FREE CINEMA NOW

For this post, I thought I'd let your eyes AND ears have a go at it. In the video below I've juxtaposed images from Stan Brakhage 's Black Ice with interview audio of Harmony Korine from the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival . Consider it another "call to arms" for the emerging wave of new independent digital filmmakers and content creators. Now watch.

A common oversight in our creative field is the curation of GOOD or STIMULATING content. Social media platforms like Vimeo give us all megaphones that can sometimes create more white noise in our arena; this can hinder the validity of an emerging new wave of indie filmmaking because there is such a high flux of content coming and going. The bottom line is that most online content (video, film) is quite bad. And not bad in an intentionally volatile or spiteful way. It's just that everyone is putting everything online. So where do you go? How do you compete with the dancing cat videos when your content is a 7-minute silent film? The key is going to be in the "micro"-curation among the independents . It's going to involve some meticulous cross-promotion of engaging or interesting works by our peers. This is harder than it sounds. The reason is that much of our time is already dedicated to actually creating content and then promoting ourselves as branded entities o...

The need for neoauteurs is great. Probably more needed than ever. And not for conventional reasons of industry argument either (e.g. to exist as the antidote to such Tinseltown dreck as Avatar or The Ugly Truth ) but because this recent democratization of film has given birth to a wave of faux novice filmmakers who are more in love with their camera--and not their content. Our indie cinema needs more narrative risk takers and more artists challenging our perception of the world. I'm not saying that there aren't any neoauteurs around right now but with filmmaking 2.0 being available at every corner, it seems that now is the most opportune time to really experiment with conventional form, delivery and method . A few years back a colleague of mine, James Choi , managed to get a few questions in with one of my favorite filmmakers Harmony Korine down at the SXSW Festival. It's a gem of an interview because Korine plays his usual role as a subtle prankster, challen...