In defence of the backwater.

 Radical filmmaking is important.  Radical films force the audience to confront their prejudices, question their perceptions, and form opinions that challenge accepted norms.

Film for film's sake.  Film made for deeper reasons than entertainment.

However, this form of filmmaking can alienate and confuse.  For some fundamentalists, this might be a test for the seriousness of a text.

Is entertainment bad?  Why? If an artwork entertains, is this a weakness?

Radical politics and radical filmmaking are bedfellows.

How does art change society?  By embodying ideas (making people think).

Does the revolutionary aid or hinder the evolutionary?

What does an analysis of history suggest?

How has radical film influenced visual mediums - modes and ways of seeing and interpreting.

Visual literacy has lots of parallels with literacy per se: it is intrinsically valuable, it enriches society, defines diverse cultures.

Poetry develops language and ways of communicating ideas.  It is a forum for radical experimentation with language.  It expands perceptions of the world.  This is true of radical film.

Paddling up a backwater is exciting.  There are difficult passages, past fallen trees, and up shallow rapids, but the effort is always worth it because it takes your head to a different place.  Radical film amounts to many backwaters that feed the mainstream, but only if they are regularly visited.  And there is always a way to get further upstream if you try.

Narrative shapes people's lives.  Narrative film reinforces common narratives (myths) that are often reactionary.  Radical film works with concepts.  Can narrative be a part of radical film?

A recuperation of narrative?

Is metafiction really the enemy?  Does radical film really need to define itself in terms that dismiss narrative and its apologists?  Is being 'anti-illusionist' its only justification?

I can't really believe anything I'm seeing on any screen, but I am seduced by moving images combined with sound, and let myself be entranced.  I know a painting is just paint on canvas, but I let myself drift off into the world of the painting.  I acquiesce, but know that I can move on from screen or painting at any time it suits me.

Re:structural/materialists like Peter Gidel - 

I suspect that there was an anti-acrylic paint group when this particular technology arose, populated by those who swore by the political, moral, and technical superiority of oil paints.  The material used to communicate ideas in artworks might not be not irrelevant, but is not very important either.  Acrylic and oil can happily be combined.  What counts is actually the content.

That was the climax of this particular blog post, narratively speaking.  There is no escape from narrative.  This next bit is the denouement - even the most apparently narrativeless films have a narrative.  It is the story of their creation, the context of their making, the history of their viewing audience, their influence on filmmaking, but also their content - if a blank screen has duration, it has narrative.  If a blank screen doesn't have duration, it still has narrative.  This is because narrative is the way everyone attempts to understand the world and navigate life.

There are backwater narratives that don't appear to have any story, but they still have meaning.

Project Nantlle Coed

 

Some films are made just for the maker, who is the only audience.  A private diary.  But film is a powerful medium, and impacts on society: governments across the world have a history of funding national film making. 

Question the whole cinematic apparatus: writing, making, marketing, showing, the audience.  Create ‘Nantllewood’?  Create a market by selecting your audience personally.

Fashion a structure for a cultural action group.

A kickstarter – 100 Audience members – An exclusive film for only those who sign up.  Each member is a director = ‘distributed direction’.

Options are offered to the closed group for the presentation of the film.

So – recruit a group of people who are to be the audience for the film that they will decide the structure/context for, based on the options provided / shared with them by the director (me).

Each member/fan pays a fee and has votes on what happens in the film and when.

Clips are provided for each one minute section to make 17 minute film.

17 sections of music are shared and voted on where they are played.  The ‘premier’ is by private internet share.

To question what the relationship of the audience is to a film – a reverse marketting of the medium?

To apply structural principles ( a set of rules that are predetermined) to a whole film production. (as opposed to narrative principles).

To document the whole process/project in a documentary film.

A cinematic cult who are chosen to be members, and who vote on various options for the film as provided by me.

To subvert the current industry model for filmmaking (or to usurp the current model and apply it to a radical context).

Mainstream film starts with the selection of a script that is judged to be a financial success.  (Or does it?)  This judgement is based on what has been a money-earner before, and on focus groups and market research.  Standard practice dictates that a film maker/director decides on, or has a clear concept of, the audience for the film.  For mainstream film, this is the biggest audience possible.  Thus, a children’s film that has reference to adult issues is a winner as both children and adults will enjoy it.

So maybe a mainstream film starts by analysing the market (audience) for a potential film, and then looking for a story/script that could meet the needs of the audience/production? Thus genre - ‘What kind of films do you like?

Statistics concerning who, demographically speaking, attends the cinema is also important.  So the idea of selecting an audience and letting them have a hand in making the film which is aimed at them is in one respect a radical framing of what happens in all funded, mainstream cinema, but also could be seen as a radical recuperation of the methods of capitalist cultural making.

The spectator vs the audience.

The private film whose only publicity/proof of existence is the PhD.

A three year project to make a film comparison about the film industry versus artist made films.  To apply radical ideas of structural film: that narrative forces identification and thus perpetuates the lie that everything is fine.

Filmmaking as a process.

Makers have developed various technical processes to produce interesting effects in the actual body of the film.  Options for experimentation in the other elements of process involved in filmmaking are available.  

The process of marketing and promoting: 

the process of writing/scripting: