Filmmaking should be a scary proposition for anyone who undertakes it. To project your feelings, your attitude, your hopes and your horrors up on a large screen to a big audience is very brave. Cinema is made to be a dialogue with an audience; recruiting an audience is part of the process. If it is not screened in front of crowds, I personally think it is something other than cinema. But what does it mean to get to screen your and your collaborator’s work in front of a crowd?
When filmmakers are given such a chance, only a few somehow choose to actually say something. If people assemble, I think they want to walk away with more than an escape from something. The audience wants to know what the filmmakers care about – this is one of the pleasures of viewing. When film comes with an awareness of the world or a hope for something more, it is taking on more and challenging an audience to come with it. This quality is there in my favorite films.
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I generally agree with most of the stuff you said, but there are plenty of great films that don’t have a lot of these qualities. One of the great things about film is that so many different things work and there are so many different kinds of films. And one of the problems with lists like these is that they can become a template to fit into, rather than a guide to your personal taste.
One thing I’d like to see, if you do something like this again, is something to do with your experiences at Good Machine and before, and how they relate to our current situation. Trulyfreefilm is so dedicated to the future, that I would like to hear some stories from the past. Maybe how certain films came about, how you found them, developed them, nurtured them, financed them, sold them. I’m sure some of the films didn’t turn out as you expected them to, for better or worse, so there are probably some interesting things you learned from those. Anyway, that would be interesting to me.
Comment by pangofilms - October 1st, 2009 at 7:19 am