April 28, 2023
"The dominance of the studios has both formed and deformed the American cinema and world cinema."
"It has also warped the very relationship of filmmakers to the practice of filmmaking—even psychologically. Many filmmakers attempting to take part in the business have found themselves in a grotesque Freudian struggle with Big Cinema Daddy, unable to dissociate their creative energy and their aesthetic drive from a battle with a pseudo-mythological giant. One of the paradoxes of independent filmmaking, even at its most extreme, is that it’s essentially dependent, and not just financially—it relies on a functioning film industry for equipment and services. I’m reminded of Gertrude Stein’s psychological distinction, in 'The Making of Americans,' of 'the independent dependent having attacking more or less sometime in them' and the 'dependent independent who can have sometime resisting in them.' The overt history of cinema is that of attack mode; the alternate history is one of resistance."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
37 comments:
looks like, i've HEARD of 7 of them. and seen 2 (i think)
A tale of mitigating progressive liberalism (e.g. single/central/monopolistic/studio solutions) in order to conserve the American model of diversity of individuals, minority of one. #HateLovesAbortion
As someone who's produced and sold an independent film, I find this excerpt to be wrong. Experienced and energetic crew are everywhere. In the old days you needed the camera rental agencies, access to editing equipment, and the film developing houses. With digital that isn't relevant anymore.
And the NYT rediscovers the fundamental role of competition in all things in the universe. The 'best' and 'strongest' and 'smartest' come up with ways to get things done and ways succeed financially. We might all watch USSR propaganda films or Woke Hollywood films, but we don't.
Equity 0, Evolution 1.
Brody is probably the worst elite film critic I've read in 30 years. That he writes for the New Yorker doesn't amaze me. Look at this sentence:
The center of independent production is infrastructure: filmmakers building their own authority regarding time, money, and matériel into the essence and foundation of their artistic authorship, whether out of necessity or desire.
This sounds like it was a bad translation from German. How does one "build authority"? And what the fuck is "Foundation of artistic authorship"?
The list of films and his comments aren't that bad. Metropolitan and blast of silence are both unknown and very good. I'm dubious of how "independent" Pyscho and Persona were.
New Yorker not NYT. I have a subscription to the latter.
1. Normally, I avoid anything written er overwritten by Brody, but these selections and his one-paragraph synopses were pretty good.
2. One note: independently-made films aren't all beer and skittles just because they're independent. The studio system bent to a lot of rebels, fighters and gifted artists.
Much like reading the commentary on Modern Art, I am struck by the sheer amount of time and search for complexity in cinema criticism.
Honestly, is making the films even important?
-XC
Much like reading the commentary on Modern Art, I am struck by the sheer amount of time and search for complexity in cinema criticism.
Honestly, is making the films even important?
-XC
"Billy Jack" is not on the list. Brody is a snob.
New Yorker not the NYT
Too many comic book movies. Theyre usually dark and I have no idea whats going on story wise. I wasnt a big comic book reader.
Cant they make a movie about The Archies or Beatle Bailey? I'd stand a chance.
According to Apple, if you have an iPhone you can make a movie.
Anecdotally, I've made a couple of movies with a camera (recording to tape) and a computer with a video input card.
One of my favorite 'independent/student' films is Dark Star. You don't need a big budget to make entertaining movies. If you don't need a big budget just tell the film industry (sic) to fuck off.
Sort of relevant I am currently about 15‰ into reading "the genius of the system" about the Hollywood studio system. By Thomas shatz.
It is about the nuts and bolts of how the movie industry operated from about 1910 and why it operated that way.
Why did Warners focus on low budget genre films while paramount focused on high end spactaculars? Paramount owned a lot of theaters, Warners owned none. Warner movies ran for a week. Some paramount movies ran for a year.
Excellent book so far. Thanks to Marginal Revolution for tipping me to it.
John Henry
I found that Gertrude Stein quote difficult to understand, but google found it paraphrased thus: “She divides people into dependent independents and independent dependents, “the first having resisting as the fighting power in them, the second have attacking as their natural way of fighting,” which seems clear to me. The quote itself seems like an unnecessarily wordy way of saying some people are more active than others, but the distinction is probably helpful for someone.
