Independent Cinema E-Book

D.K. Holm

• Herausgeber: Kamera Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 172

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Just what is 'independent' cinema? D. K. Holm aims to define a term all too carelessly used both by media commentators and marketers, and distinguish it from categories such as avant-garde, underground, experimental or 'art' films, with which it is often confused. By contrasting studio-era Hollywood with changes in the business since the 1970s, and the rise of companies such as Miramax and New Line, it shows the birth of a commercial environment in which the new independent cinema can emerge. Profiles of specific filmmakers suggest how diverse personalities use independent cinema for individual ends; directors such as James Mangold, who found indie cinema to be a stepping stone to more mainstream movies, Jill Sprecher, who uses its flexibility to explore philosophical ideas, and Guy Maddin, one of the few true independent filmmakers, whose films are beholden to his own unique vision rather than financiers or abstract audience markets.

Leseprobe

D K Holm

INDEPENDENT CINEMA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to salute numerous friends and colleagues who gave aid during this project, starting with Chris Ryall, former editor of Kevin Smith’s website, MoviePoopShoot.com (now QuickStopEntertainment.com), and including Kristi Turnquist of the Oregonian, writer Tim Appelo, Holly Cundiff, Helaine Garren, Shawn Levy of the Oregonian, filmmakers Patti Lewis and Cynthia Lopez, Andrea Marsden, Cindy Mason, Gregg Morris, L Ninos Smith, Britta Gordon, Mike Russell, Mark Christensen, James Walling, editor of the Vancouver Voice, and Charles Schwenk. A large debt is owed to Desiree French, who edited early versions of the text, as well as to the filmmakers who took the time to engage in interviews. More generally, I can cite the Multnomah County Library, the Portland State University Library, and the Internet Movie Database, both Pro and civilian. Acknowledgement is also due to publisher Ion Mills for his enthusiasm and risk-taking, and editor Hannah Patterson for supreme patience.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: What is an Independent Film?

2. Independent Cinema as Alternative to Commercial Storytelling: Jill and Karen Sprecher

3. Independent Cinema as Stepping Stone: James Mangold

4. Independent Cinema as Autobiography: Whit Stillman

5. Independent Cinema as Truly Independent: Guy Maddin

6. The Future of Independent Cinema

7. Interviews with… Lance Weiler & Bilge Ebiri

8. Independent Film Resources

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’

Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigations,

translator, GEM Anscombe, 1935; Oxford, 1997, No. 115

On 26 June, 1997, George Lucas stepped onto the set of his latest film, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for its first day of filming. After three years of preparation, consisting of scriptwriting, computer previsualisation, and the assembly of a special effects team and digital camera crew, he was finally ready to commence shooting (though perhaps recording would be a better term) the latest chapter of his ongoing space opera saga. Shot in England, Tunisia and Australia, Phantom Menace cost an estimated $115 million to make, all of the money raised by Lucas himself.

Some years later, in May of 2006, a user named Lonelygirl15 began posting her video diary on the website YouTube.com. Named Bree, she was a home-schooled teen who was experiencing new roiling emotions under the influence of the outside world. Her films captured her in activities that ranged from rating different cookie brands to exploring a friendship with ‘Daniel’, an older boy. In her videotaped, emotional peregrinations, Lonelygirl15 was adding video imagery to a fund of movies that already amounted to over one million posts since YouTube.com first started. Founded in February of 2005 by three former employees of PayPal, a controversial online banking system that has inspired the birth of websites decrying it, YouTube quickly became one of the most visited locations on the Internet, premised on its being a public forum for amateur videos, news clips, music videos, pornography, television commercials and rare TV footage.

Lonelygirl15’s posting came at a time when YouTube was proclaiming to enjoy visitations from over 100 million clip-viewers every day, ready to view the 65,000 new video clips that were added daily. Lonelygirl15 proved to be just one of thousands of people who posted their own video blogs. She brought realisation to Francis Ford Coppola’s comment about the advances in moviemaking technology – as captured in Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s 1991 documentary, Hearts of Darkness (about the making of Apocalypse Now):

To me, the great hope is that now [sic] these little 8 millimeter video recorders and stuff are coming out some people who normally wouldn’t make movies are gonna be making them and suddenly one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camera recorder and for once the so called ‘professionalism’ about movies will be destroyed, forever, you know, and it will become an art form.

