Azza El Hassan.
Palestinian documentary film maker.
on her film Exposed and Lost
“As an independent filmmaker who started off by making extremely low budget documentary films I got used to doing everything by myself. I would go with a small digital camera and spend weeks shooting on my own. The absence of a crew allowed my locations to become more relaxed. Characters would move without lights and cables and people observing them; it was just me and my camera. Also I learnt to spend lots of time with my subjects since I needed longer periods of shooting because I was doing things alone. In this project I worked with a professional crew of four people as well as myself.
Because the film involved going to four different countries and movement of an Arab crew would have been restricted due to the political situation I ended up working with a European crew who spoke no Arabic. I think this meant that at the moment when the camera started rolling and I spoke to all my characters in Arabic I managed to develop a feeling of isolation that I believe worked to the benefit of the project. Also I have known most of the people in the film for years so a bond between us already existed. I think without a relaxed feel in each location it would be very difficult to make a personal film which people could associate with."
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/july01/0107037.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/azza-interview.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/azza_el_hassan_interview.shtml
Not embarrassed to say that I’m a bit of a fan of postmodernist bullshit.
However, I will sign the petition of more intelligence/classicism in independent film.
How about postmodern intelligence?
I’ll think of an awsome filmmaker that will make you proud T.
Stay tuned.
Bruno Dumont,
French Cinemamaker.
Despite the necessary uncomfort while watching his films, the more I think about them in retrospect, the more I love Bruno Dumont as a conceptual artist. Constant subtlety & his languid pace allows one to somehow remember nuances you otherwise did not render significant while watching. To this very day, there are select scenes from each of his films that standout in my brain, not because of shock value (not those scenes) but rather because of the overwhelming humanitarian honesty. He looks his characters right in the eyes (literally & figuratively) & he does not flinch, which of course means the characters are looking you directly in the eyes. Which is startling. And above all beautiful.
“I see [Twentynine Palms] as moving closer to formal art. My dream is that this film would be shown in museums, not in movie theatres. And that people should see it as individuals and not as a collective audience.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Dumont
I love Bruno Dumont. Any man who can find the emotional content in filming industrial machines (his first job, corporate videographer)… I agree completely. His work has this slow burning resonance —L’humanité stayed with me months after I watched it… he has a capacity for shining light into the darkest, most ironic and most softly human of places. Great great film director.
Cristi Puiu
Romanian filmmaker
His film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu sits in a very strange place for me. It’s not a picture to enjoy, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. What is so fascinating about watching an old man suffer at the hands of inept healthcare workers during his last hours alive? I don’t know. Shot very stripped down documentary style, but it almost seems like the camera is behind the old man the entire journey or peering at him from a safe distance like death just waiting to creep in. Hollywood would never have the guts to make a film like this, it goes against everything the American happy ending promises. There is no victory, nothing is overcome, boy does not get girl instead he dies, hypocrisy is exposed, the human condition is realized for what it is….lonely at the end and we all must die and do it alone. I found it very honest and brave. I look forward to more films from Puiu.
T- amen brother, hipsterism is running wild and it needs to be combated.
I think there are a crop of genuine filmmakers on the rise though.
I just saw a wonderful film by a new director named Ramin Bahrani called “Chop Shop”, he’s like an American with the Kiarostami touch. It gave me a lot of hope.
Eric Dyer
Danish animator.
An experimental animator who often uses computers to create his films, Dyer produced “Copenhagen Cycles” using a new filmmaking method that he developed, merging digital animation and a pre-cinema technique. He compiled hundreds of photographs he took while bicycle riding around the streets of Denmark during his 2005 Fulbright Fellowship. First, Dyer printed and cut the sequences of the moving images and built about 25 zoetrope-like paper sculptures, then spun the sculptures and recaptured the collaged movements with a fast-shutter digital video camera. The art installation version of “Copenhagen Cycles” includes the bicycle wheel-sized zoetropes and a video demonstration of the unique filmmaking process.
Kifah —re:“Chop Shop” ah man I’ve heard of this, and good things only. I’ll check it out.
Thanks for the rec.
I find Robert Bresson to be as revolutionary to cinema as Sergei Eisenstein; he just hasn’t been paraded around for his impact yet.
Bresson’s impact can be felt in such diverse works as those of Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Abbas Kiarostami, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Jean-Luc Godard.
He is the other end of the spectrum for me from what was described in the original post.
Very few filmmakers reach this level of excellence today. So, though Bresson is long dead and gone, I recommend starting with him and then seeing if anyone can measure up.
Bresson’s impact is felt how? I hear what you are saying, actually, but I don’t get why. The global film industry has changed dramatically since Bresson’s early days— I doubt his particular plane of invention can be reached by anyone currently, as new filmmakers are 90% caught in the crossfire between a dying/evolving Hollywood, “independent festival” circuits murdered by big corporations masquerading as small film companies, a www. rapidly annexed by advertizing agencies and the same big corporations, and the need to eat somewhere down the line.
Ugh. Manifestos.
Craig Baldwin
I got to meet him recently, which was a really great experience. He’s a San Francisco based collagist filmmaker who deals in alternative histories, science fiction, and re-appropriating pop culture commodity for reinterpretation. Spectres of the Spectrum is a great movie, and he has a recent out called Mock Up on Mu which is touring around and deserves attention (it has his best editing and one of the strongest uses of the Western genre send-up ever). Mock Up on Mu is a tale of vengeance and Cold War terror through the eyes of L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, and Lockheed Martin (as a character, yes)…. and, well, Alaistar Crowley, all in the year 2020. Spectres of the Spectrum is a send-up of the Telecommunications Act and a sort of cyberpunk attack on owned public air space. These are the only two movies of his I’ve seen, but he has others that look very compelling as well, and he’s a very compelling guy, too. He’s also the owner/creator of that Other Cinema DVD label I keep talking about on here, a label that honestly is hard to find but shouldn’t be ignored.
