Tuesday, December 30, 2008

indie film "crisis"?

via Anne Thompson (Variety), Mark Gill's LA Film Festival address on the proliferation of filmmaking potential, market news, and a shared film-community sense that "The Sky is Falling." 

Read to the end for Gill's hopeful minimalist and pragmatic view of the potential we might salvage from "the carnage."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice talking to you at MLA. I'll admit that I have some skepticism with regard to Gill's speech. As I mentioned there (or tried to mention--I may have run out of time), there are a number of indie companies who did well this year. I'm not that convinced that these narratives are connected to actual box office numbers, etc. But there is quite a bit of good stuff to mine here.

bonnie lenore kyburz said...

yeah, Gill makes a case, but i can't agree completely with his overgeneralization re: digital and radically indie films at Sundance. there *are* some clunkers, but there is a lot of really good stuff, too. and then, the festival does a tremendous service (well, in many cases) as a part of the process of getting after those "fewer, better" Gill lauds.

bonnie lenore kyburz said...

plus, relevant to questions regarding the "shared, communal cinematic experience" narrative, festival screenings create/become/simply *are* environments in which film enjoys a more luxurious kind of range and difference. festival screenings "tolerate" stuff that doesn't often find appreciation from mainstream filmgoing audiences. so, there's something to think about re: Web 2.0 filmmaking and distribution and whatnot. that is to say, festival screenings maybe operate as a kind of case study on expansive cinema (?).