I disagree that “alternate” is a good replacement for “covert”in that passage, but otherwise I suppose I’ll need to read the article.
One of the paradoxes of independent filmmaking, even at its most extreme, is that it’s essentially dependent
I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain:
You give something up for every thing you gain
And you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Most movies are just cartoons now. In fact I believe the "C" in CGI actually stands for cartoon.
The old movie studios, run by Jewish entrepreneurs who had run movie theaters, knew what the public wanted. They were also patriotic for the country that allowed them to get rich. Jack Warner insisted on joining the Army in WWII. Today movies are made for effete elitists who make them for each other.
The studios are a doubled-edged sword. Yes, they can meddle with the creator's vision and many a studio has ruined what could have been a good movie, or at least an interesting one. They have also restrained creators from bad ideas and produced significantly better movies than would have been. There's also the matter that for truly epic films, only the studios have that sort of resources, though whether they can use them properly is always an open question. It is very dependent on the situation.
The idea that independent creators are paragons of filmmaking is laughable. They produce a lot of rubbish. So do the studios. The main difference is the independent creators tend to be produce a lot of "artistic", low budget rubbish that the large majority of people have never even heard of much less care about, while the studios produce a lot of high budget, commercial rubbish that people actually know, plus a smattering of Oscar bait, which have become less and less interesting over the years.
Looking at the list, there are a handful of films that I recognize. I am very amused that Carnival of Souls made the list, since that movie was ripped apart by the RiffTrax boys. I wouldn't call it a bad film, but if this is one of the best films for this category, that's a low bar to clear.
It's interesting that not one indie movie in the canon showed an individual or a town oppressed by socialism or by the regulatory state. A man burned himself to death in Keene New Hampshire to dramatize the plight of men who have fallen through the cracks into the "second system", the court based regulatory system which has no Constitutional protections for the individual man caught up in a bitter divorce. Can you imagine a movie about his plight? Or a movie about a women coerced into an abortion? Or a movie about even one life in the enormous group of people, black and white alike, who have been refused jobs in DC, in journalism and in the universities because they hold traditional beliefs on the Constitution or on a religion or even just on free speech - see Bari Weiss and Jordan Peterson? or a movie about the pressure brought to bear on individuals during the Kavanaugh hearings to lie - as chronicled by Mark Judge. Or a movie on the homeless or the border or downtown where restorative justice restores criminals to a life of crime?
Movies like Absence of Malice or the Lives of Others, only indie movies that don't hold back.
Wildswan, indeed a lot of stories to be told. We used to have novels that did that. I believe the last one was the Human Stain, abt 25 years ago.
Can't get away with that stuff now of course.
Just watched first trailer for Ridley Scott's Napoleon, scheduled for release in December. Joaquin Phoenix in title role. This is why studios make motion pictures for big screen release!
Of the 61 movies listed, I have seen "The Gold Rush", "Vampyr", "Othello", "Psycho", "Carnival of Souls", "Persona", "Faces", "Female Trouble", "Not a Pretty Picture", "She's Gotta Have It", "Metropolitan", and "Slacker". I have heard of a few of the others-either title or director- but recognized neither the title, description, or director of any of the rest.
and nolan is doing oppenheimer with cillian murphy, probably wont have the voice over problems of tenet, i don't think theyve done an oppenheimer treatment since sam waterston, 40 years ago,
Having worked for a couple of large studios and two broadcast networks, as well as produced television and film, I am not terribly sympathetic to the indie moaners and chest-thumpers. The purpose of a film studio is to develop, produce, and release profitable films.....films that actually return production costs, some overhead, interest costs, prints, advertising (and other distribution expenses), distribution fees, and profit.
The "distribution fees, and profit" part covers the losses on less successful films. Some dopey fuck who thinks that his art is paramount to the financial stability of a studio or a production company can always go out with his super 8 or iPhone and make his masterwork and then finance the costs of getting it into a theater and promoted out of his cocaine budget. But generally, they want to use other people's money for that shit.
Nobody sets out to make a failed film, but failed films predominate over 20 to 1. If it was easy to do, the Eskimos would be down here doing it.
