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April 16, 2006
Low-Budget Moviemaking and the Death of Film
Just a quick pointer to part two of Jeremiah Kipp's interview with Godfrey Cheshire (here's part one). The second half of the interview focuses primarily on Cheshire's documentary about his family plantation, which sounds really facinating. Because I grew up in Atlanta and have family scattered all over the south, including sections of North Carolina not too far from Cheshire's family plantation, I'll be curious to see what Cheshire does with this story (his speculation that D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation may been based on his ancestors makes the story sound doubly interesting).
But Cheshire's comments about the effects of low-budget video on the decline of European auteurs are also worth noting. Specifically he notes that fewer people are going to independent theaters for forign films to the point that the foreign film market has "dried up." It's an interesting argument, and I think it's relatively clear that audeinces are more commonly seeing foreign (non-US) films on DVD, if at all. Cheshire argues that
We’re still in a stage where we have art film distributors, for example, that go to the foreign festivals and still put out some foreign films, but I’m afraid that’s on its last legs. It’s been in such decline since I wrote that article in 1999 that it wouldn’t be surprising if a few years from now you could only see foreign films on DVD. Maybe some would open in New York or Los Angeles just to get the advertising, but we really aren’t far away from that.The whole interview is well worth reading, and I would have more to say about it, but I really should be working on other things.
Posted by chuck at April 16, 2006 8:16 PM
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