Independent Film Review

Last week, the world’s most successful independent filmmaker opened his latest movie in 3661 theaters; it grossed a record-setting $158.5 million in its first four days of domestic release. Next week, one of America’s most respected independent filmmakers will open his new film at the Brattle Theatre. There are five prints in release.
You might say there’s a big gap between George Lucas and Hal Hartley, but there are some similarities as well. Both filmmakers have total control over the production and distribution of their product. Both have inspired imitation. And both Star Wars and Hartley’s new The Girl from Monday are science-fiction epics that reflect both the world outside and the world of the filmmaking process.
Lucas, of course, has had the greater impact. The success of the original Star Wars in 1977 made the blockbuster the model for the film industry. Whether he meant to or not, he all but eliminated the individual creator from the film-production process. High concept, special effects, corporate marketing, and merchandising replaced inspiration, originality, and artistry. Corporate profiteering, like the Evil Empire, threatened to wipe out the force of individual creativity.
As in his film, though, pockets of resistance remained. Independents staged a comeback in the late ’80s. Films like Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape and independent studios like Miramax led the charge. In 1996, all five Oscar Best Picture nominations were more or less independent productions.
Now, a decade later, the direction of independent filmmaking has gone at best Sideways. Most of the indie studios have folded or been sucked up by the majors, who have learned that if you can’t beat them, then let them join you. Miramax’s troubled marriage with Disney has ended in a messy divorce, and the newly single studio’s future, to judge from its upcoming release schedule, is uncertain.
Still, there’s hope in the resurgence of independent filmmakers at Cannes this year. Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, starring indie favorite Bill Murray, won the festival’s second-highest honor, the Grand Prix. Gus Van Sant’s Last Days earned critical acclaim. Whether American audiences will get to see these films is another matter. Anne Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter reported that the studios showed little enthusiasm. "They’re challenging," says Mark Urman of ThinkFilm, one of the few remaining independent distributors. "And people don’t want to be challenged to the degree they used to be."
Hal Hartley, for one, seems undaunted by opening in the wake of the latest Lucas juggernaut, even though his film’s $300,000 budget is probably less than that of a single Star Wars Burger King ad. Neither does he expect to recoup even that amount very soon. "Maybe I should have Girl from Monday action figures," he quips.
Nonetheless, he has his audience, which has responded to his deadpan irony and his knack for recording the surreal absurdity of the everyday in such films as Amateur (1994) and Henry Fool (1997). With his most recent effort, No Such Thing (2001), he might have overreached. An ambitious "horror" film set in Iceland it, it did not meet the expectations of the distributor, MGM/UA. Hartley found himself afterward with diminished commercial credibility and fewer financial resources.
But he had an idea. He had long been annoyed by ads using classic rock-and-roll songs to sell SUVs and the like. "I heard the Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ playing over a Nike commercial," he recalls. "There seemed something wrong about that. Overhearing people’s casual conversations with each other, I notice how everyone’s saying the same things. People give the impression that they’re expressing themselves individually, but they’re all talking like some character on a popular sit-com. We feel like we’re being flattered all the time for being original, but in fact we’re all just buying into the same things."
He started writing a story about a not-so-future dystopia where a "revolution" has imposed a "dictatorship of the consumer" overseen by MMM, an all-powerful corporation. It’s Lucas’s Evil Empire, except this time the enemy is much like the system that Lucas represents. A small band of "terrorists" resist, abetted by visitors from another galaxy, such as the girl of the title.
To make this film fast and cheap and to achieve its hyper-real style, Hartley used digital technology. Making the film available to viewers proved more difficult. "It’s much less expensive these days to make movies, but distribution is much more conservative, so it’s harder to get films out there. It feels a lot like it did in ’84, when I first came to New York. By ’88, things had totally changed, but I when I first got here, everyone was talking about how movies are not very interesting because you have to pack them with big stars in order to get a film even financed. Well, you hear that same kind of talk now."
This old situation called for new tactics. Hartley decided to do something he had never done before — distribute his new movie himself. "When we finished the film, we realized we had something that was considerably outside the mainstream, and somewhere along the line, the boundary between producing a movie and distributing it dissolved. We’re not making a ton of money. I’m happy we just finished the New York run and the theater made money. We’ll have to sell something like 300,000 to make our money back. I don’t think that’s very likely."
In the meantime, Hartley has left the United States, taking root in Berlin, where he’s preparing for his next film, Fay Grim, a sequel (his first) to Henry Fool. Is Berlin an escape from the dictatorship of the consumer he lampoons in The Girl from Monday?
"I do feel more comfortable in Berlin. They’re more welcoming to the arts, I find. It’s easier to work in Berlin than in the US. But the same sort of consumerist mentality is everywhere. I think there’s an escape in finding smaller communities and having to forgo your participation in popular culture."
Back in Boston, another independent filmmaker also finds support in a smaller community and trying to distribute his films on his own. Andrew Bujalski won critical praise for his first film, Funny Ha Ha (2002), the deceptively simple story of a twentysomething woman who doesn’t know what to do with her life. As it turns out, no distributor has yet figured out what to do with the movie.
"We finished the film way back in 2002," he recalls. "The first public screening we ever did was at the Coolidge Corner in 2002, and from there it traveled around to a bunch of festivals, and I kept thinking that the thing was going to die out. But something would always come along and there’d be some spurt of energy for it. Finally we just decided to jump in whole hog and back this little private self-distribution for the film."
Whole hog, at this point, means two prints. Meanwhile, Bujalski has completed a second film, Mutual Appreciation, which also has been applauded at various festivals (last month it screened at the Independent Film Festival of Boston) but as yet has mustered no interest from distributors. Lawrence, a young musician in New York seeks success with a little help from his friends. They fantasize about forming a "cool and inclusive club" of like-minded creative types to support one another and fulfill their dreams.