- Krumhorn
"One of my favorite 'independent/student' films is Dark Star. You don't need a big budget to make entertaining movies. If you don't need a big budget just tell the film industry (sic) to fuck off."
A great and funny movie! Directed by the future director of HALLOWEEN (and many other good movies) John Carpenter, and scripted by the future screenwriter of ALIEN, (and other good movies) Dan O' Bannon. (O'Bannon does double duty as one of the spacemen in DARK STAR.)When I moved out of NYC last year, I purged many of my DVDs, but I kept my copy of DARK STAR.
I’ve seen 14 of them.
Slacker has always been a big favorite.
And I saw saw Playtime recently and thought it was the most artful movie I’d ever seen.
The only one of these movies I've seen is Playtime which I watched all the way through without any idea that it was social or architectural commentary. In fact I could not imagine what it was about or why but somehow it was interesting.
When talkies came in the 30s more and better writers were needed. The studios brought a flock of "journalists, playwrights and novelists fro back east. I found this bit interesting from Shatz' book:
Journalists often had a better ear for dialogue than playwrights or novelists, whose language usually sounded anything but natural when spoken on-screen.
Perhaps most important, journalists shared with veteran screenwriters a tendency to think of their work more as a craft than as an art. They rarely considered what they wrote their own, and put little stock in creative control and individual autonomy.
Like any other writers, journalists bitched about having their copy mutilated and having to write down to the masses, but they understood the movie business—and that it was a business.
John Henry
It's ridiculous to the point of absurdity to dismiss The 400 Blows and Breathless from the independent canon. Truffaut and Godard started the French New Wave. These were ultra-low budget movies, produced completely outside the studio system. And Godard and Truffaut had a profound and obvious impact on filmmaking. The jump cut, for instance, came from Godard.
It's mind-boggling to me that a film critic would dismiss these films as bad(!) or historically insignificant(!!!) or as somehow not independent cinema (!!!!!)
Of course there's a lot of fascinating and wonderful cinema from around the world -- cinema that was produced outside of Hollywood. But the French New Wave is especially significant because those films changed Hollywood filmmaking.
I get that Rohmer and Varda are both part of the French New Wave, but there's a reason that Godard and Truffaut are so famous. I can't remember what I was watching, but there was a montage of American filmmakers talking about their influences. And, yes, you heard Kurosawa's name. But the names that came up over and over were "Truffaut" and "Godard." They are foundational in independent cinema and any alleged canon of independent cinema that omits them is either the mark of woeful ignorance or it's a writer with really bad taste in movies.
#305 Playtime (1967) Jacques Tati went bankrupt making this movie. And it’s such a beautiful work of visual art, the shots are amazing.
I think it’s a difficult movie to get into, as there is no character engagement in the first two acts. If you didn’t know who Hulot was you would miss him. It’s all sight gags, sight gags, sight gags. And we’re so far away from the people. I felt like I was watching a Kubrick movie at first, very distant and cold with precise shots.
But once we get to the nightclub scene, wow. The last act of the movie is so chaotic and fun. I wanted to be in the nightclub so much! By the end of the movie, the warmth and humanity of Tati jumps out at you. It’s so playful and happy. It’s like a love letter from France.
Wilder was kind of dismissive of People on Sunday in his interview book (Cameron Crowe's version of Hitchcock/Truffaut, super-interesting).
"It was a silent picture, (the screenplay was) 25 pages...Robert Siodmak directed it, we all directed it, we all placed the lights. It was everybody's first official picture, except the cameraman (Eugen Schufftan). It was kind of vaguely true, almost documentary. That was the first picture my name was on as a writer...
It was a silent thing, where we talked while we were shooting, we told them what to do. I mean 'we' -- I was the writer, with Curt Siodmak. It was after an idea by Curt Siodmak, and the screenplay was by me. He was there too. Everybody was there, Zinnemann was there too, and we were schlepping the camera, we got no salary, we got like about -- let's ee, we got about a hundred dollars a week. We just did it, did it out of love. All the actors were new. They did not continue to be actors. (Laughs). The cameraman was the only guy who was a pro, who had done pictures before. Very, very well photographed, I must say. He (later) made pictures in Hollywood. His name was Schufftan, and he was the only guy who knew where to put the camera and what kind of lens to use. He later won the Academy Award for The Hustler in 1962. We borrowed the camera; we had the camera only on (Sunday). We were shooting for four or five months, just on Sunday when we had lots of people for the background.
I think it was just kind of a freelance experiment of a picture. It never quite got into much depth...
(Wilder goes on to talk about a sex sequence and how they intercut montage from a tennis match. Makes me want to see the movie! And Criterion has a release).
I've only seen 13 movies on this list. Here are my grades.
A+
The Gold Rush (The 1942 version is the one to watch, imho)
Psycho
Persona
Playtime
Metropolitan (Whit Stillman is mandatory viewing for hillbillies, especially his second film, Barcelona)
A
She's Gotta Have It (Spike Lee's only funny movie and still his best work)
A-
Slacker
Rome, Open City
B+
Carnival of Souls
D+
Rules of the Game
Pather Panchali
D-
La Pointe Courte
Blast of Silence
Added five to my watchlists...
People on Sunday
Vampyr
The Bakery Girl of Monceau
Faces
The Whole Shootin' Match
Netflix doesn't have People on Sunday, so I had to buy it. The company is winding down its DVD division this year. The end of an era! I'll always be a DVD man. The kids make fun of me, with my red envelopes. But a lot of really cool stuff you won't find on the streamers. As a matter of fact, I don't have cable. Any TV watching I do is DVD or Blu ray.
(I'm currently watching Vienna Blood. It's great!)
I love Dreyer -- Joan of Arc remains one coolest movies I've ever seen -- so it's strange that I haven't seen his vampire movie.
I had to add The Whole Shootin' Match to my queue after reading a couple of the Netflix reviews.
Holy crap did I love this movie. This is "Bottle Rocket's" crotchety uncle. It's "The Last Picture Show's" goofy cousin. It is a hilarious and kind-hearted movie that also has the fringe benefit of being a wonderful time capsule of Austin circa 1978. I cannot recommend this movie highly enough, especially to people that are used to slower paced talky movies about goofy but endearing misfits. (So basically, nearly all of my friends).
"Dark Star" is one of the films I wondered would be on the list or not.
One of the paradoxes of independent filmmaking, even at its most extreme, is that it’s essentially dependent, and not just financially—it relies on a functioning film industry for equipment and services.
Or in the immortal words of St. Barack of Unity, you didn't build that.
Side note: What a jerk that guy was.
In the words of me, gosh, mister, you sure are smart! To realize that an independent filmmaker needs things like a camera operator, a lighting person, a sound engineer, a place to film, someone who coordinates schedules, someone who pays everybody with proper withholdings, industries that produce cameras and film... What an insight!
If it weren't for the "who seized the means of production" bit or whatever it was, I wouldn't be so snarky. And maybe I shouldn't anyway, since this observation - that big endeavors don't get done without input from at least several areas of expertise - ought to be the absolute, ultimate nail in the coffin for would-be socialists. What do you think has fewer potential catastrophic pitfalls and more automatic safeguards against total collapse:
* an economy built from the top down in which government dictates and regulates every aspect of it, removing, drastically reducing, or attempting to dictate incentives, or
* one in which individuals, following their bliss or the money or whatever motivates them, gain expertise in an area, start a business doing it or work for a company that will pay them for doing it, and this pattern is repeated for every part of said economy?
I've only seen a few of the movies on this list, my favorite of them the great SLACKER by the always interesting and worthwhile filmmaker Richard Linklater. His DAZED AND CONFUSED perfectly captures the look and feel and milieu of my own high school experience, (I graduated in 1973 in Jacksonville Beach FL, and the movie depicts the end of the school year at a school in 1975 Austin, TX.)
The most obscure of the movies on the list may be BLAST OF SILENCE. I read about it 30-odd years ago in a book about little-known off-beat movies. A year or two later I saw it was being screened at a small theater in downtown Manhattan, with the film-maker and star of the movie, Allen Baron to be present to talk about the film. I made it a point to be there. I found the movie far better than the D- someone above grants it. I even bought the CRITERION dvd of it when it came out some years later. I haven't yet watched the dvd, but I will now, having been reminded of it.
Post a Comment