Posts by Campbell Walker
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Speaker: Levelling the Playing Field, in reply to Jonathan King,
the lines between them are almost entirely dissolved these days
Hmmm. The lines between selling them have mostly dissolved, but the way they are made has not. To determine how to analyse their market is not the same as understanding how best to produce them. This kind of blur effect is one of the main problems with understanding cultural production in a market based system.
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Speaker: Levelling the Playing Field, in reply to Sacha,
and vice versa as well? agreed they are entirely different things
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Speaker: Levelling the Playing Field, in reply to Russell Brown,
Hi Russell
Are there other ways? Depends what you need to get from it, as always. There are good community oriented structures for watching and talking about film - I am very fond of Wellington's People's Cinema (run by a different Jonathan King) as a really engaged space to screen films in, and will try and work with them again, but they're definitively not in the monetised realm.
For the most part I'm not either, so I organise screenings at galleries, houses etc, usually on a koha basis which nobody who comes can afford. That's ok, I can't either - living in Dunedin for instance gives you access to amazing art on a weekly basis, and nobody ever tells you off for not paying to get in, because there is really no money here. We're literally living a long way off the grids of "creative professional" life that is a central focus for so many contributors to PA, obviously.
Accordingly, I'm only starting to re-engage with these questions outside of my arts community. I'd always taken music as much more of an influence than cinema here - and regard what i'm doing as most closely aligned with the ideas of musicians like Peter and Graeme Jefferies and Bill Direen than any local filmmakers.
I'm most interested in making and seeing work that is critical of culture and that demands a certain serious engagement from an audience, and so I'm most interested in thinking how that can work locally, on a small scale that promotes its continued existence.
I know there is an audience for this, based on the responses to the films I've made, but I know its fragile, too. When I've screened to decent crowds who don't know me or slower kinds of cinema too well, we've had the kind of responses that show audiences are seeing something new: some people hate it and leave, others are shocked at seeing something so familiar but new as well.
I went to a random costume party once, and the host came out, dressed in a wonder woman costume. She saw me, and said "Ah, you're the guy who made that Uncomfortable Comfortable film - that film changed my life!" This was several years after the fact. She went on, "I saw it with my boyfriend, and left him as a result". So, yeah, I changed Wonder Woman's life... but in particular, these kinds of quietly extreme responses tell me there are people who have an interest in, maybe even a need for a quietly serious cinema that captures elements of our culture and lives outside the cute and stereotypical.
For me, this lead to considerably further research into the effects of non-expedient cinematic strategies upon audiences: things like duration and the use of real time, getting away from a dependence on the mantra of "storytelling" and replacing it with techniques and methods that are more native to cinema.
But I'm also resigned to doing this pretty much on my own, because its not how we do cinema here. As in line with many other elements of our society now, we don't trust people like artists and academics to do their work - which is not based around the same value systems - without needing to punish them for having potentially less meaningless lives than us, until they earn more money than we do. We see this in film, for instance, in the way that filmmakers are required to whore their ideas out as clickbait (in the most superficial forms) on social media before they're allowed to make a serious film project. Whether or not you are making work that is based around a highly commercial model, cinema doesn't benefit from this kind of reductive approach, and neither do the people making it.
In the same way, I seriously do not think there is any possibility of creating a sustainable NZ cinematic voice that can reflect our culture within the kinds of systems we have operating at present. But this is part of a wider war on culture that we are all participating in, anyway.
Is there a way to do it better in the current environment? There are probably many, and I am speaking from financial perspectives too. I tend to believe that the cinema I'm most interested in works best in public spaces, rather than on a small screen, so I've been trying to tour films. This is hardly financially sustainable, but it does result in positive engagement with audiences. Certainly, I think education and advocacy are necessary.
I am fully aware that I'm running against the tide of conversation for a lot of people here. But I see the problems with film here as much more about the way we make and sell it: if we can get past the assumptions that ideas like reflecting culture, engaged (rather than lazy) criticality and respect for ideas are meaningless and secondary to commercial thrusting, then we can start talking about how we have things worth watching and earning from.
