I heard about the One Day on Earth project on the radio while staying at the apartment of new friends in Seattle: the idea is that people around the world would film on October 10, 2010 and submit their footage to the initiative’s website. The footage can be seen on the site via individual users profiles and will also be edited into a film (submit at least 1 min of video and you will get online access to the film). I am interested to see what that will be.
What will the archive of footage look like? Who will have submitted? Will this in itself be a portrait of the world? Who has access to video technology & the internet and what do they care about?
I spent most of 10/10/10 on an airplane.
I found the perfect detail to film while waiting for my bags to arrive on the baggage carousel: a 24-hour vending machine for fresh flowers. What an odd and lonely commentary on nature and culture! Unfortunately I couldn’t get my camera settings set correctly and had to give up to catch the train into the city.
Filed under: Distribution | Tags: archive, concrete poetry, curator, ethnography, experimental film
UBUWEB is a wonderful site for viewing often hard-to-find films of 100+ artists, poets and researchers, including:
Jean Rouch
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Dziga Vertov
Ed Emshwiller
Brian Eno
Chris Marker
etc.
The site has a clear curatorial eye and presents full-length works, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Shoot for the Contents (1991, 101 min) for example. It was created on a voluntary basis by “an alliance of interests” including media archives and bandwidth providers. The site presents not only films but concrete poetry in visual / text / sound forms.
Filed under: Distribution, Production Models | Tags: art, experimental film, gallery
Michele Pierson’s article on challenges to experimental film funding and distribution since film-making began is a smart piece:
“Public Image” By Michele Pierson. In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film. Edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. P. 168-175.
I read the essay this morning after muscling the beautiful and heavy silver book to a Brooklyn cafe; Celyon tea, apricot jam, tattooed young man at the bar, two businessmen eating an early lunch of bratwurst and red wine.
The book proceeds from a description of the solidification of the Hollywood system and its mass audience in the 1920s through various forms of amateur film societies and experimetnal film distribution collectives, to a few words on how the Internet promises change. Like the idea that that reading is not becoming less popular, but that only a very small group of people have ever really liked to read, M. Pierson suggests that experimental film-making has always been personal, ‘amateur’, and funding and distribution tricky – though the ways that filmmakers have tackled these things has shifted through time and place.
M. Pierson points to a striking idea for film funding by experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek:
“In the early 1960s, Stan VanDerBeek gave voice to the hope, perhaps even then only faintly imagined, that private art galleries might become places where films could not only be screened, but where prints would be available for sale. The idea that, like etchings or lithographs, films could become “‘objects’ to own and appreciate,” was one that failed to fully appreciate the vast differences between public and private forms of exhibition,” (p. 171).
Stan VanDerBeek’s idea about films as ‘objects’ is not so far off as suggested. It is true that although films have come more and more into the gallery space over the past decades that funds are not generated for the gallery/filmmaker in general by film print sales (this is besides the point that video technology has since arisen). Though I could be somewhat mistaken .. the economics of films-in-galleries is rather mysterious. Unlike theaters or museums, gallery admission is usually free to the ‘public’, so where does the money come from to host these films, to pay the filmmakers & the hot Chelsea rent?
I think that S. VanDerBeek’s idea of films-as-objects has yet to be explored in these sense that he may have meant it. And, that, further, internet/digital media technology open up new possibilities for what films-as-objects might be – how films as objects, frames, fragments might be sold and ‘owned’ as a way to support experimental and independent film-making.
Filed under: Distribution, Documentary, Production Models | Tags: activism
There is a quiet but fascinating synergy emerging between documentary filmmakers and social change organizations. Groups like Media Rights have emerged with the purpose of tying documentaries together with organizations or educational endeavors that are roused & galvanized by the same issues as the films talk about.
The idea is that educators and social change organizations gain new ways – beyond dull texts, e-mail calls to action – to show people how the system of mass food production works or why vinyl house siding is scary. On the other hand, documentary filmmakers get a new way of distributing their films – reaching, through educators and organizations, the audiences that want to see their work and for whom their work might make a difference.
We were encouraged by Working Films (‘linking non-fiction film with cutting edge activism’) via a kind & free phone consultation to pursue an unconventional distribution strategy by striking up relationships with organizations that work on the issues that our film touches – skipping the traditional film distributor world altogether. It’s a good idea. There’s also no road map for this:
- What do these partnerships between filmmakers and organizations look like? How do they get formed?
- Is this the death of film distributors? (e.g. cutting out the middle man between films and audiences)
- Or, will distributors adapt to this new sphere, perhaps creating relationships with social change organizations and targeted online spaces rather than festivals and TV stations?
- Are non-profit groups like Media Rights and Working Films the new ‘distributors’?
We recently attended the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival in Toronto, which is also a big documentary industry event. As befits an industry conference there were a number of panels on the future of the documentary, largely focusing on the changing financial structure of how films are made and distributed.
One of the most striking comments by a panelist was that the documentary industry has a lot to learn from the changes that are happening in the music industry – for which recent transitions online have been more visibly contentious (Napster and the aftermath), including issues also relevant to film, like:
-copyright, see Lawrence Lessig
-media sharing
-how artists can get paid for their work
-producers and distributors in the era of Myspace
-new mass distribution platforms, like iTunes
-physical media (CDs, DVDs) versus electronic media (computers, ipods)
Strikingly the panelist noted that, “Musicians don’t make money from music .. they share their music on Myspace, e.g. for free. Instead, musicians make money from the things that surround the music itself, like concerts, where ticket prices have risen.” For example, see the Rolling Stone article “Rock’s New Economy: Making Money When Music Doesn’t Sell.”
The question is, what can the documentary industry learn from the music industry?
What parallel changes is the documentary industry undergoing, and how are its challenges and opportunities different? How do the traditional structures of each industry relate to emerging structures?
And, where does all this leave the artists – the filmmakers and musicians? What can filmmakers learn from musicians? If filmmakers don’t make money from films (have they ever made much?), how will their work be supported? If Youtube or Vimeo are the Myspaces of the film world, what is the “concert” of the documentary industry?
