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Disastrous figures for low budget UK films


David Mawson

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Obviously the democratization of technology and the cheap technology/low barriers to entry to film these days will result in more content. But probably not better content. I think we'll find that there will be roughly the same amount of awarded films today (when everyone can do it), as it were back in the days when the barrier was huge.

Excellence finds a way through all the obstacles.

It's just like music - Beatles had 4 audio channels to record on and extremely archaic mixers and equipment. Today you can have unlimited channels, layer all sorts of sounds, instruments, process it, mix it on a laptop, make people who can't sing sing in tune, etc. Is the music measurably better? There's more of it, that's for sure, but truly better? I'm not so sure.

Technology is both very important and not at all important. Human thinking and creativity is important. And sometimes technology can enable that initially, or make new creative avenues possible, but in the end, it comes back to what humans do with it, not the other way around.

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That's true, Adam. Excellence is as rare as it ever was.

In terms of popular music at least, the music was definitely better in the Beatles day than today. I think that's beyond dispute. Interesting to speculate on why that might be.

Something to do with the general tone of society now. A lot of the films, let's take for example music videos, now have a continually dystopic theme to them. They tend not to vary from that. Sad, dejected faces. Hopelessness. 

A sense of energy and life is needed in art - not all the time, but most of the time. Creative works should be like a kind of food. Maybe in a way a kind of spiritual food. Are these works usable, valuable, in some sense? Do people derive something useful from them? Are their lives somehow enriched, even in a tiny way, by them?

Edited by Jon O'Brien
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2 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

 

A sense of energy and life is needed in art - not all the time, but most of the time. Creative works should be like a kind of food. Maybe in a way a kind of spiritual food. Are these works usable, valuable, in some sense? Do people derive something useful from them? Are their lives somehow enriched, even in a tiny way, by them?

Totally agree.  When you combine a unique filmmakers perspective with the marketable elements of the industry, you end up with commercially successful "arthouse" film.  Paterson is painfully slow but by the end you walk away with a sense of what Jon describes.

 

Edited by Michael LaVoie
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I find some of that article profoundly dubious.

What's said about the streaming situation and the inevitable consolidation in a year or two is probably a reasonable prediction. But Paterson's quote says it all: " if during that time, we lose the independent film business in this country – which is going to happen unless we make big choices – then in three or four years’ time there will just be a few American-dominated platforms that control all creative content."

Unless you know someone at the BFI, that is already the case. Paterson is described as saying this would have the effect of "depriving cinema audiences of original and diverse films in which the UK has always excelled." As far as I'm aware cinema audiences are already pretty much deprived of those things. How many of Paterson's films have seen wide distribution?

Loach's producer Rebecca O'Brien is quoted as being concerned for "our ability to keep the sector going." I don't know specifically how profitable Loach is - I would suspect quite the opposite - but in general there is no real ability to "keep the sector going." Loach's I, Daniel Blake took nearly £16m but it's not clear what was spent creating it, and it is a highly unusual breakout success. Has anyone even heard of Loach's most recent film, Sorry We Missed You? It's not a sector. It's not supposed to be self-sustaining. Well, it'd be nice, but nobody appears to be trying very hard toward that end, or they wouldn't keep making Ken Loach movies.

We've already had commentary in this thread that many independent films are made without any expectation of making money and this sort of commentary, which treats the UK independent film scene as some sort of industry, is inappropriate. Filmmaking in the UK is a very expensive fringe artform. It's not a business and it's not trying very hard to be one. The fact that Paterson and O'Brien are making very nice middle-class incomes out of being film producers on films practically nobody has heard of and practically nobody will see is irrelevant.

I'll say it again: the solution to a more robust, self-sustaining film industry in the UK is protection from imports. It's the only thing that can possibly work at this point, and it will never, ever happen. So, forget about it, and concentrate on that US work permit application.

P

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5 hours ago, charles pappas said:

That article hits the nail when it talks about the whole anti-trust monopoly aspect.  Movie studios cannot own the theater chains. It's a horrifying dynamic for that to happen and in the U.S. we learned it early on and passed laws preventing it.   Studios owning platforms means less money for producers, less bargaining power, less artistic control and fewer distributions options.  Filmmakers can roll with that or rail against it.  It will take legislation for the latter.  We just did it with music in the music modernization act.   This kind of thing is desperately needed for filmmakers to protect them and provide transparency.  Producers need to know how many people are watching their films and how that translates into revenue for the platform.  How this is "proprietary" knowledge that the platform can legally withhold is beyond me.

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