« Apparently There is a Cheating Crisis | Main | Searching for the New Ishtar »

May 10, 2004

Production-Distribution-Exhibition

I'll start teaching my Introduction to Film course tomorrow, and a major focus of the course will be how the film industry itself imposes upon what films get made, how they get distributed, and how those factors inform our interpretations of the films we do watch. Cinema Minima has compiled a number of links over the last few days that might help me (or my students) to think through some of these issues:

  1. "Short Features Belong to a really Fucked Up Breed of Cinema:" A discussion on Esoteric Rabbit of the difficulties of distrubting films that run between 40 and 70 minutes long. Such films rarely play outside of festivals, leading filmmakers to create new ways of distributing their films.
  2. I'm repeating some industry gossip here, but according to one Disney employee, Eisner's decision not to release Fahrenheit 9/11 has less to do with a fear of BushCo than it does a fear of Roy Disney. This power struggle has had interesting consequences for some time, as the recent release of Destino indicates (go to A Fly on the Wall for the Michael Moore scoop).
  3. There was a Flash Film Festival in Paris on May 8. This might be less pertinent to a film course, but it's still an interesting concept.
  4. A workshop on obtaining financing for your film led by Carol Dean, executor of the Roy W. Dean Foundation.
  5. In unrelated news, Gawker reports that New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell invited Bill Murray to his last film criticism class at Harvard. Hilarity (and, apparently, drunkenness) ensues.
One of my projects in the film class will be to provide a short stream of links for my students, some that pertain to the films and readings themselves (links to IMDB pages, etc), but others that will hopefully give them a better picture of how the industry works and how that contributes to our experiences in the movie theater watching movies.

Posted by chuck at May 10, 2004 11:19 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.wordherders.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.fpl/1851

Comments

Post a comment




Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)