"HERE COMES THE SUN" Media and the Moving Image in the New Millennium

New Directors/New Films; The Human Rights Watch Film Festival; The New York Video Festival; Moviepalooza; The Montréal World Film Festival; The Independent Feature Film Market; The New York Film Festival; The Boston Jewish Film Festival; The New York Expo of Short Film and Video.

 

Here comes the sun
Doo-n-doo-doo
Here comes the sun
And I say
It's all right

—George Harrison

The year 2001 brought with it the baggage from the previous year, because 2000 had been used as a summing up by many institutions, organizations, and artists, reflecting on the achievements of the previous century, the most notable being the primacy of the cinema as the defining artform of the twentieth century. So, as the twenty-first century started in earnest, the cinema was witness to its own fragility, the possibility of its own demise. This was particularly apparent during the various festivals throughout the year, when "films" were shown that were actually created with digital equipment. In all this, an actual connection with "film," that is, with an emulsified celluloid, was increasingly tenuous, especially when digital projection is added to the mix. (In fact, during the year, several "film festivals" should have more properly been named "video festivals," because the works on display were video works, projected with video equipment.) By no means exhaustive, this survey attempts to make note of some of the developments of the period from January to December of 2001.

First of all, the field of film distribution in the United States remains endlessly volatile. One of the most important of smaller distributors over the past five years had been The Shooting Gallery; after attaining a measure of success as a production company, with such films as Billy Bob Thornton's Slingblade and Robert Duvall's The Apostle, The Shooting Gallery made the decision to enter the field of distribution; for three years, The Shooting Gallery had been distributing a package of films, from six to eight per season, which would play limited engagements throughout the country, at the Loew's theatre chain. In 1999, during the first year of The Shooting Gallery's series, one film from the package turned into a major success, Croupier, directed by Mike Hodges. The last package of films from The Shooting Gallery included the Iranian tripartite film The Day I Became a Woman (directed by Marzieh Meshkini), the expansive, elliptical Japanese melodrama Eureka (directed by Shinji Aoyama), and the quirky, deadpan American independent Too Much Sleep (directed by David Maquiling). But The Shooting Gallery became a victim of its own success: the original company was sold to a multinational, which attempted to expand; the expansion was, of course, too rapid, and The Shooting Gallery soon filed for bankruptcy.

The closing of The Shooting Gallery was a real loss for alternative film in the United States, but other companies have been trying to fill the gap. Established small firms such as Zeitgeist and Strand have continued, with renewed activity. Though the major theatrical chains continue to dominate, the problems with the financial stability of those chains caused openings for independent theatres to emerge. In New York City, such venues as the Cinema Village, the Quad Cinemas, the Angelika, and Film Forum have seen competition in the openings of the Screening Room, the Pioneer Theater, and (at the end of the year) the Landmark Sunshine Theaters. These theatres have provided older distributors such as Zeitgeist and Strand, and newer ones such as Cowboy Booking International, Lot 47, and Empire Pictures with vital outlets for their films in the North American media center. In addition, Anthology Film Archives, the venerated museum for avant-garde cinema, continued its renewed activity, with actual theatrical runs for notable films, including Jonas Mekas's As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief...