TORONTO QUICK TAKES, LINKAGE + INDIE FILM CONTINUES TO DIE

A few quick notes from Toronto and a couple of links before I go to bed. I'll write in slightly greater length about these films in the next few days.

By my fourth day here in Toronto, I've seen three films that I can wholeheartedly recommend: Steven McQueen's piercing, astringent near-masterpiece Hunger, which plays here in Toronto after debuting in Cannes; Astra Taylor's generous and affirming philosophy doc Examined Life; and Rahmin Bahrani's wise and well-observed Goodbye, Solo.

A couple of news items out of the festival:

Celluloid Dreams has picked up international rights to Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's Soul Power, a documentary on the 12-hour concert that took place in Zaire in 1974 that was the subject of When We Were Kings. Josh Braun of Submarine repped the film. And New York-based sales company Visit Film rides the mumblecore express all the way to Australia. They've sold a package of five films -- Hannah Takes The Stairs, LOL, and Kissing on The Mouth from director Joe Swanberg and Dance Party USA and Quiet City from Aaron Katz -- to Beyond Films. I think it's fair to say that the mumblecore moniker and packaging opportunity definitely helped these small films cross the ocean while other tiny digitally shot films are stuck Stateside.

And, finally, the New York Times weighs in with its own "Indie Film is dead" double-decker. Manohla Dargis's is titled "The Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution," and she makes the point that indie film has bifurcated itself into two completely different businesses. There is the "indiewood" industry, which spends a lot of marketing money to claim the "indie brand" while producing films that seem far from the edgy provocations that used to define it. And then there are the group of films that I think are constituting something of a real renaissance in independent film right now: Frownland, Ballast, Wendy and Lucy, Momma's Man, Sugar (and I'd add The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Medicine for Melancholy). These pictures represent independent film as art, not specialty entertainment, and Dargis wonders if we wouldn't be better off if the remaining specialty labels didn't just keel over and die so as to give these often DIY-distributed films some space in the marketplace. The second piece is A.O. Scott's "It''s Suddenly So Last Year, that Bold New Guard," in which he wonders what happened to all the energy that seemed the studio specialty divisions last year.

At his blog Naked Came I, Tim has some thoughts about both articles, and he makes these points about the assumptions regarding DIY distribution he found in Dargis's piece:

Dargis also (briefly) talks about the "DIY" move current in independent film thinking. Filmmaker magazine has been promoting the DIY model for nearly five years now. In this model, filmmakers avoid using a distribution company to get their movies into theaters. Rather, filmmakers utilize the Web to build audience awareness -- posting on zillions of message boards, buying supported-links on Google or Amazon.com, using viral marketing, posting on Usenet and even relying on limited spam to get the message of the film out. It's a lot like "The Blair Witch Project," and the DIY model relies very heavily on building a Web site for the movie. Whether the DIYer should release DVDs of their movie (buy the DVD on the Web site) or permit downloads is an ongoing argument in the DIY community. Another problem is that filmmakers aren't viral marketers or PHP coders. A filmmaker who's barely scraped $150,000 together for a movie and whose whole life has been devoted to cinematography and film direction can't be expected to also learn how the long tail works, be an expert in viral marketing, and know how to find, create databases of, and post to hundreds of Web sites, Usenet groups and list-servs. Do do they? That's another part of the DIY debate, and probably the one raging most fiercely at the moment.

Dargis drastically mis-characterizes the DIY model. She thinks it's the old "do the art-house and film festival circuit" followed by re-creating a distribution company on the cheap. That's not the DIY model, and never has been. In fact, while the DIY model advocates doing the art-house and film festival circuit, that's never been considered part of the distribution model. That's been considered more of the "get your film noticed so a distributor can buy it" segment of the traditional distribution model.

# posted by Scott Macaulay

Posted on 09/08/08 by: FilmMakerMag 06:01 PM