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The following are Michael Lynne’s opening remarks from Friday’s Independent Film Summit, presented by MoMA & indieWIRE (with Zipline Entertainment).

Ira Deutchman, Ted Hope, Michael Lynne and James Schamus at the Independent Film Summit. Photo by Brian Brooks/indieWIRE

As someone who grew up in the independent film world and helped shepherd a company from “Reefer Madness” to “Lord of the Rings,” it is a pleasure to be here today.

I think it is ironic that I have been asked to kick-off this Independent Film Summit, having been a principal in perhaps the most successful independent film company in history – which has nevertheless become one of the biggest victims of the consolidation of film production and distribution that has so negatively affected the independent film universe.  Fortunately, we are living to fight another day in our new production company, Unique Features.

There are however, several very telling points which can be made in this regard:

1 – If you are independent and value the freedom which that brings – stay independent.  There is no free lunch – if you are owned by a major studio, you will ultimately be governed by major studio guidelines and major studio decision-making.  It is kind of a Faustian bargain.  When New Line agreed to be acquired by Turner Broadcasting, we had access to wherewithal for production and distribution substantially beyond what was available to us as a free standing public company.  The ambitions which we had for New Line could be accelerated by years.  But there was a catch – as Ted Turner said to us about six months after the merger when we referred to him as our partner – “Yes, guys, we are partners in a way and we are definitely friends – but you did sell your company to me – let’s just keep that in mind as we go forward.”

2 – Independent filmmaking emerged in a significant way in the early ‘80s with the arrival of New Line, Miramax, Cannon, New World, Tri-Star and others.  Each of those companies had a game plan and a strategy for the space they would occupy in the industry landscape.  It was an earlier time of irrational exuberance and lots of capital and very expensive debt was available.  The anticipation that we were on the brink of a new generation of film companies, was palpable.  Obviously, some of those companies have left a significant film legacy, but the truth is, and this is very telling, none of them today, if they exist at all, exist in the same ownership configuration in whichthey existed then.  And none is truly independent now.

3 – Just as there was an opportunity then for independent, maverick organizations to make films for underserved audiences and to create new paradigms, the same opportunity will undoubtedly come out of the very difficult times for independent filmmaking today as fresh, out-of-the-box thinking on content and delivery, from passionate and talented filmmakers and producers, finds its way through the ambient noise of the establishment to a public hungry for the new.  It may be one of us in this room – or it may be a kid with a dream, a digital camera and a fire in his or her belly.

4 – We should be prepared to rethink all of the commonly accepted practices and pre-conceptions about film production and film distribution.  There is and will be less funding available for the production of independent films and for the release of those films.  (In fact, there will be less funding available for the production and distribution of films in general.)  We will see the conventional timing and formats for film viewing re-invented to a meaningful degree.  Where films are seen, when they are seen, who pays for them to be seen, are all going to change dramatically in the next 5 to 10 years.  Some of those changes will make the process easier and some will make it much harder.

Read more… Michael Lynne  ‘Stay independent’

Source: indieWIRE

Paul and his Mom

I Covered My Eyes (2008)

Paul Turano

I Covered My Eyes investigates childhood notions of threat and safety by juxtaposing TV news broadcasts of tragic world events with home movie footage. The project was first conceived after seeing the televised images broadcast live on September 11 2001, and wondering what children must be feeling upon witnessing this horrific act within our own borders.

Soon after, director Paul Turano wrote a list of the tragic events he distinctly remembered witnessing on TV as a child in the 1970s and early 1980s. By adopting a child’s perspective, the film evokes his experience of learning about the outside world through news broadcasts, and the accompanying realization of threatened safety from forces outside his immediate family and community. As the sense of vulnerability grows throughout the film from abstract threats to more immediate and actual ones, the seemingly innocent and idyllic world of his childhood becomes overshadowed by an increasing awareness of its fragility and precariousness.

From I Covered My Eyes (2008)

a film by

Paul Turano

My work from over 15 years as a practicing image maker has developed through autobiographical and essayistic experimental strategies, from small meditations to expansive explorations. I examine the process of image making as a way of communicating personal, social and political ideas or interpretations of history, from both the domestic and the public spheres. The images and sounds I present refer to subjects as far away as Mars and as close as my own back porch.

I work with film and video, often integrating these formats in the same piece. My current work investigates the effect of mediated experience on the construction of personal identity and memory. I Covered My Eyes juxtaposes television news broadcasts I witnessed as a child with my family’s own contemporaneous home movie footage, and examines how those images helped shape my sense of the human capacity for wrongdoing. In 2007, I received a grant from the LEF Foundation Moving Image Fund that has enabled me to complete this work and develop my digital video essay We the Ecotopia, a meditation on environmental sustainability exemplified by the small island of Tikopia in the Solomon Islands. When faced with a microcosmic equivalent of the resource depletion, monocultural food dependency and over-population issues we currently face on a global level, the Tikopians re-envisioned their relationship to these practices to save their island from destruction. Currently I am in the pre-production phases of this project and have begun shooting in 16:9 digital video and HD formats.

My ongoing work in 16mm has focused on the transformation of domestic space into a metaphor for autobiographical experiences. Two recent works, Porch Film: 76 Day St. Apt. #2, from 2004, and Windows onto Montebello Rd., currently in the editing phase, utilize similar observational strategies for depicting personal space as a vehicle for social and psychological transformation. The personal poetic approaches to the image in these films is driven by the more prosaic use of sound that provides both a supplementary emotional register as well as a contextual grounding in a larger social or political moment. As in all my work, the strategy of autobiography functions as a construction through which I may examine the larger issues that both intrigue and challenge me.

READ MORE… Paul W. Turano.