Does this club reflect Bujalski’s own ambitions? "There’s very little autobiography in either film. But one thing that is an accurate reflection of me is that, much like Lawrence, I tend to be skeptical of clubs for clubs’ sake. Although, that said, at least half of the cast Mutual Appreciation is filmmakers whom I have met along the way. A lot of things do come out of those situations and . . . networking is such an ugly word."
So is solipsism. One of the critiques of Bujalski’s films, and independent movies in general, is that they ignore the world outside. Bujalski’s films lack any overt reference to politics. September 11 took place while he was editing Funny Ha Ha, but though he recalls a sense of futility in making a film in such circumstances, there’s no hint of the terrible events in the finished product. "The kind of films I’m doing, everyone ends up being a type for myself. That said, I think that one of the things about Funny Ha Ha is that it’s a film in which almost no one talks about art or practices art. I think I did that on purpose. I kept that stuff out of the film because I wanted to avoid that certain glib self-reflexivity."
Some independent filmmakers avoid that self-reflexivity by making documentaries. Nina Davenport has been applauded for Hello Photo (1994) and Always a Bridesmaid (2000). On September 11, she was working for hire on a set in San Diego. Her apartment in Manhattan was in view of the Twin Towers. Stunned, she decided to make the cross-country trip home by car, interviewing ordinary people she met along the way. The result, Parallel Lines, was completed in 2003. It received a rare theatrical screening at this year’s Independent Film Festival of Boston. I found it the best documentary yet about September 11, and one of the best films ever about life in America. Why has it been seen by so few Americans?
"I really have no idea!" she says. "When I compare the film-festival route now with Hello Photo, it’s gotten so much more competitive and so much less professional, and jurors who don’t know about filmmaking . . . I don’t know this for a fact, but it certainly seems like it. So it’s harder to stand out than it was before. And I guess there must have been some sort of resistance to it, because of September 11 and people wanting to move on."
Davenport herself has moved on, but she hasn’t turned away. Her new project, funded by non-American sources, looks at the Iraq War. "It’s a long crazy story of an Iraqi filmmaker, this guy called Muthana Mudher, who was on the MTV show Real Life that a friend of mine produced, where he described how his school was bombed by the Americans. Liev Schreiber happened to see the show and got MTV to invite Muthana to work on his next movie, which was Everything Is Illuminated, based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel. It’s basically a metaphor for American-Iraqi relations, because it was a very rocky road between Muthana and Liev and also with me because everything was sort of a power struggle. It’s going to be a great film. I’m really excited about it."
Perhaps this new film will benefit from the recent popularity of hot-button documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me. But Davenport has mixed feelings about the new vogue. "It’s always great when any documentary does well. But I think that it means that this kind of reality-TV culture is seeping in, corrupting and co-opting the medium. Maybe in the long run, it would have been better if it had remained marginalized."
Elliot Greenebaum is an ambitious young filmmaker who shares Davenport’s concerns about independent filmmaking and the future of reality in movies. How does one reconcile the narrative nature of movies with its power to reflect real life? These two aspects of the medium come together in his debut feature, Assisted Living.
