Editor’s Note
by James Kaelan
“Films should either stop wars or start them.” — Anastasio Sevilla
When we launched BRIGHT IDEAS, one of our primary goals was to extract ourselves from the echo chamber enclosing the film press. If possible, we wanted to identify work before our perceptions were tainted by the people paid to influence us. If this sounds haughty—and idealistic to the point of unachievable—it is. But agents and publicists, as the old studio system has fragmented over the last four decades, have kept wide the gap between creators and their audiences. Even for ostensibly “independent” film, they control our perceptions of what’s marketable. And that needs to change.
Long before films get to festivals (to say nothing of theatres), a small coterie of self-nominated tastemakers at the major agencies determine what’s good. But their rubric is just a litany of projects that have succeeded in the past. Accordingly, anything that departs too far from their preconceived—and recursive—definition of
salable gets rejected, or worse yet, refashioned in the image of something that’s already sold. This is not a process that favors innovation. Rather, it’s a system that ensures straight white men write stories directed by straight white men in which straight white men wear costumes and save (sometimes bisexual) white (or maybe Asian) women. Starting with Winter/Spring 2015, we’ve made an exceptional effort to identify the films we want to cover before anyone else is talking about them. We’re not doing this because we think it’s cool. We’re doing it in an attempt to stay as unsullied as possible by the corrosive commercial influences seeking to homogenize American film. And that’s why we decided to go to Poland in search of talent.
Each October for the past five years, Kino Nowe Horyzonty—who’s run the New Horizons Film Festival since the early ‘00s—has also hosted the American Film Festival, Wroclaw
(AFF). Directed by Ula Śniegowska, who travels the U.S. circuit from January to November in search of limitspushing independent films, AFF has become both a repository for, and a predictor of, some of the most cuttingedge cinema produced in the States. The centerpiece of the AFF slate, where we found both Matt Sobel’s Take Me to the River and Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven, is called U.S. in Progress (USiP). Reserved for near-complete American films, USiP invites six projects to compete each fall for a range of finishing funds, inkind services, and distribution deals. There are pecuniary interests at play here, don’t get us wrong. The Polish government wants more American co-productions shooting in Poland. And they use AFF—and specifically USiP—as a conduit to reach American filmmakers. (And their pitch, it must be said, is damned good. Warsaw-based Chimney did the color grading on Spike Jonze’s Her, and governmentfunded organizations from the Polish Film Institute to the Wroclaw Film Commission offer grants and access
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EDITOR’S LETTER
(CONT...) to locations as grandiose as Zamek Książ—the enormous 13th century castle where, in the early ‘40s, Nazi physicists were trying to assemble an atomic bomb.) But to focus on the ulterior commercial motive would be to miss the astounding bi-products of their marketing tactic. By playing the long game, by celebrating films for their artistic merit rather than their perceived salability, AFF is building rapport with tastemakers rather than check-writers—with the hope that, eventually, the former will become the latter. This is a revolutionary inversion founded on an historical perspective often lacking in our own country, where one sure win today is better than the potential for five next year. And because Poland is willing to wait a decade for their ambassadorship to produce fruit, they’re less beholden in the short run to what’s conventionally popular. And coupled with their geographical distance from the States, that ensures they’re free—or nearly so—from agency pressures. If Ula Śniegowska’s taste aligns with CAA’s, it’s by chance, not coercion. Which brings me to my second point. Blessing Yen and I previewed our feature, EEL, at AFF. The second screening sold out a day in advance, and on an early Saturday afternoon we stood before a theatre packed with 20-somethings, many of whom had braved their hangovers to see an emotionally caustic, black-and-white
film made by two Americans they’d never heard of. Flying home the next day, it occurred to me that that phenomenon—strangers packing a theatre to watch a weird movie they know very little about—happens at festivals across the world almost every day. People like Ula Śniegowska—and Janet Pierson, David Wilson, Brad Wilke, Jacqueline Lyanga, and countless other programmers and festival directors—are helping amass audiences for limits-pushing cinema. And yet we’ve been conditioned to think of these “festival films” as un-commercial, incapable of drawing theatrical audiences. Well, that’s a bunch of fucking bullshit. These films do draw theatrical audiences. The problem is, we’ve allowed agencies and distributors to define the festival tour as a means to an end (e.g. representation and distribution), rather than the end itself. Few conventional distributors are going to line up to buy Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven. But what if he didn’t need one? If AFF, Sundance, True/ False, SXSW, SFiFF, and hundreds of others can draw big crowds for “unmarketable” films, doesn’t that mean those films are marketable? This year, Seed&Spark and BRIGHT IDEAS are going to force a conversation that we hope will allow directors like Silver—and the other uncompromising visionaries who pack festival theatres, but don’t sell to IFC Films—to make a living with their
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work. Crowdfunding has, in many ways, solved the problem of financing for truly independent films. But if we can open up a new avenue to revenue on the back end, by transforming the festival tour from loss leader into profit-maker, we’ll have disrupted the hierarchy completely. The extant audience for the films we celebrate in this magazine, who seek out the avant garde as it tours the country, are the most powerful—and yet most marginalized—faction of the revolution. But not for long.
We can’t cover every film we want to. But we’ve worked especially hard to fill BRIGHT IDEAS No. 3 with work that deliberately eschews convention, and the institutions that endeavor to sanitize it. With any luck, Winter/Spring 2015 will read like a document of dissent: a prodigious magazine, full of people for whom cinema is not a profession, but like food, like sex, a life-sustaining force. From Imran Siddiquee’s essay on how Hollywood helped kill Mike Brown, to Aaron Hillis’ profile of Josephine Decker, to our feminist inversion of Godard’s Alphaville, to our interview with Matt Sobel about his incendiary debut—this is our boldest issue yet. We hope you dig it, because without you it’s all pointless. As always, we’re taking this shit really seriously. B