distribution can be difficult to find because it is held and catalogued in many places, and in less than ideal databases.

Films are available to rent or to own – as downloads or as DVD-on-demand – to both institutions in the educational market and to individuals (depending on the film from the looks of it). The Hollywood Reporter describes the deal structures as follows:

The nonprofit TFI and copyright holders will split the profit on digital download rentals and purchases (distributed in Windows Media Player format) evenly. DVD sales will operate under a tiered system, with 40% of $50 and under titles, 85% of $51-$200 titles and 90% of more than $200 titles going to rights holders. More expensive titles will be aimed at the educational market looking for classroom materials, though rentals in the $4 range, lasting anywhere from 36 hours-30 days, are accessible to all visitors. Buyers must have an Amazon account to make purchases.

I haven’t had a chance to really check out the site yet but I’m excited to see how it develops and what sort of collections it builds. Have a gander – I’m very pleased that they’ve launched with Thriller, a rare 1979 film from Sally Potter who is one of our wonderful Shooting People patrons!

UPDATE: We’re working on this RIGHT NOW so this video may go through a few different versions and look a bit different each time. This is beta baby!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Ok our player IS lovely but it is also HUGE and it was eating up my whole blog so I have taken it down while we continue to work on making it awesome.

UPDATE MARK 2: Ok let’s see if we’re at awesome yet. Hooray, I think we did it!