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September 21, 2011

The Joe Swanberg Box Set

I was excited to see the official press release for Joe Swanberg's new collaboration with distributor Factory 25 yesterday. The box set will be released as a subscription, with four of Joe's most recent works mailed out over the course of a year, along with special additional features designed to gradually fill up a collectible box. The set is limited to 1000, and is now on sale. Scott Macaulay has a great article about the announcement over at the Filmmaker Magazine blog.

Two notes on this. The first is that this is a fantastic and unique form of physical distribution - and by unique, I mean unique entirely to Joe, whose increasingly termitic work is not only perfectly suited for this type of release but also, increasingly, demands it. Over the past six years, his audience has grown even as his work has become less openly accessible, putting him in an extremely rare position: he doesn't have to please anyone to get everyone to pay attention.

Which brings me to my other point, which is that this subscription is worth the price solely for the double feature of Silver Bullets and Art History, which as a one-two punch are some of the most gut-wrenchingly honest looks at the artistic process and the nature of collaboration that I've ever seen. They're deeply personal and deceptively ambitious - particularly Art History, which lacks the genre conceits. wanton emotion and meta-flourishes of Silver Bullets but replaces them with a stark, almost terrifying sense of formal restraint. It's exactly the type of film that I'm excited to see Joe making, and (big screen aside) this box set is precisely the manner in which it should be released.

Posted by David Lowery at September 21, 2011 10:15 AM