ripping reality

(“Hi there, internet.” Sundance’s John Cooper, Berlin’s Weiland Speck, tiff’s Piers Handling, Tribeca’s Geoff Gilmour and I, the not so attentive moderator, discuss “The Changing Role of Film Festivals” at tiff. Photo courtesy of Peter Belsito via Sydney’s Buzz)

A side effect of being tossed from my summer media diet into Fall’s fulsome trough of film festival fodder (tiff, followed by ifp’s Independent Film Week, then Nordisk Panorama) has been that things seem different than before, even the before of just last Spring. And by “different” I mean apocalyptic.

Old news now, but you can read about the apocalypse here, and here, and also here, and here too…and there’s much more. I’ve moderated six panels in the past few weeks, and regardless if the panel topics have been orientated around film festivals, or distribution, or technology, or even specific case studies, they’ve all been essentially about the same thing…..its the end of something, and something else will be taking its place.

And everybody seems to be writing manifestos or becoming distribution consultants.

Closer to my discomfort zone, pinko provocateur Ian F. Svenonius proclaims a “documentary crisis”:

“these films are usually bad-looking, un-nuanced, propagandistic tellings of events. The camera work is almost always execrable, the narration simplistic, the method of storytelling is usually a parade of talking heads; they feel like audiovisual presentations in grade school. While utilizing this powerful medium and trying to express a particular ideological argument could be admirable, the aesthetic decisions of the video auteurs often reveal an infantilized weltanshcauung, a stunted artistic vision, and a linear and impoverished mindset.”

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