Searching for an auteur

Searching for an auteur


Clever software, cheap camcorders and the web mean that millions of wannabes can make their own home movies, says Peter Bradshaw. But can these digi-indies ever truly break into the feted world of the big screen?
 
I was at the Venice Mostra Cinematografica in 2004, and I was having a coffee with my friend Shane Danielsen, the movie writer and then director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. His habitual good nature had been strained to breaking point by having to make conversation with any number of people who wished to approach him at the cafe and discuss their latest projects.
 
“I blame the affordable digital video camera,” he said acidly. “Before, these people were just ‘writers’ or ‘journalists’.” His voice rose to an anguished howl. “Now they’re independent film-makers!” But are they?
 
Since the beginning of this century, there has been one great theme that has animated cinephiles and industry insiders: the growth of digital film-making and the way it was going to democratise cinema and open it up for a new generation of auteurs. Digital will be revolutionary, empowering, we repeatedly assured ourselves, just like blogging and the world wide web. Before this era dawned, would-be directors were like a bunch of grimy urchins – without money, without contacts, without hardware – cowering outside Soho House in London’s medialand, their noses crushed yearningly up against the window, while film-makers inside smugly disported themselves, complacent in their membership of an elite. Digital technology would let the dispossessed leap over the velvet rope and join the club.
 
It has certainly made film cheaper, easier, more fun. But has it made audiences any keener to see the resulting product? All these funky low-budget digital movies: can see you seen them at the Odeon? Or are they available only on that digital boulevard of broken dreams, YouTube – the vast showcase for lovingly handcrafted and often excellent mini-films made by digital film-makers with day jobs, all blogging about how their colossal number of hits means their film is a success, while secretly fretting about the resounding lack of impact their film is having: a digital tree falling in a forest of commercial indifference?
 
Digital technology swept away the dusty Gutenbergian appurtenances of celluloid and audio tape. Now people can buy digital video cameras for reasonable sums from high-street stores and get broadcast-quality results.
 
Nowadays these cameras even record on to a disc, so you don’t have to listen to the background mosquito-whine of tape on the playback. Digital video itself is massively cheaper than film; you can shoot all day without ever worrying about money. You can edit it yourself using digital software, which is easy to master, breathtakingly cheap and in some cases even free, coming bundled up with the software provided with new computers. And many of those big-screen films you see in the multiplexes are on high-definition video which looks as good as film.
 
The annus mirabilis of digital was arguably 1999: this was the year that Apple produced its iMovie software, and ordinary civilians were astonished to see how their digital home videos could be transformed. They, for instance, could take a random piece of footage, put it into slow-motion, turn it into black and white, and paste a recording of Mahler’s Adagietto on the soundtrack – and hey, presto, they were independent film-makers, visionaries, poets of the digital age.
 
The other great leap forward was Apple’s mighty editing package Final Cut Pro, aimed at professionals. It can be bought off the shelf in computer stores and allows you to do animation work, audio post-production, colour grading – all the things that ordinary mortals, even if they had the expertise, were once unable to do without access to big expensive facilities in big expensive buildings. The latest upgrade now costs about £650. The late Anthony Minghella told me he worked on his epic Cold Mountain, starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, on Final Cut Pro, on his laptop, just like everybody else.
 
In the justly forgotten Britfilm Final Cut (1998), starring Law and Ray Winstone – when they were trying to brand themselves the Cool Britannia rat pack – Law plays an actor and home-movie maker. There is a superfluous but archivally interesting scene in which he shows all his spanking new digital kit laid out on his bed, and gloats about how “sexy” it is. And it was sexy. It is sexy. But the problem is distribution. So what if a thousand digital flowers have bloomed? There are still only a certain amount of cinema screens, and cinema managers feel no great need to show these films. How to change their mind? How to create a new atmosphere in which wobbly, handheld, lo-fi digital cinema becomes acceptable in commercially polite society?
 
The foundations were laid in 1995, when the mischievous Danish director Lars Von Trier was invited to address a conference in Paris to commemorate the medium’s 100th birthday and ask questions about its future. Instead of speaking, Von Trier astonished the gathering by just throwing armfuls of leaflets into the auditorium announcing his radical new puritan movement ‘Dogme 95’, a group that insisted on low-budget films using no costumes, music or flashy effects; just natural lighting, real locations, real stories about real people. Directors had to sign a jokey ‘vow of chastity’ to this effect. And, of course, digital film-making was just the ticket. It was a brilliant PR coup and some of the films under its banner, notably Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, were hugely admired. The ‘Dogme 95’ movement was always tongue-in-cheek, but what of that? Von Trier had single-handedly persuaded the movie business that low budget was cool, just as 30 years before the French New Wave had persuaded the moviegoing public to go and see Godard’s bold experiments.
 