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Cheers, Jonathan, I know this conversation partly comes out of your own experiences as someone forced to self-fund in order to make work. Living in a similar (but smaller) boat a long way further down this particular river, I have always found some of the points you're making here to be not only self-evident, but of critical importance in understanding the problems we're facing in terms of the production of cinema in New Zealand.
As someone who makes films in New Zealand, but deliberately exists outside of the film industry, I'm not sure I'm interested so much in the questions of whether we should have a substantial film industry that employs a lot of people. More salient to me was the original tweet, "personally i think the '$2bn income and jobs for 15 000' and 'telling our own stories' are almost entirely separate and unrelated issues".
This is important. My experience is that New Zealand's cinema culture is very thin and very conservative, compared to, say, our music community. Our greatest strength is in technical ingenuity, but as a culture we lack the slightest sophistication around different possibilities of how films can be made.
When I started making films in the late 90s, we made the first digital features here, and they were received very well by audiences and critics, and with hostility and condescension by the industry. In hindsight, the work we were doing was the visible start to what Jonathan is describing here as the devaluation of craft skills, and I would have liked to better appreciate at the time that people were alarmed.
Certainly the first "wave" of digital features here (the Aro films directed by myself, Colin Hodson and Elric Kane & Alexander Greenhough, and the Auckland films made by Gregory King and Florian Habicht) were made by artists who placed more value on original ideas, the lateral use of technological and ontological possibilities, and an engagement with the history of cinema. Subsequently, the field became dominated and to an extent taken over by genre-heads, industry people looking for a new way to produce work and young filmmakers looking to make "calling-card" first features. These films tended to present a much more conservative filmmaking model.
Certainly my understanding of making cinema was that the non-technical craft specialisations of filmmaking, like working with actors, and understanding how ideas like minimalism and duration effected an audience, were completely neglected here, but represented ways of capturing our culture for close and necessary examination without having to enter an industrial apparatus, and the strong and surprised responses we got from audiences backed that up.
Of course, since the mid-2000s, even the minimal funding structures for digital art films were removed from Creative NZ and given to the Film Commission to make what I would typify as "international low-budget genre films", and this killed off a genuinely unique, developing mode of NZ cinema.
Personally, I continue to make work, but all the structures I used to be able to use to fund and screen it have dissipated into the commercial, the complacent and the negative.
CNZ has not only cancelled the Independent Filmmakers Fund after the Film Commission pulled their share of the funding, they've also cancelled the Media Arts category that moving image work was folded into. I haven't even looked at how they might fund work for a couple of years, because I just see it as counter-productive.
I enjoyed great support in the past from the Film Festival. In line with the way that our present market-based political system hollows out cultural institutions, they are now in much less of a position to support work on a cultural basis alone, but rather are forced to select films that can return money to them.
Because I see people who work on commercial cinema as endangering their ability to make work that is original, i have chosen to not attempt to work in the industry. Instead i do whatever i can to continue being someone who can make the work I see as important. A year selling insurance in a call centre a few years back contributed to a marriage break up and several years of depression, more recently i am now studying again, and living in the cheapest city in the country to live in. I'm nearing completion on my 5th feature, shot in Dunedin a couple years ago, for about $40. As always, its about New Zealand culture, it features some of what I would describe as my best work, and it was held up when someone broke into the house and stole a shitty laptop and a hard drive that had the film on it; no-budget filmmaking means you can't afford to make backups all the time. I'd like to be working on it now, but instead I'm firing off job applications to supermarkets and retail stores and going to the foodbank. But it'll get finished and a few hundred people will see it and i'll run into them years later and we'll talk about it. So life is pretty good, really.
So, I guess I'm also in the category where I'm maybe a tad suspicious of exactly why we should have the particular species of subsidisation that promotes more than anything the lobbying skills of its representatives. Its great when people have work, and even from my radical artist's perspective I still believe in commercial moving-image making as being of community value. But, because of our political climate we still seem to be much more interested in the people at the top than the people working in making the actual work. The actual filmmakers and crews are often treated feudally and contemptuously, and expected to demean themselves along the way, with crowdsourcing as popularity contests and a culture that refuses to call anyone on their shit out of fear for their own revenue streams. This is clearly not the best way to foster and build work that can reflect anything but the most banal and standardised versions of our culture.
(Sorry that was somewhat long)