April 23rd, 2009 §
Digital filmmaker Alejandro Adams, of the original and newer braintrustdv.com, has organized and posted a self-distribution roundtable.
Here is my entry:
What if cinema art’s economic model shifted from its traditional show business roots to something resembling the art market and in the process helped reconstruct the economics of art–making in the digital age. That’s right, moving an art form that has always been democratic toward something elitist. Let’s face it, the great film artists—Dreyer, Bresson, Antonioni, Cassavettes, etc., were stubborn and elitist directors who at one time were the talk of the town not because they were speaking to everyone, but precisely because they were uncompromising and difficult. Show business cinema will continue to give us those big collective experiences that we all love, but without the more exploratory/experimental cinema arts, the language will become stale. Late Hitchcock needs the French New Wave.
What would a cinema art market look like? I guess Matthew Barney is one model, but an unfortunate one. Making the Cremaster cycle limited edition DVDs does not put those images into collective circulation (I’ve been able to see only 2). It would be like owners putting Picasso’s first cubist paintings into a vault. Patrons and collectors should want their artists popular, exposed and of collective value.
Another model is Mark Amerika’s recent cell phone project, Immobilite: a limited edition feature film shown at museums, a website with remixed video segments, an iphone app, a pdf publication, a blog, probably some wall art and performances thrown in. I haven’t seen the 70 min. projected “film”, but what I love about the project is that it is trying to create a model for a new type of art cinema (and a new type of writing) by offering the process of its making and distribution as part of the work. The project is kind of manifesto. You can’t get more democratic than a cell phone. But again, it would be a shame if the limited edition feature were not available for viewing outside major cities.
How to sell a cinema project to collectors and still make it available to everyone? We have to get away from thinking of a cinema work as a 70-100 minute feature. More than anything the work should open up possibilities of seeing in a multi-dimensional way. This could mean something transmedia—a DVD, a book, a database, an installation, a website, wall art, social networking. This does not mean cinema artists should (necessarily) renounce narrative. It does mean looking at narrative as an element in the web of culture and not the dominating force for making meaning. Eija-Liisa Ahtila (with the help of Finland state funding) makes affecting stories for multi-screen installations and linear versions of the same stories for the festival circuit.
What about funding cinema art? What does it cost a painter to get a studio, paints, canvas, model? These costs are figured into the price of the final work. What does it cost a small theater company to put on a show? Public funding and patronage could help digital artists, but costs for shooting are near zero. Actors must be paid however, and though much depends on the nature of the project, their fees should also be included into the price of the final work. How much would a collector pay up front for a limited edition David Lynch project? How much would a collector pay up front for a limited edition newcomer’s project? I don’t know. But wouldn’t it be a bonus for “culture” if the artists were simply paid for the work and then let it go? No need for talk show circuits, promotional events, marketing campaigns. Just the art itself circulating the networks.
By embracing an art market (not the current one necessarily), there might be innovative ways to support novel cinema forms. Galleries and museums could be extraordinary houses for the moving image. Public funding could help everyone make, teach and share cinema art. Authors and musicians could partner with cinema artists to make hybrid works not just adaptations of novels or music video commercials. By owning limited editions of the work, collectors (the 1000 fans?) could choose screenings online and off to publicize their collections. And most importantly artists could make a viable living by making work, sharing their ideas with the public and doing it in a context that celebrates experimental forms. We need novel art to get us through these enormous cultural changes, and I would argue we need novel cinema art most of all.
March 11th, 2009 §
None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.
-Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation.
The 3-minute pop song has it’s roots in the ballad – a collage of words and sound given form with repetition and melody. We listen to most music (pick your favorite genre) over and over again not because we know what is going to happen next, but because our minds are turned on by the complexity of multiple inputs and the oceanic state beyond linear thought and meaning.
I am reading the new bio of Donald Barthelme, and getting reintroduced to his fragmented stories. For a while in the 60’s and 70’s, he was celebrated for a cinematic montage style where meaning was found (or discovered) in the juxtaposition of images, voices and genres. Everybody was doing it – The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Fellini, Godard. And then came a backlash, the collage style went out of fashion. Story and collage went their separate ways.