Lars Von Trier was to cinema what Malcolm McLaren was to punk. Kids were once told to learn three chords and form a band. Film-makers were inspired by Dogme to pick up their Sony DV Handycam and make a film. And film festival directors, cinema chains and distributors were convinced that Dogme-style films were a reasonable bet.
 
There was something else, too. In 1999, the movie world and the chattering classes found themselves transfixed by an ultra-low-budget horror film called The Blair Witch Project by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. This was a mockumentary on digital, which looked like something by precisely this new generation of 20-something digi-indie wannabes. Crucially, it became the first to exploit the viral marketing possibilities of the internet. It had its own website, shrewdly and continuously updated, designed in a Wellesian spirit of publicity and mischief to hoax people into thinking that the Blair Witch movie was for real – or at least make it a talking point. 
 
But the basic problem remained. However much geeks and insiders were turned on by the possibility of digital and the liberation of the independent film-maker, the public didn’t want to go to some glorified Camcorder Amateur Night; they wanted high production value, high gloss. They wanted Notting Hill and Gladiator and Toy Story. Who can blame them?
 
But we are still in the era of Web 1.0. The turning point arrived in 2005 with the launch of that extraordinary website, YouTube, which allowed people to upload all those videos from their computer desktops to the net. They could bypass the distribution system. They had direct, thrilling access to the public. Soon billions and billions of videos were online. In 2008, it is estimated that 50,000 videos a month were being uploaded.
 
But I suspect that every serious independent film-maker busily uploading to this site, has a heart-sinking feeling: isn’t it just vanity publishing? YouTube is great and there are gems to be found on it. It’s great for showreels, great for comedians who want to post an audition piece. But for a serious director who dreams of being Stanley Kubrick? There is a sneaking, secret yearning driving people in the movie business, as in every area of showbusiness: a need to be famous, to be celebrated. My 17-minute digital movie may get 45,678 hits online, which beats the ticket-sales of many mainstreamers – but so what? I’m still an amateur. I don’t feel like a success. It’s not making me famous. It’s not getting me on the red carpet. It’s not getting me photographed with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and it’s not getting me discussed in Sight and Sound. It’s not making an impression. It’s not in the cinema. Ironically, opening up the vast digi-web mosh pit in front of the stage has just made the pampered stars up there in the spotlight, in the corporate studio world, look even more privileged.
 
So the last gasp for the independent digital film-maker who has no distribution deal is to approach the cinemas themselves. An independent institution like the excellent Rex Cinema in Berkhamsted, if they really like you, might let you hire the place for one night only, a Sunday or a Monday, for £1,500 or £2,000, in return for, say, 30% of the box office and maybe even a smaller slice of the bar takings. But you’re still out at least £600 or £700 even if you sell out every seat. Of course, if a distributor or an agent sees the movie and signs you up, then that loss is an investment; money well spent. Sometimes the Rex will even let you have the place for nothing – effectively acting as your co-distributor for the evening – so you haven’t risked anything at all. But that’s only if they really, really like your film and you personally. Even then, though, after that night, the party’s over. It’s just you and your handful of DVDs and nice press clippings.
 
So the only alternative is to be inspired by the case of a 2005 indie comedy called Four-Eyed Monsters, co-written, co-directed and co-distributed by Susan Buice and Arin Crumley who also star. It’s an American film that thoroughly used the potential of the web to get a real cinema presence. Buice and Crumley uploaded their film, in part and in whole, on the net. They got hits. They got emails. They collected names and addresses and where these clustered round a certain cinema, they took this evidence of its popularity to the theatre’s manager, begging for a one-night stand. And all the time, they blogged; they sold the DVD from the website; they videoed their various travails slogging round promoting it. They snowballed fans and supporters and arranged screenings in more cinemas. It is a genuine, admirable example of can-do spirit: an authentic piece of good news from the embattled world of the self-distributed digital film. There may well be many more cinemas who will revive the old 1970s spirit of the ‘Midnight Movie’: wacky alternative films such as Eraserhead and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which gained cult status from being repeatedly shown to late-night audiences after the main programme was over.
 
Four-Eyed Monsters is the last gasp of hope for the self-distributing digital auteur. But the basic problem, even more basic than distribution, is talent and training. Film, however it is revolutionised by digital technology, is a difficult, collaborative art. You have to learn it. You have to work at it. There are some self-taught maestros, and perhaps digital will create more of these, but basically it is a craft as well as an art. It has to be learned and no technology in the world can accelerate this process. Where there is no talent, there is no film. Word processors helped writers, and digital has helped directors – but cinema is a bloody-minded, agonisingly unfair lottery. Digital can’t change this. But it may let you buy more lottery tickets – and at a lower price.
 
Peter Bradshaw is film critic for The Guardian.