This is likely to be jiggled around and CERTAINLY tidied up/proofed, etc between now and two weeks time, but this is the jist of my MA dissertation. 600 words here that will be expanded into 15,000 (or as much over that, that I can get away with). Please have a read and if you think of anything interesting related please let me know about it. I won't be able to inject any radically new material to what I already have gathered, but anything that springs to mind will a) be of great interest and b) may help to form exactly how I put together the ludicrous compilation of notes I already have. Anyone interested in doing any proof-reading on the full thing (or bits of it) next week would be my best friend for at least that day.
Either comment below, email mike.mckenny1983@gmail.com or catch me on twitter @DestroyApathy
INTRO
The film industry is reputedly a medium of big business,
with the dominant rhetoric of ever-increasing box office records and markers
placed in line with the opening weekend takings of films across the globe. This
specific language-game becoming the measure of success and therefore shaping
taste in the global distribution, and by extension, production of cinema would
lead one to believe that the goal of moneymaking is placed higher than the
artistic aims of creating an engaging, entertaining and moving piece of
moving-imagery that can dominate the mind for weeks after viewing, impart ideas,
challenge world-views and ultimately stay with someone their whole life. This
is not implying that the large, Hollywood studio produced and distributed films
that embody such a profits-driven outlook cannot affect someone in the same
way, but should simply highlight the fact that the discourse of art versus
commerce is placed very much in the forefront when examining exactly how the
films that are presented to us are introduced to the complex system of global
film distribution and exhibition. There seems to be two distinct, though undeniably
intermingled, origins of a film’s ability to travel the world: the linear
approach of Hollywood studio production and the non – or more specifically less - linear approach of the complex
network of the international film festival network. It is surely undeniable
that the economic might of Hollywood, with its synergy of corporate ownership (SEE THAT EJUMPCUT ESSAY) and
power has the largest influence on what films populate the box office and the
screens at multiplex cinemas in towns and cities across the world. Yet what of
the alternative, often deriving from, or intentionally entering the film
festival network? Why do so many films that populate the ‘arthouse’NOTE ON CRAP TERM
cinemas, as well as many of the multiplexes that now cater for ‘alternative
content’ and niche-tastes, that aren’t produced under Hollywood’s production
system, or with its aesthetic tastes, generic tropes and compliance with easily
saleable dominant ideologies? This isn’t to say that these systems are mutually
exclusive, that their methods and approaches aren’t part of the same symbiotic
system. It is the intention of this essay to examine exactly why, in the face
of increasing Hollywood synergy and box office control, are film festivals not
only still in existence, but also constantly growing in number. Far from alluding
to an entirely unrelated alternative distribution model, it will look
throughout the history of film distribution and consider why there has always
been – and possibly always needs to be – both counter, yet cooperative
approaches. This will be achieved by underpinning the cinephilia that drives
the urge to find and present films ‘other’ to the dominant model, and how cinephilia
constantly reinvents itself to ensure that cinema remains fresh, injects its
contemporary landscape with the love of moving images and challenges philistine
attempts to push corporate agendas over the artistic merit of film. By doing
so, rather than creating an unrelated counter-system, it enters into a neo-Gramscian
system of counter-hegemony whereby it can influence other forms of more
populist film production and distribution, which ensures that films stay fresh,
yet avoid being trapped down cultural ghettos. This process will be set against
the changing socio-cultural values of the time, particularly the influence, in
the 1970s, of the postmodern pioneer Jean-Francois Lyotard’s notions of the
emergence of non-linear ‘little narratives’ having increasing influence over
established, fixed and linear ‘grand narratives’. Further, the influence of
this paradigm-altering development is related to the rise of neoliberal free
market economics, which has greatly – for better and/or worse – influenced the
developments of film distribution.
