Deconstruct your cinema
If in this year of our Lord 2009 you are self identifying as an ‘independent filmmaker’ it is quite likely that you are expending an overwhelming amount of headspace on the ‘state of the industry’. Pondering co-opted corporate terms like “paradigm shift” or “thinking outside the box” and so on. These times, indeed they are a changin’.
With all this conversation of how technology is changing the way in which we find, view and interact with films I find it interesting how little time is spent on the subject of the films themselves. Other than the transmedia or cross platform discussions, which I find personally exciting with the understanding that it is not an arena suited for every film, I find there is very little actual talk about how the art of cinema, the film itself, must evolve its form in order to fit in to this new non-linear information based world we now live.
Last night I watched Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. I’ve always admired Soderbergh’s work, his aesthetic and frankly his commitment to experimentation and working digitally.
As I was guided through the world of The Girlfriend Experience I realized that I was witnessing perhaps the beginning of what this new form of cinema might look like. It’s non linear in approach, though wholly understandable, even logical, blurring the line of narrative and documentary, subjective and objective, to create a living social document that is firmly situated ‘in the now’ both in subject matter and in method of construction. Entertaining and deeply engaging, visceral yet intellectual.
Years ago I remember the musician Beck commenting, after being classified as ‘alternative’, on how (and I’m paraphrasing) at some point all genres of music will dissolve and we will loose the chains of these music labels.
I think this is where we’ve arrived with the art of cinema, at least for the forward thinking among us. Forms and genres crashing into one another, fearlessly deconstructing “the way things have always been done” to create a cinema that lives and breathes in the now.
In my search for that Beck quote I ran across this WIRED interview with him. In it he says the following:
“There are so many dimensions to what a record can be these days. Artists can and should approach making an album as an opportunity to do a series of releases – one that’s visual, one that has alternate versions, and one that’s something the listener can participate in or arrange and change. It’s time for the album to embrace the technology.”
Exchange “record” and “album” for “film” and “listener” for “viewer” and I think we have the current state of the industry. It’s time to evolve. Both form and function.