It’s the end of the semester, and I’ve had an existential need to leave work after long days and see a film, but when I look at what’s at the local theater’s, it’s all shite. The existential need that is my soul then slumps and I think to myself: who are these [people] in control of what is available to me (the same shite at every theater), and why is there not at least a little variety? Why is there not a single independent film available for viewing in all of Canton Ohio? Well, thank the maker for Steven Soderbergh, who in Film Comment gives us all the answers to at least what the problem is and why it matters. First of all, there is the distinction between movies (which are doing fine) and cinema (which is not):
The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made. It has nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with where the screen is, if it’s in your bedroom, your iPad, it doesn’t even really have to be a movie. It could be a commercial, it could be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.
These are outrageous, surprising numbers:
In 2003, 455 films were released. 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films, and yet, 10 years ago: Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.
I like Soderbergh’s fantasy-studio thought experiment. Hire talented directors, give them a budget, and let them make things. Why doesn’t that happen? One filmmaker he mentions as one he’d hire is Shane Carruth, whose new film Upstream Color I’m scheduled to see tomorrow night at a premier in Akron. His first film, Primer—about some entrepreneurs who accidentally make a time machine—is quite good and available on Netflix.
But SS does have some hope, and sees hope as the only salient, salable thing.
So whenever I despair I think, okay, somebody out there somewhere, while we’re sitting right here, somebody out there somewhere is making something cool that we’re going to love, and that keeps me going. The other thing I tell young filmmakers is when you get going and you try to get money, when you’re going into one of those rooms to try and convince somebody to make it, I don’t care who you’re pitching, I don’t care what you’re pitching—it can be about genocide, it can be about child killers, it can be about the worst kind of criminal injustice that you can imagine—but as you’re sort of in the process of telling this story, stop yourself in the middle of a sentence and act like you’re having an epiphany, and say: “You know what, at the end of this day, this is a movie about hope.