—PolarisDiB
It’s not really a manifesto, PolarisDiB.
I’m going to check out this Other Cinema label of which you speak so highly.
Yep, dire. Bresson. He’d never get off the ground today. Great filmmaker. Useless model. Unless you’re using him as a way of working close to the bone, to reality. Look at that list up there: one’s dead, one is way outside our system. Jarmusch retains his hard-fought idependence, but I wonder where’d he be if he came along today? Godard? Well, he’s hunkered down in Switzerland or someplace with his video equipment, and how many care? Of Scorsese, what can be said? Big Stars, bigger budgets. Decades ago (has it really been that long?) Robert Fripp suggested that the artist become a “small, mobile, intelligent unit”, to combat what he saw as exploitation in the music industry. That is a useful model. Digital photography has allowed that to become a reality. We’ve obtained the means of production, we just don’t own any outlets. There is the intertubes, of course. Act fast before capital begins to harden its arteries.
Oh, yes, a filmmaker: Bruno Dumont. For the same reasons others have indicated.
Not exactly off-topic, but slightly to the side… I’d be happy if COMPETENCE was the new Black.
Just going through a period I hit 2 – 3 times a year of wading through DVDs that need to be reviewed & I’m struck again by banal camera work, lighting that causes skin tones to vary back and forth between orange-yellow and blown-out white, actors who are in a supposedly urgent situation delivering lines with all the intensity of trying to decide between the Ham on Rye or the Tomato Surprise for lunch …
Anyway, just to note I’ll be perusing this thread for ideas of which Indie filmmakers are a tonic for the dreadful films I am forced to watch.
Harry, hehehehe yeah,
the Ham on Rye school of acting.
Damn I wish Bukowski was still alive.
That’s not a total non-sequetor.
But mind the gap.
and KJ
“We’ve obtained the means of production, we just don’t own any outlets.”
> yet : )
It will be interesting to see how Andrew Bujalski makes out. This new one is shot on super 16mm. I happen to love super 16. He hasn’t jumped to video yet. Combined, what do you suppose he’s spent on three films? Five million? Less? What’s his end of the distribution deal worth? Does he continue along his present path, or with his next film does he go a-calling for Scarlett Johanssen? These are valid questions. Man’s got to eat after all.
Scarlett Johanssen makes for a good eat, I am sure.
Andrew Bujalski—-
“Independent film” was, and is, supposed to be an arena in which the laws of commercial Darwinism are, if not suspended, at least a bit less brutal. And to a degree, that is the case. A $10 million film can, literally, afford to be a bit more adventurous than a $50 million film. The inverse proportion though, does not hold all the way to the bottom; perhaps you can make a movie for $7,000 like Robert Rodriguez did, or, even better, $218 like Jonathan Caouette did – maybe you can even set the new standard and revolutionize cinema for two digits – but unless in your spare time you’ve developed innovative new modes of distribution, someone is still going to have to spend hundreds of thousands to get your film into theaters. (In the case of Tarnation, hundreds of thousands were necessary before the real work of distribution even began, just to clear the legal rights to the music and film clips employed throughout.) Which is to say, unless the film is the breakout hit that everyone sincerely hopes it will be, or you’ve gotten away with a wildly overenthusiastic advance, you’re still not going to make your $99 back. The economics of distribution are unfriendly to all, but most gruesome to the independent.Not that anyone can really tell the “independents” apart from the dependents; the borders are notoriously slippery. The nominating committee of the Independent Spirit Awards (indie world answer to the Oscars), rather than attempting the formidable task of measuring the independence of individual nominees’ spirits, instead generally presumes the limit to be somewhere between $15 and $20 million – films in that range are open to debate, but above it are considered beyond the pale. Indeed, because of the demands made by people who’ve given it to you, there does tend to exist a loose correlation between access to enormous cash and a lack of artistic integrity, but there is no reliable mathematical formula here. Many, many films on the festival circuit lack not only the entertainment value but also the aesthetic coherence of, say, Charlie’s Angels. In the actual trenches of filmmaking, though, one does try to develop an optimistic view of a low budget, and it’s always a comfort to think of the restrictions one avoids by sidestepping all that string-attached excess money. And unless you are Charlie’s Angels auteur McG or are in his rarefied company, then there is always a production out there more demonstrably extravagant than yours."
Ramin Bahrani — I wish they had put his latest, “Goodbye, Solo” one a double bill with “A Taste of Cherry”.
Neorealism never really died and we owe a thank you to film makers who take it on and in this case remind us about the American experience and present it thoughtfully, reminding us about “the better angels of our nature”.
Unpretentious can be hard to do. Rare these days, also.
T
STUPID IS COOL culture… I am sick of vacuous empty-headed hipster mim- and bimbos making films and getting distribution on the basis of kitsch postmodernist mumbling self-knowing idiocy (’it’s entertainment" – is it?), half-thought out ideas and pastiche/plagiarism. I hereby declare that INTELLIGENCE IS THE NEW BLACK. And I call upon all concerned with creative film in their time to identify the new wave buried under the avalanche of sheer crap that is drowning independent cinema— aim the crosshairs on the proponents and progenitors of the true counterculture, not the posers.
It’s about the outsiders. It’s about the makers making waves.
Write about one filmmaker per post, and give some information so others can research them.