It’s taken me weeks to find the time to blog about these events but I’ve been determined to put fingertip to keyboard and join the discussion.
First, I would like to thank Scott and Lance and everyone who put these events together because they were informatve, very well run, fun, rewarding and timely. If they hold any further events like these I'd encourage more indie filmmakers to attend.
Second, this blog post is going to seem a little dark after the euphoria of these events. I have more to say on the future of indie films that's more optimistic but I'll save it for another blog post.
Let me start by defining an “indie” film as <$1million and without a named director or a named cast. That means I’m not talking about all those navel-gazing +$4m soap operas made by the studios that are really just low-budget Hollywood pictures with a sad ending. Calling those films “indie” is like calling Green Day a punk band. Crass was a punk band. And “yes that’s right, punk is dead; it’s just another cheap product for the consumer’s head”.
For all the hope and aspirations we had back then of actually achieving anarchy in the UK, the Establishment, at first dazed, soon recovered and understood how the game could be played. The dream of a new dawn was quickly subverted and we returned to the usual endless days of night.
DIYDays
Attending DIYDAYS was like attending one of those early Crass or Poison Girls gatherings in some disused school in Westbourne Park. It felt real. It was genuine. There was a vibrant grassroots enthusiasm to take the cheap technology that capitalism and US military funding has provided and use it to break free of the norms: new ways to tell stories, new ways to capture those stories, new ways to distribute them and new ways to be compensated (paid). Many of the under 25s there seemed ready to burst with uncontrollable energy, unfettered by the memory and disillusionment of the failed punk movement decades ago.
It was a great event. And although I’d heard some of the speakers before on Lance’s excellent Workbook Project, I listened with a Zen mind and was rewarded with new insights. The only negative that sticks in my mind was that the woman from Current.tv was a bit of a miserable cow - I put it down to stress of sponsoring the event.
The Conversation
The Conversation, although equally informative, was rather more Establishment and less indie. I had a good time, I met some wonderful people. But I came away (from the bar), a little drunk I confess, with a simmering disappointment that I couldn’t pinpoint the origin of.
I think now that my melancholia was from the feeling that I’d seen the writing on the wall: Indie films would be squeezed of attention between asinine user-generated videos of people playing the flute from their arse and +$100m Hollywood 3D computer-generated cartoons. Whatever air is left for indie films to breathe would be sucked dry by bland, Brand-sponsored, advertising-led feel-good movies on the one side and dreary taxpayer-funded social-cause documentaries on the other side. I took a business card from the PR girl representing IndieGoGo – she worked for Ogilvy. Yeah, that’s very indie.
Right now we’re in the midst of a new gold rush except that nobody knows where the gold is. So there are lots of people buying Internet real estate in case the gold could be on the bit they’re buying. And just like the last gold rush, the ones making money now are the ones selling the spades.
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I'll promise to be more upbeat on the next post! :)
Told you you would like it Rob. Just blogged about you my man!
Posted by: Tim Clague | October 30, 2008 at 08:16 AM