Friday, November 10, 2006

NOVEMBER 2006: What's All This About the Future of Cinema, Anyways?


While perusing various film festival websites over the past summer, I've taken note of a series of blog entries that have been posted on the Rotterdam International Film Festival website. The blog, "A Programmer's Chronicles," is the musings of IFFR programmer Gertjan Zuilhof, who has over the years written in great detail about world cinema and the cultural, social and artistic milieu in which they were produced. At times dense and informative, Mr. Zuilhof's accounts of both important and emerging filmmakers from Asian have considered the adverse impact of an impatient society prone to "disposable" delivery of art. To wit: an August 2006 entry he made with the rather alarming title (provided by the webmaster, I assume), "The Future of Film Festivals." In it, he comments on the growing fragmentation of both cinema and of the ways in which current means of delivering cinema to the masses are conspiring to render the communal experience of movie watching irrelevant. I lift an excerpt from his blog entry here, as it illustrates what will likely happen soon, if not already:

Imagine a new film by Wong Kar-wei (sic) has its premiere in Cannes in May. In the same month, it will be possible to download it via the FNAC or you can order it as a gift when taking a trial subscription to your local daily. By the time its January, the Rotterdam festival audience has already seen the film. They are still interested in Wong Kar-wei, they may well want to see him in the flesh, but there’s no point in the festival screening the film any more...

Of course, I'm writing from half a world away, and I'm covering a vastly different terrain -- that of Asian Pacific American cinema, one of those "hyphenated" cinema movements formed in response to the lack of creative, exhibition or distribution opportunities for us colored peoples here in America. Yet, if I substitute "Justin Lin" for Wong Kar-wai and "Sundance in January" for Cannes in May, then Mr. Zuilhof's comments find a rather alarming identification with me. Simply put, will the concepts of "community" and "gathering" be relevant in an age where delivery models as YouTube and digital cameras set to "movie" mode have been championed by our audiences and artists? More to the point, will our audience that would attend VC FILMFEST now want to get out of the house to see a movie they may have screened on their computer monitor, at home, while simultaneously preparing their taxes and/or watching "Deal..or No Deal" on the analog telly? And can we promise a local "premiere" for our audience when films may have already been "seen?"

It's a bit alarmist of me to ask the question, I know, but while travelling the world this past September and October to research potential programming selections for VC FILMFEST 2007, I've seen instances in which both the programming and marketing of cinema has tapped into non-traditional means of distribution. At the Vancouver International Film Festival, an aggressive marketing initiative entitled ":Mobile VIFF:" allowed for features including downloading of day-to-day schedules, film info retrieval, audience award voting and both video feeds and downloads to be enabled via a mobile phone or iPod. The blog features of the Hawaii International Film Festival, meanwhile, seemed to play down to the viewer's apparent disinterest in actually READING reviews and artists perspectives, as YouTube videos clogged the daily entries of HIFF's Daily Flash Pass blog. It's apparent that the internet and mobile technology have permeated the film festival interface, allowing for immediate participation by the audience. But when does the programming of a film festival become impacted by these developments? And will we have to very soon consider the notion that one day soon our film festival community may become a virtual one? With the explosive popularity of YouTube, MySpace.com and other means of delivering media, will filmmakers even care to wait until a festival screening to get their works viewed by an audience? I know of a couple of shorts filmmakers who have done just that: put their short documentaries up on YouTube over the past summer. I wonder, will they be able to attract an audience if they considered submitting to VC FILMFEST 2007?

Over the course of the following months, I'll be filtering these issues and concerns for you, visitors to vconline.org and the VC FILMFEST 2007 website as I consider the filmmaking directions and trends our community of artists are pursuing as I encounter both feature-length and short film submissions for our 23rd edition May 3 through 10, 2007. Some of these developments may (or may not) confirm some of my worst fears around the virtual collapse of the theatre walls; while others may in fact be welcome directions that I haven't considered. As well, I expect our community of filmmakers to keep working on producing progressive, forward-thinking cinema that never fails to lose track of the entertainment value and community-building possibilities of cinema. Hopefully at the end of the day, I may be making a lot of hay over nothing. But let's see what transpires. I think it'll be an intriguing journey...