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August 27, 2010

The Fine Art Of Referrals

I wrote a brief capsule review of R. Alverson's debut feature The Builder for Hammer To Nail. That it was a capsule was not my intention, and if it seems brief, it's because I curtailed what was originally going to be an overriding theme - the concept, featured in last Sunday's NY Times, of record labels releasing independent films.

That filmmakers should take a cue from the recording industry has been a running cry these past few years, one always foiled by the fact that films, by their very nature, cannot be enjoyed in the same manner as music. What struck me when I read the article, however, wasn't necessarily the manner of distribution the labels were applying to these films, but the labels themselves. An interesting trick occurs in my head when I think about it. Drag City, for example, is a label I trust implicitly, home to my very favorite musicians. I bought more of their records in the past year than I did DVDs. Their stamp on a film automatically piques my curiosity, regardless of whether it was directed by Harmony Korine (or Michael Tully). There's some degree of novelty to it, but that novelty will wear off as more labels do the same thing, and what will be left, what was there all along, is the matter of taste.

Which is to say: it all comes back to curation. As much fun as uncharted territory and the joy of discovery can be, by and large I place great value in the fine art of referral. There's too much material out there for me to parse; I want the stamp of approval of a trusted critic, a festival programmer, even a distributor to direct my attention towards works I should be seeing. That I include distributors here may suggest that I'm casting my net too wide, or that I'm attached to an old model. But I'm intrigued by the notion of trusting a distributor (Oscilloscope Laboratories is after just that, with their Circle Of Trust program that depends on a subscriber's faith in the taste of the acquisition department). On the other end of the spectrum is a friend sending me a link to a video and telling me to check it out, but in between the two is a spectrum of possibility for getting the work out there that appeals to me in a way that self-promotion does not. A million tweets from an unknown filmmaker is not going to get my attention as much as a nod towards that same filmmaker from a writer whose opinion I hold in high regard.

I think this can work for getting the work made in the first place, as well. I attended a fundraiser party for a friend's band the other night, hosted by a friend, at her house. Any random patron who donated money that night did so not because he or she had been randomly perusing Kickstarter pages, but because the opportunity to discover the project - along with sufficient evidence as to it's worth - had been provided by a trusted confidante. Our hostess suggested that she would be holding a continuing series of such events - a philanthropic subscription service, if you will.

All of this was circling in my head as I wrote about The Builder, but none of it belonged in that review, and so I cut it short and continue it here. What I'm saying, in short, is that I'm shirking responsibility left and right, both as an audience member and a filmmaker. In the latter category, I want my the ubiquity of my voice to rapidly diminish the moment my film is over; I want to trust others to carry it forward from there.

Posted by David Lowery at August 27, 2010 3:21 AM

Comments

Posted by: ingrid veninger at September 5, 2010 11:01 PM

Posted by: David Lowery at September 7, 2010 2:58 PM