He got the idea in film school — by defying his teachers. "I had written a movie about a woman who gives her son an airplane and then years later she gets a call from him. He’s an astronaut lost in outer space, and she’s in a nursing home, and she sees a plane fly over and apologizes to the janitor for giving him an airplane. NYU, where I was attending school, thought that was a bad movie. I disagreed. They said they wanted three acts. And I said that that was crappy. They said you have to learn how to do crappy stuff before you can do good stuff. I said I’ll make a 15-minute film this summer . . . and follow their formula very briskly so they couldn’t say, ‘You don’t have mastery over conventional narrative.’ But I decided to drop out of school instead and make a totally weird movie that’s experimenting with the boundaries between documentary and fiction. That short film, which I filmed in a real nursing home with real residents, evolved into this weird film, which is Assisted Living."
You can’t blame the profs at NYU for steering their students away from anything this unusual. They couldn’t have foreseen that a film about a slacker finding solidarity with an Alzheimer’s patient, shot with a non-professional, mostly post-septuagenarian cast, would become the indie equivalent of a hit. Maybe if they’d seen the 1971 cult classic Harold and Maude, but that was so long ago . . .
For Greenebaum, the story was secondary to the tension between the real and the made-up. "In fiction films, everything is more controlled, and in documentary, the idea is you’re not exerting artistic control over the material, and in this environment, the fiction scenes have this eerie, uncontrolled quality to them. You can’t direct elderly people in the way that you can direct actors, so I got interested in making a movie that was in the gray scale between fiction and documentary. It’s sort of documentary, but there’s fictional characters, and the result was that I came up with a lot of interesting material but sort of a story that wasn’t big enough to support it."
There was enough story to get the support of independent distributor Cowboy Pictures. So does Greenebaum see himself as a role model for independent film directors? "What does ‘independent’ mean?" he asks. "It can be used to market a film pretty well, it means less money usually and less genre. I don’t know what it means. Whatever it means definitely applies in my case if your readership wants to see a genuinely independent film where no one knew it was being made, no relevant companies had any idea who I was. This just was a film done in Louisville, Kentucky, by a young filmmaker."
Greenebaum’s probe of the frontier between reality and fiction in cinema has been an issue with filmmakers at least since the documentaries of Robert Flaherty. What did he see as the outcome of these cinematic explorations and the future of movies?
"Video games," he says, ruefully. "And reality TV." And, of course, blockbusters like Star Wars

A Morning An Afternoon And An Evening.

Well, I am watching Law&Order SVU,marathon on USA. I really like the show, and well I have had a great day. I slept for at least 12 hours. I also took a nap. Tonight, I am planning on staying home and watch some more t.v. Well, today, I was so sleepy, I felt like I was going to pass out. Last night was a great I had a friend come over and we watched TV and drank. I am istill,bored,but I am keeping myself from falling asleep. I am kind of trying to figure out to do. I may stay home.

The weather is miserable, it was hot and sticky now its raining. I am wondering if I am wasting my time. I am kind of tired,my muscles are aching and I didn't think I was going to do anything. The day has been boring, I watched some of the Indy 500 and then I took a nap. Well, I am tired of being so sore and I took a shower but I am still feel dirty.

Hmm, I wonder what I am going to do tommorow. I may write for a few hours. Take a nap then write some more. I think I am going to walk around and maybe that ease the joints.

I had a wonderful slow day. I am glad that nothing exciting happend. Infact I am glad that I didn't do anything. Nothing new has happend today, so this will be a short entry.