It has also warped the very relationship of filmmakers to the practice of filmmaking-even psychologically. The dominance of the studios has both formed and deformed the American cinema and world cinema. (The ideal of artist-owned productions was already advocated, in the fifties, by François Truffaut, as a precondition for the revolution in cinematic form that he anticipated.) That’s why I’m compiling this list in a minimalist spirit: it’s limited to movies that, as far as I can determine, weren’t made by an entity or a producer in the business of making films-unless it’s the director’s own production company and principally produces his or her own work. That holds true at all levels of production, whether the ultra-high budgets of the colossally wealthy Chaplin (who’d made a fortune in his first decade in the film business) or the ultra-low ones of student filmmakers. (For the record, the suit was then revived and the Supreme Court ruled against the studios in 1948, and the resulting changes in the industry helped to foster a mighty outpouring of creative energy in Hollywood during the fifties.)Įven then, the essence of independence was clear: it meant art made under artists’ own aegis. But, in 1944, a small yet powerful group called the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers-its ranks including Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford-urged the federal government to renew an antitrust suit against the major studios. As a result, the definition of independence was, in practice, very wide, embracing such smaller studios as Republic and Producers Releasing Corporation. For instance, in the high studio era, from the nineteen-twenties through the late forties, studios were vertically integrated-they produced films, distributed films, and owned their own movie theatres. The streaming giants have afforded some major filmmakers major resources and a wide berth of artistic freedom yet, in the essential matter of filmmakers developing their own structures and methods of production, they-and other large-scale independent producers, such as A24-remain akin to the studios.Ī bit of history helps to clarify the idea. filmmakers with budgets in the hundreds to nine-figure super-productions, if you count directors who work with Amazon and Netflix. For instance, today’s independents-perhaps defined as anyone working outside the studios-range from D.I.Y. Yet the very concept of independent filmmaking has long remained unstable, vague, and ambiguous-and the way that it’s defined in the profession doesn’t necessarily reflect the most significant realities of the business. The center of independent production is infrastructure: filmmakers building their own authority regarding time, money, and matériel into the essence and foundation of their artistic authorship, whether out of necessity or desire. Directors’ personalized production methods-their approach to every aspect of filmmaking, from departmental organization to the casting and directing of actors, from the crystallizing of stories with or without scripts to the techniques of cinematography and sound recording-are often at the root of their more comprehensive onscreen originality.Īgnès Varda (kneeling) shoots a scene for “La Pointe Courte.” Photograph from Everett Still, though the art of filmmaking is primarily the art of directing, much of what’s ascribed to direction is a matter of production. The backstory of a movie’s production isn’t a mark of its artistic merits. Many of the greatest filmmakers worked for major studios in Hollywood and around the world, and sometimes even found sufficient artistic freedom there to create enduring masterworks. A list of the best of these movies reveals the exclusions and suppressions that many of the prime artistic voices of filmmaking endured in the era of studio hegemony, and not just in the United States. Instead of embodying the mainstream, twentieth-century independent filmmaking formed a crucial alternative to it-a virtual counter-history of cinema. (The studios have been squeezed between the popularity of prestige TV and the international profitability of franchise films.) In the twentieth century, the production of independent films was no less varied or artistically accomplished, although many of the best of them went largely unseen. It has largely taken over for Hollywood studios in producing the kinds of realistic dramas and comedies that were long the core of studio fare. Independent filmmaking has been especially prominent in the twenty-first century because it has become the new mainstream.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |