Andrew O’Hehir’s annual survey of the year in indie film is up at Salon today. Consider it a companion to yesterday’s discussion of the best “undistributed” films of 2007. The big theme: the increasing dominance of studio indie arms (like Fox Searchight and Focus Features, which exist primarily because their parent companies want to win awards without actually having to take their attention away from their bread and butter tentpoles) is forcing “true” indies like Magnolia and IFC (which is still part of a huge corporation, but manages to operate under a curation strategy that’s more like MoMA than Miramax) to take risks, both in what they release and how they attempt to deliver it to an audience. Oh??????and beware of iPods!
Ah, futurism. O’Herhir gives the impression that if the indie industry can’t figure out how to get anyone to see the legitimately good films that they have been distributing, their solution will be to basically scrap all that and start making content for the devices that they’re pretty sure kids are paying attention to instead (again with the kids!) Killer Films’ Christine Vachon acknowledges that iPods, “the YouTube universe and the whole notion of making things for cellphones” are forcing producers like herself to “shift with the times.”?? Microcinema’s Joel Bachar takes it a step further: our devices have ruined our ability to respond to traditional content. “There’s this social-networking mentality; they’re Twittering, they’re blogging,” he says. “There’s more commitment to, you know, the experiential moment, and not much commitment to longer moments.”
Interesting. I’m going to go back to Twittering about the three 3-hour films that are sure to make my 2007 Top Ten while you ponder it.
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