Lonelygirl15, however, turned out to be a hoax, or more generously, an experiment by a pair of filmmakers, Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, who were attempting to generate interest in their work. Bree turned out to be the actress Jessica Lee Rose (among whose films was the Lindsay Lohan vehicle I Know Who Killed Me). But still, her movies did what most filmmakers hope their work will: they sparked viewing and commentary. The show and its creators were already represented by the agency CAA. Yet despite the revelation of the show’s fictional basis, the resultant solo website, LG15.com, made its debut in the summer of 2006, garnering 150,000 viewers a month there and 300,000 a month on YouTube, where it is still posted.

These filmmakers from extreme ends of the filmmaking spectrum have one thing in common. Both Star WarsEpisode I: The Phantom Menace and the works of Lonelygirl15 are independent films. One could go so far as to say that they are true independent films, more so than the rash of indie films that preoccupied critical discussion throughout the 1990s, most of which were financed by film studios or distributors of one level of power or another. Seen from the perspective of the work of both George Lucas at one end, and of Lonelygirl15’s Beckett and Goodfried, as mentioned above, independent cinema is something of a myth, a bogus term, a false genre.

Almost every book or article or review about independent cinema begins with the author grappling with definitions. Typical is a review of writer-director Rian Johnson’s Brick in The Economist (of 20 May 2006) which begins, ‘Defining “independent films” is not easy. Small films? Films that premiere at Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival? Films made outside the studio system?’

These are all good answers, posing as questions. What is independent cinema? Is it a school of filmmaking, or is it really simply an economic category, a marketing tool? Can filmmakers ever be truly independent within the context of commercial cinema? And, however it began, hasn’t independent cinema by now developed its own style, evolved into a distinct genre?

The reader of The Economist suddenly realises that this seemingly simple word ‘independent’ proves to be as illusive or allusive as the many other words that we take for granted, which, as we start to unravel them, prove complex; words such as ‘yet’, ‘free’ and ‘reality’. And it is clear that over time ‘independent’ as an adjective used to describe a movie has altered, be it in the context of commercial or critical usage. In fact, how critics, professional filmmakers and moviegoers have used the word ‘independent’ over the years helps to chart just what an independent film is even as the definition fluctuates with changing models of film production.

The phrase ‘independent cinema’ as we now mostly use it came into common parlance around 1977, and strictly speaking served as a designation for movies made outside the confines of traditional financing, distributed by companies that were not aligned to the big Hollywood studios. Though the exhibition business itself usually uses the term ‘specialty films’ for art house or non-Hollywood product, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, then of Miramax, seized on the word ‘independent’ as a marketing tool.

Among the films released in 1977 was David Lynch’s first feature, Eraserhead, initially distributed by Libra Films, a company that existed from around 1971–1982, and also released Cousin, cousine and The Atomic Café. Joining Lynch’s film that year was Joan M Silver’s parody of life at an underground newspaper, Between The Lines, distributed by Midwest Films, a company that existed solely to distribute Silver’s work – which amounted to three films, the first of which was Hester Street (1975). In addition, there was John Waters’s fifth feature film, DesperateLiving; his first feature, Mondo Trasho, had been released in 1969, but he first became widely known for PinkFlamingos, distributed in 1972 by Saliva Films, which existed long enough to release three of Waters’s features. Alan Rudolph’s first feature Welcome To LA was another 1977 release, which made its debut at the Seattle Film Festival in 1976, produced by Robert Altman’s company Lions Gate. Altman sold Lions Gate in 1981 and it has since evolved into the most successful non-American film production and distribution company (it is based in Vancouver, BC).

By contrast, here’s what the mainstream studios released in 1977: Fox opened Star Wars, which made $202 million, Universal offered up Smokey and the Bandit, which made $126 million, Columbia released Close Encounters ofthe Third Kind, which made $116 million, Paramount distributed Saturday Night Fever, which made $94 million and a movie star of TV actor John Travolta. In addition, MGM released Neil Simon’s love comedy The Goodbye Girl, which made $41 million. One could argue, though, that StarWars was, in essence, also an independent film, because director George Lucas financed it himself and sold only the distribution rights to Fox, as he would with all subsequent sequels in the series. An analogous person from the world of genre film is George A Romero, a commercial filmmaker who in 1968 formed a small company with a group of friends to film a horror movie outside Pittsburgh called Night of the Living Dead. It went on to become not only a big commercial success but one of the most significant influences on pop culture.

The box office for 1977’s independent films, on the other hand, is unknown or at least unofficial, but the budget for Eraserhead was $100,000, and Desperate Living cost $65,000, mere fractions of the financing that went into the majors’ releases.

