“What Does America’s Cinema Business Need Now?” — A New Seven Part Series
Yup… I have another long series for you. I guess that is what happens when we try to answer the Big Question Of The Cinema Ecosytem, eh? This is Part One of a seven-part HopeForFilm new series on what America’s cinema business most needs now if our goal is to sustain authored cinema.
What do we lack? Might as well turn my obsession into something useful, right?If you can see what’s missing, you at least know what is needed. That’s one step closer to making it better. When it comes to the cinema ecosystem, there’s so much that is still abscent, you can see why it doesn’t work better for any of us. We have to start to ask why it isn’t being addressed. Consider this new series, my effort to help to decide what to prioritize. It nestles nicely with the prior series that asked “Who will be responsible for “independent” film?”; in fact that series, grew out of this one.
This opening installment defines the work we are trying to preserve and the kind of ecosystem it requires. Part Two will ask who can actually afford a creative life in America; Part Three will turn to power, policy, ownership, competition, transparency, and accountability; Part Four to the machinery of finance, distribution, data, and NonDē circulation; Part Five to exhibition, audience development, education, preservation, and cultural life; Part Six to who takes responsibility for the health of the whole ecosystem; and Part Seven will bring the practical proposals together in a working Cheat Sheet.
Whew! And that’s just the plan I have for it now. If it is at all like my efforts before, it will also evolve as I publish — particularly if you Dear Readers engage with some questions.
Let’s get into it, shall we? I do think this is a series you can’t afford to miss… or participate in, if I do say so myself.
Part One: What Are We Actually Trying to Sustain?
For decades, those of us working outside the cinema studio-industrial complex have asked some version of the same question: How do we get more films made? This question however has a bad assumption baked in to it. America does not lack movies, or videos, or reels. We produce an extraordinary quantity of moving images. But that doesn’t mean that will continue, that the work will be preserved, easily accessed, or even engaged with.
So maybe it is time to stop talking about getting films made, and instead move onto the more urgent question of whether ambitious, authored cinema can continue to be made, valued, and remembered — and whether the people devoting their lives to that work can maintain doing it.
Such a mindshift requires us to all be much clearer about what we are trying to sustain. Cinema is a business, certainly, but it is also a cultural industry and, for many of the people who work within it, a passion industry. People do not spend years building — a screenplay, a production company, a repertory series, an app, or a federation of filmmakers — because those are rational ways to maximize income. They do those things because cinema matters to them deeply, because they want to contribute something, and because they want to build a creative life around cinema.
All of us here once fell in love with film and recognized great movies change our lives for the better, didn’t we?
Passion does not remove the need for economics that benefit all that are involved. In some ways, it makes that need more urgent, because passion industries are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. People will tolerate conditions they would never accept elsewhere simply to remain close to the work they love. I joke that America has had a great cinema industry because we remain free to exploit people far beyond the limit of the law. But it is true, and unfortunately one of the reasons why only the most desperate or rich can afford to work here now.
So before we start proposing tax incentives, distribution mechanisms, new institutions, or regulatory fixes, we need to decide what kind of cinema culture we actually want. You with me, Boyo?
We need to know the destination before we build the path
I have written many times about the need for utopian ideation when it comes to our cinema ecosystem. I do not mean utopian in the sense of pretending constraints do not exist. I mean allowing ourselves to describe the system we actually want before immediately reducing our ambitions to whatever seems politically or commercially plausible this quarter. It still makes sense to reach high.
If we only think of— and design for — the existing marketplace, we will mostly produce incremental modifications to the status quo and the existing marketplace. Sure, some of those may be useful, but they are unlikely to be enough.
We all should first ask what a healthier American and global cinema ecosystem would look like if we were actually designing for the long-term sustainability of the work, the people making it, and the audiences engaging with it. It doesn’t feel to me that we have done that. Does it feel that way to you? Once we have a clearer sense of that destination, we can then argue about discuss which paths are practical, which require public funding, which one entrepreneurs can build, and which of our current habits need to change.
We cannot put down the road until we have some idea where we want it to lead. Capisce?
What do I mean by authored cinema?
This matters, because I am not using “authored cinema” as another way of saying auteur cinema, nor am I invoking auteur theory — and some folks seem to get a tad confused.
Auteur theory is often concerned with recognizing a filmmaker’s recurring perspective or signature across work, sometimes despite the industrial circumstances under which that work was made. Authored cinema, as I am using the term here, is all about a responsible individual’s intent, and that generally being the director.
When I use “authored”, it is represent the intentional effort to allow a personal perspective to blossom from the work beyond the desire to simply “tell a good story well.” The director does not have to have written the screenplay, and the underlying material may originate elsewhere. What matters is that the director is consciously shaping the film through a particular way of seeing the world and making that perspective integral to the finished work.
That perspective can emerge through any number of ways — performance, framing, rhythm, structure, tone, sound, design, or the way the film chooses to observe its characters and their world. The specific methods will vary from filmmaker to filmmaker, but the authored quality comes from the director’s deliberate creative point of view, beyond just getting the story down and making it look nice.
That can happen in a comedy, thriller, documentary, or genre film just as readily as in something traditionally labeled an “art film,” and it can happen at $50,000 or $50 million. Authorship is not synonymous with solemnity, obscurity, modest budgets, or the refusal to entertain. It is the deliberate presence of the director’s perspective in the work. It is about intention, perspective, and creative agency. It is generally the opposite of corporate filmmaking today.
We once had a stronger ecosystem for authored cinema…
Authored cinema remains highly visible in international festival and prestige cinema, where filmmakers are often expected to bring a distinct perspective to the work. I just came back from the Venice Film Festival. All 25+ films I saw there were “authored”. I am watching four films a day now at the New York Film Festival’s press screenings; they are all authored too, but rarely from the U.S. American cinema once truly supported the “authored” impulse too, but the conditions have changed substantially since those days.
The American “Indie” cinema of the 1990s often carried an expectation that the filmmaker would bring something personal and particular to the screen. The excitement was not simply that a movie had been made outside a studio. Or that it may sell. It was frequently that someone seemed to be speaking differently through the form, whether that difference came through story, tone, politics, humor, or visual language.
As the American “Indie” sector became more institutionalized and more tightly connected to market sale, the incentives shifted. Increasingly, success meant creating a film capable of attracting a distributor or recognizable cast — some form of market validation. There is nothing wrong with wanting a film to sell — filmmakers need audiences and investors need returns — but when marketability becomes the dominant organizing principle, other ambitions get diminished.
SC-Indie Film became increasingly good at trying to make modest versions of movies the larger business already understood. And frankly, I for one, am not much of a fan of those wanna-be’s.
The art, the artist, the audience, and the ecosystem
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