Cinema Today: A Conversation with Thirty-nine Filmmakers from around the World

INTRODUCTION

When the far-flung bits and pieces borrowed from older, more established arts are shaped into a smooth, composite whole to make great cinema, something entirely new, powerful, and exciting results—moving images and sounds that follow their own rules of movement, space, and story to reveal a livelier, more passionately intense reflection of the world as we experience it. This metamorphosis begs the perennial question, what is cinema? Famously posed by seminal French film theorist André Bazin, the question has never been answered to everyone’s complete satisfaction, so we continue to explore it today, even while recognizing that cinema’s unique magic eludes description through mere words and that it may not always be wise to deconstruct the illusion. Yet, when thirty-nine international filmmakers share various and sometimes oppositional views on their art, perhaps we can piece together their ideas and approach a more comprehensive understanding of what cinema can be and how it can work. After all, who is better qualified than filmmakers themselves to describe cinema’s collision of various art forms, textures, images, sounds, rhythms, and other expressive elements, as well as to dissect the frustrating, exhausting, and exhilarating process by which a filmmaker’s vision finds its way onto the screen? The usual way we receive information about an art from its makers is via the interview’s choppy question-and-answer format. But reading an interview can be tedious, and plowing through a collection of interviews in which the same topics, issues, and questions are directed to each subject in turn, over and over, can be even worse, like being trapped in a revolving door. Cinema Today attempts to spring the catch on that revolving door with a symposium-in-print format created by editing my interviews with thirty-nine independent and personal filmmakers. My questions have been removed and their answers grouped together under the various key cinema topics that form this book’s chapters. ix INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION x Cinema Today opens with the evergreen question, what is cinema? A similar question could be posed regarding independent and personal cinema. What do those terms mean when they are commonly used to describe everything from mainstream genre fare made independently of major film studios, to truly personal art films made by those same studios, to any series of continuous images, however brief, that can be viewed over the Internet, via computer, or on the screens of handheld devices? Unlike mainstream or commercial film directors, the filmmakers interviewed here are involved in almost every phase of creating the film—from its writing to its final edit and sometimes even its distribution. Some are the authors of their works in the sense that their films are stamped with a unique cinematic signature despite the collaborative nature of the medium. Other personal and art filmmakers are equally involved in the entire filmmaking process, but try to avoid displaying a consistent style as they adapt to the differing contents, concepts, and genres of their film projects. The nationalities of these filmmakers—who come from countries including Kazakhstan, Turkey, Macedonia, Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Cameroon, Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, Mexico, and Poland, in addition to the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France—reflect the fact that films are being made virtually everywhere in the world, thanks to a wider playing field created by dramatically lowered filmmaking costs and light-weight equipment. Significantly, many of the newcomers are women. And finally, more films are being seen by more viewers in more places than ever before. A little more than thirty years ago, VHS videotape emerged as a popular viewing platform; it was speedily relegated to dinosaur status by the emergence of the DVD, which, in turn, is now threatened with extinction, as more and more films are being broadcast by pay-perview and free cable television stations or downloaded from Web sites to be viewed on computer and handheld devices. These additional viewing platforms, along with digital video recorders, which can store a wealth of television entertainment, and large flat-screen televisions and home theater setups offer viewers numerous options. However, the emergence of these technologies also raises the issue of what will lure audiences into theaters to see films when an abundance of entertainment, often of high quality, awaits them at home. INTRODUCTION xi On the one hand...