The Circuit

The internet noise in advance of the New Talkies screenings at New York’s IFC Center will be an interesting test of the indiefilm’s new grassroots machine. Spearheaded by indieWIRE and SXSW’s Matt Dentler, there seems to be a blog entry every 2 minutes on “Hannah Takes the Stairs” (pictured), low-fi naturalism, or whether “mumblecore” is really the right term. The apex might have been the Sunday NY Times piece. Movements are very romantic -- French New Wave, New German, ‘70s American, ‘90s Indie, Dogma, etc. -- usually popping up when film production is eased through technology like the shrinking of film cameras, the crystal sync of Nagras, the promise of video and DV. Another ingredient seems to be how the filmmakers in these movements don’t really care to be affiliated with a movement in the first place. Dennis Lim quotes director Andrew Bujalski (whose “Funny Ha Ha” and “Mutual Appreciation” will screen in the series): “It makes perfect sense for bloggers to sift through the films and pluck out commonalities,” he said. “But the reductive concept that we’re somehow the same -- that bugs me.” 

This new movement is interesting in how it doesn’t involve the easing of the production process as much as it uses new technology to push the finished product -- the same Web 2.0 stuff that isolates and confounds the characters in many of these films. I asked John Vanco, who programs the IFC Center, what he thought of the blog saturation:

"I think the blog action will help. It’s not just the young, digital set that's paying attention to this -- it's also the mainstream papers. We've gotten tremendous feature coverage, not only from the Sunday New York Times, but from The Village Voice, The New York Post, and so forth.

I think the interesting thing about this group of filmmakers that has piqued the interest of journalists is that they are the first generation that grew up with the constant, saturated, interactive buzz of digital communication as the norm, and that has absolutely influenced and directed their taste in narrative.

Most directors who shot on video in the past were generally only interested in it for its ability to ape celluloid narrative production on a low budget. This current crop of filmmakers really have an entirely different sense of cinema, with YouTube, iChats, blogs and so forth being so central for them that it's necessarily created new visual aesthetics."

 (Mike Jones)