The short-lived small companies that sprang up to distribute these independent directors’ films also included, or were soon joined by, larger enterprises such as Circle Releasing, Savoy, Phaedra, October, Gramercy, Trimark, Island, Alive, Live, Goldwyn, Avenue, Vestron, Artisan, Strand, Cannon, New Line, Fine Line and Miramax. All were founded on the principle that audiences had an appetite for non-conformist films stripped of the predictable or familiar story structures of Hollywood cinema, and dealt with issues or political and social concerns ignored by the studios. At the same time, however, many of these companies conducted themselves like mirror images of their studio antecedents, wheeling and dealing to outbid each other for ‘product’ at film festivals and movie markets, and merging with each other, or simply failing into disappearance. An amusing insider’s look at how independent films are made is Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion (1995).

A thumbnail sketch of the history of October Films summarises the volatile nature of independent film distribution companies from the 1970s on. Bingham Ray, then an executive unhappy at Avenue Pictures, and Jeff Lipsky, an executive frustrated at Skouras Pictures, founded October Pictures in 1991 (taking the name of the company from Sergei Eisenstein’s film, according to Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). Their initial desire was to distribute Life is Sweet, British director Mike Leigh’s kitchen sink account of life under Margaret Thatcher. October subsequently went on to distribute a wide range of European films (The Cement Garden, Cemetery Man), documentaries (The War Room), and American indie titles (Ruby in Paradise, The Last Seduction). In 1997, Universal Pictures bought a controlling interest in the company, then sold its shares to media entrepreneur Barry Diller, who merged it with Gramercy Pictures (in existence since 1992) and renamed the resultant whole USA Pictures. Meanwhile, Universal itself passed through ownership by Seagrams, Vivendi, before finally ending up in the hands of NBC. In 2002, Vivendi acquired USA, merged it with another acquisition, Good Machine, and re-dubbed the result Focus Features, which, as of the time of writing, is the art film arm of NBC-Universal’s Universal Pictures.

October was only one of several small distribution firms designed to ferry low-budget or specialty films into theatres but that quickly evolved into or were replaced by complex corporations that were independent in name only. Others from the late 1970s onwards have simply disappeared. In such an unstable or protean commercial world, definitions end up transitory, provisional, quickly co-opted.

Yet ‘independence’ under one label or another has existed within or on the fringes of commercial moviemaking since its inception. The very first films were independent, in their own unique way, because movie studios as we know them didn’t exist until the early teens. Since then the sort of film that we now gather under the sole rubric independent was called at various times experimental, underground or avant garde. Other terms include specialty films, art films and fringe filmmaking. One could also argue that foreign films were for a time the contemporaneous equivalent of independent cinema. Film maudit, or cursed or disreputable film, is another less used designation, but appropriate for the early films of John Waters and David Lynch. And, arguably, drive-in pictures, grindhouse films, and even stag films and other pornographic works can contain elements or go by standards that affiliate them, to varying degrees, with what we now call independent cinema. America’s long history of exploitation films gave birth to the career of African-American director Oscar Micheaux, who financed and physically distributed his films himself. He is the predecessor not only of Spike Lee, whose first movies were student films or independently made, such as She’s Gotta Have It (1986), but also Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song [1971]), and Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep [1977]).

In reaching for a definition of independent cinema, it helps to understand what so-called independent cinema is, or believes it is, independent of. In a word, that would be Hollywood. But behind that word is a world of complex interconnections, hierarchies and stages of transition in advancing both a work of art and a commercial property. Hollywood is both a literal place and a state of mind; a factory and a philosophy.

The thumbnail history of Hollywood is simple. Once motion picture production technology was invented in the United States and Europe, it was almost immediately put to commercial use. Kinetoscopes, which required single viewers, were soon replaced by movie theatres, which could accommodate multiple viewers and were more in line with the live theatrical presentations that people were used to, particularly as cinema dropped documentary recordings of reality in favour of fiction. In the first few years of the cinema, Thomas Edison’s cameras were leased to groups of filmmakers who struck deals for their product with national exhibitors. By the end of the teens, these disparate groups had formed into stable narrative fiction-making enterprises. The enormous cost of movie producing made the application of the assembly line attractive to investors. This, coupled with the fact that moviemakers were settling in the (then) relatively remote Hollywood, made it feasible for diverse visionaries to establish film studios, where films could be manufactured to the public taste. As movies became a national mania through the 1920s and 1930s, the seven studios – MGM, Fox, Paramount, Warner, Columbia, RKO, Universal – consolidated the very power to make movies amongst themselves. Large Mitchell cameras and 35mm film were prohibitively expensive to other filmmakers who might want to break in.

Speaking broadly, in its early days the filmmakers and the exhibitors ‘owned’ the movie industry; but with the rise in the medium’s popularity came the creation of studios for movie mass production and control of cinema fell into the hands of banks and corporations. By the end of the 1920s, the movie industry was run by a small number of studios, themselves owned or controlled by corporations or banks on the east coast.

In their ‘golden age’, from the 1930s through the early 1950s, the significant studios were like large theatrical companies. They trained performers and technicians, provided costumes and sets, processed the physical films, advertised them and showed them in their own theatre chains. ‘Talent’ was hired, trained, exploited, and rose to fame based on a combination of physical appeal, studio mandated publicity, and background networking of all varieties. Movies essentially served the stars, enhancing their images, while at the same time, particularly after the implementation of the Hays office guidelines for tasteful presentation in the early 1930s, shrinking from troublesome realities. Soon there was a national dichotomy between the real world and the ‘dream factory’. Filmmakers bristled under the factory’s restraints, but went along with them, occasionally pushing the boundaries toward more frankness and political realism.

An exception to this system were the so-called Poverty Row movie studios that included Monogram and Republic. The experiences of directors such as Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, or Edgar G Ulmer in these studios, as well as those of later directors who worked for companies such as American International, which specialised in drive-in movies, mirrored that of filmmakers in the indie studios of the 1980s and 1990s. They had some freedom as long as they supplied certain components of marketable content. But even in these impoverished studios, conflicts still existed between money and artistic vision. Studio interference existed, just as it did in the majors. Creative ideas were often compromised for big financial returns.

The role of independent cinema in today’s popular imagination is that of the rebel child against this corporate ‘adult’ world of assembly-line filmmaking. If the studios are often less cookie-cutter-like in their approach to filmmaking than critics claim, the so-called independent film is often less ‘independent’ than it appears to be. To offer a movie that is wholly financed by the Disney Corporation, as most Miramax movies were from 1995 on, and label it ‘independent’ is simply ludicrous. In both the past and present, changes in the movie industry have come not from within, but via threats from without: competition from foreign films, vast changes in public taste, and severe governmental challenges to studio locks on production and exhibition.

Numerous factors, such as the separation of the studios from ownership of theatres, labour relations and the advent of commercial television, led to the declining power of the movie studios after the end of World War Two. Producers formerly associated with studios broke away to go it alone, though still remaining tied to the studios via development deals, or ‘first-look’ options, whereby the studio gets first refusal of a producer’s new fare. By the 1960s the movie studios, as creators of film, were moribund. Henceforth, the big seven would be primarily distributors of other people’s movies, while the studios themselves were gobbled up by large conglomerates (Paramount by Gulf and Western for a time, though it’s currently owned by Viacom). This change didn’t necessarily make it easier for outsiders to break into moviemaking, however.

Periodically, Hollywood allows outsiders into the fold in an effort to revitalise itself, like a vampire seeking new victims. One such epoch was that of the late 1960s and early 1970s, traditionally referred to simply as Seventies films. Movies associated with this movement include EasyRider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, Carnal Knowledge, Coming Home, and scores of others. During this era, new talents were allowed to express themselves.

Today, film fans talk about how much they love American cinema of the 1970s but when modern filmmakers pay homage to the films of their youth no one goes to see them. Three recent such examples were the films Zodiac, Breach, and The Good Shepherd. All three are expensive, well-mounted, serious, moody films about real events, and each adopts different aspects of 1970s films as colours on its palette. Breach’s look and feel has its roots in All thePresident’s Men, The Good Shepherd evokes TheGodfather Part II, and Zodiac draws on numerous 70s films set in San Francisco, such as Dirty Harry, for its look, particularly in its interiors.

All these films ‘flopped’ at the box office, perhaps because word of mouth suggested they were slow and anti-dramatic. But then most of the films from the seventies that are now heralded as masterpieces were also flops. And many of them tended to be measured and static. ThePaper Chase, for example, one of the few indie-style hits of the time, is surprisingly slow paced, ponderous and oblique in its storytelling, additionally hampered by passages of shallow, out-of-date humour.

Soon enough, however, movies were popular again and the invitations to outsiders dried up. Throughout the 1980s, the movie studios, mutatis mutandis, conducted themselves much as they did in the 1930s, though arguably with even less soul. Now, what the studios do is create or co-opt franchises with brands, such as X-men, Batman and Indiana Jones. In response, what the so-called independent studios do, with the exception of Miramax’s division Dimension and New Line, is create a brand with a director, Quentin Tarantino, say, or Ang Lee.

Each era’s fringe filmmaking gets the label it deserves. It also gets the filmmakers it deserves. Economic conditions fluctuate and prevailing cultural trends may wither the ambitions of some, while others overcome difficulties to create works that seem diametrically opposed to the current trend of filmmaking.