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.”

Tell us how you really feel, Ian. Svenonius, who usually directs his cheeky of-the-people satire at pop music, is partly joking (I think, blank post-irony is tricky)…. but here’s the rub, he’s also partly right. While there has never been more socially and politically engaged filmmaking being produced, I struggle to name recent fillmmakers (at least those known to more than a handful) who are formally innovative on the level of, say, Emile de Antonio, or Peter Watkins, or Santiago Alvarez, or even early Errol Morris and, egad, Michael Moore (there was a time when Moore was inventive).

Thus, rather then anxiety over how this glut of filmmaking is going to be…don’t write “monetize”….don’t write “monetize”….monetized, my own apocalyptic anxiety has become: Will engaged filmmaking, as currently manifested in North America, exhaust itself just at a moment when, in relative terms, it is at peak popularity? Will audience interest hold for a form that seems to have settled into predictable patterns and conventions?  At Independent Film Week I participated in one of those meet the gatekeeper speed dating sessions in which filmmakers rotate between tables, spending ten minutes presenting their projects. Of my twelve meetings, the majority were regarding social issue/human rights films, most with rather familiar subject matter. That’s fine, but few, if any, of these projects articulated any thought or ambition regarding film form.

But why would these filmmakers want to discuss actual filmmaking at an independent filmmaking conference; most of the panel topics directed at them were about financing or distribution. Its remarkable that within this so called DIY filmmaking culture the one thing that’s scantly discussed in public at film festivals and conferences is the creative act of making a film. And not to pick on ifp, as this is true of all the events I attend, including Hot Docs (where I’m also responsible for the Conference topics!). Most of the creative issue panels we’ve done are quite modestly attended. Its the funding and distribution panels that are seen to sell delegate passes.

Another irony exists here. Typically the limits of documentary film form are perceived to have been imposed by broadcast television. But, as we know, and as Nick Fraser recently reminded us at the Vancouver International Film Festival, broadcast television is not exactly committed to sustaining the future of documentary features:

“If you look at the story of documentaries over the past 10 years, it’s a fucking scandal,” Fraser said. “These documentaries, when they work well, are the most important cultural artifacts of our time. But the way they’ve been treated by broadcasters is just barely comprehensible…It’s a sort of philistinism. It’s an act of vandalism, and a sort of stupidity that you can’t see under your nose what’s great… The fact they’re not shown enough on television indicates that by and large — except for the people on this panel — television doesn’t care about the rest of the world. It cares about itself.”

Something in Fraser’s words bear, for me, the frustration of an incredible moment slipping away. Beyond the very practical concern of knowing, if not broadcast tv, where the money for the next wave of documentary is coming from, I wonder what kind of films are going to be made. The past ten years has been a watershed for documentary, which over this period has been the most vital movement within the broader context of film culture. A new wave, even. Yet, the bulk of the political and social issue work I’ve been seeing the past two or three years is, creatively, offering diminishing returns. A synthesis of cinema verite, direct address, personal and reflexive filmmaking styles, not to mention sophisticated new strategies for representing reality, revitalized and drove interest in the form. However, they are now hardening into stylistic cliches.

The new documentary flourished as a fresh and fluid alternative to the tired storytelling conventions of narrative film (while, of course, doing a fair amount of borrowing from classical narrative). There are still many many good, and some great, documentaries being made. In fact, Hot Docs 2009 was as deep in quality as any festival with which I’ve been associated. Yet, if the vitality of documentary expression is stuck in a cul de sac, I don’t see how funding and distribution prophesies are going to provide a way out. I cling to a romantic notion that its the work itself, or more likely one work, or a handful, that will provide that interruptive moment which aligns all the new fangled distribution models bandied about on film festival panels. Its not the pundits, but the filmmakers who we need to jump start “the new way.”

And, then, just maybe we’ll do a panel on it at Hot Docs.