As I toil away at another draft of a screenplay, I get the heavy feeling (again) that the feature drama, like the novel, has lost much of its alchemical magic as an art form. I don’t think it’s a question of storytelling vs. a collage aesthetic. The traditional ballad and many pop songs, are fragmented stories. Some of the great storytellers of cinema (Welles, Hitchcock, Renoir) had a complex and somewhat fragmented style. Mainstream movies and novels have lost their power to connect to experience, which is more and more a collage-like messiness. As commercial art forms, they need to justify themselves to agents, publishers, producers and distributors. Every moment needs to be about something.
That’s why I love the fragmented messiness of net video. It is hard to find the magic and poetry, given the relentless and tiresome 20-something relationship dramas, but it is there. Here is a taste:
June 19th, 2008 §
Six months away from the vlog. There is a lot going on behind the scenes – personal/professional/national/global – but really I have been thinking, reading and absorbing. Where to go with one’s extra energy? Being a contemporary “media worker” is all about stops, starts and about-faces.
Mark Deuze’s Media Work lays out the opportunities and insecurities of media production in today’s “informational hypercapitalism.” The conclusions are neither optimistic nor pessimistic. They are, to me, simply hopeful. Disruptive technologies are exactly that – disruptive. Obama is a case in point.
Deuze reminds us that it is the novel and authentic that will always attract attention, and therefore have value. The difference now is that what is novel and authentic depends on networked communities made up of individual creators and consumers. It can no longer be controlled by top-down corporations,governments or boards. At the same time, commerce and power need attention flows and must be engaged with or following culture production. What does this look like in practice? Nobody knows the answer, which is why it is such an exciting and precarious time to be a media creator.
I recently finished a draft of a feature script that is one part novelty, three parts formula. It seems to me that Capital will only feed cultural production in healthy ways once it follows (rather than lead)s the directions of individual and niche creators. So instead of the 100 million dollar mega-hit, why not seed communities by funding 1000 artists with 100,000 dollars? Or 10,000 artists with 10,000 dollars? The artists have to keep working no matter what, continue creating novel and authentic forms without the attachment to money. If the artist helps to cultivate a niche community, then their work has value and money, in theory, should follow.
Much of my reading lately has been around the cultural implications of recent brain research. It could be said that the experience of novelty is the firing of new neuronal pathways in the brain. The brain feeds on new experiences.
- Neuroplasticity – experience changes the brain’s organization.
- Mirror neurons – the same neurons are fired by an animal performing an action as an animal observing that action.
Voice, style, technical innovation, the weird, the hybrid, the disruptive are what some of us hunt for – the fuel for these unstable times. But novelty in media is also the recording of the novel or contingent in daily life. A reminder of the strangeness of what is always nearby. Novelty is everywhere. It is our brains that become lazy and dull. One of the roles of art, and one that is essential for health, is the exercising of new (and refreshing of old) pathways in thought. The art vlog is the brain’s gym.
But the trick with novelty is that there needs to be a dose of the familiar, a cultural context, or else the brain has no way of dealing with it. It ignores novelty, rejects it or labels it silly or pretentious. The familiar is essential for novelty to actually register as novel. David Lynch is able to create such deeply strange experiences because he uses so much that is familiar – the well-lit suburban house, the diner, the cup of joe. The familiar is the invitation into the brain, where the art work can then start firing neurons in unexpected ways.
Authenticity is even trickier. Questions of authenticity were hotly debated when vloggers first shook hands with advertisers. An artist can be stuck repeating a certain kind of effect because it is easy or profitable to do so. Here is where networks and the feedback of consumer/creators help in authentic cultural production. We want to sing the praises of novelty and authenticity when we see it. The comment and the link are just as much acts of cultural production as the post.
These thoughts are not new. Just reminders to myself of why to keep making things.
In his poetically inspiring Keynote at the recent ELO Conference (entitled Visionary Landscapes), Mark Amerika reminds us that the work is never just about ourselves:
Perhaps playing to play
while staying ahead of ones time
requires a recalibration of ones inner time
catching the flow of their unconscious poetic rhythm
so that their intersubjective jam sessions
with the fluid personas within and without
take place in what I call asynchronous realtime.
By asynchronous realtime I am referring to
what at times feels like a timeless time,
a simultaneous and continuous fusion of horizons
that embeds itself in an ongoing formal investigation of
complex event processing where the visionary artist,
always gyrating at pivotal locations throughout the narrative,
becomes a multitude of flux identities
nomadically circulating within the networked space of flows.