Blurred boundaries

Beyond Miramax by Jesse Walker : Due to the ease with which one can now edit their own videos, the boundaries between the home movie and the independent film have blurred.

Many articles have been written about one sort of indie-film success story: the “young,” “scrappy” “maverick” whose Internet short or ultra-low-budget tape gets viewed by the right Hollywood exec, allowing the fresh-faced filmmaker to vault over those barriers and land a job assembling dream-widgets. This is not such a piece. This is about the moviemakers who don�t want Hollywood jobs, or at least don�t want them on Hollywood terms — about people trying to find ways around the distribution bottleneck, and the audiences that are tentatively coalescing around them.

Not suprisingly, the internet contains a vibrant virtual community of filmmakers and a horde of online movies. The most successful filmmakers are pornographers, but if alternative cinema consisted only of porn, it wouldn�t be worth writing about. Some net flicks even star well-known actors or are helmed by well-known directors. (Tim Burton, for example, has made a series of online animated shorts called Stainboy.) There are also a huge volume of fan communities devoted to Star Wars, Doctor Who, and other movies and TV series that put out spoofs, sequels, and tributes (not to mention infamous edits). The biggest problem with these internet films is the quality of the picture and the conditions under which it must be viewed (a tiny screen within a screen, huge bandwith requirements, etc…) Other available avenues are equally problematic, but these filmmakers have little or no interest in reaching a mass market, so its limited distribution isn’t as big a deal…