I assume you're talking about Picturehouse's Claire Binns - but twenty years ago you could say the same thing about Mairi Macdonald, Channel 4's head of acquisitions. In fact, Mairi arguably had a greater stranglehold over arthouse distribution then than Claire does now!Nothing wrote:Try exhibitor monopoly then, at least in the UK. Should one woman really get to decide which distributors succeed and which fail? In any other industry, the office of fair trading would be stepping in by now...
I completely agree about marketing, and it's well worth noting that that was one of Stanley Kubrick's passionate interests - even to the notorious extent of insisting that the interior of a cinema be repainted to complement Barry Lyndon more effectively, or personally specifying classified ad sizes in local papers in the US, when he hadn't set foot in the country in years, or, most notoriously, continuing to release his films with mono soundtracks well into the era of Dolby Stereo because he didn't trust cinemas to get the balance right.Of course falling TV sales are an important part of the equation too (traditionally being a kind of insurance for the distributor against theatrical losses). And we can speculate on how much may or may not be made by digital revenue streams in the future, no-one really seems to know. Housewives are proving the most important demographic for VoD in the US (romantic comedies, soapers). I think piracy can be over-emphasised. You're right to pinpoint the rapid expansion of viewer choice; where, in the past, the arthouse audience was a captive one in many ways. But most, I think, will be opting for The Dark Knight rather than Knights of the Teutonic Order (hence my marketing comment).
That's an extreme case, but I'm certainly getting the impression that filmmakers are getting increasingly savvy about the need to trigger a desire to see more than one of their films - which is why I made that point about Thomas Clay referencing his earlier work in his most recent film, and could just as easily have made a similar comment about Jia Zhangke or even Wong Kar-wai, whose films constantly reference each other and build up their own internal mythology. It's all part and parcel of the same process.
Actually, on the subject of Knights of the Teutonic Order (though that's probably not the best example, given that that particular release was badly botched through no fault of their own), I think Second Run does a blinding job of marketing its releases - especially given the obscurity of most of them. The fact that they do it on a budget that makes a shoestring look like a luxury item is all the more impressive.
I'm not about to disagree, but given the virtual certainty of a Tory government in office by this time next year, possibly even with a specific mandate to apply sweeping cuts across the board, can you really see it happening?Taking it back a step, however, art cinema hasn't been making money in a long while. €3m+ a pop for your average Euro co-pro, selling for maybe €750k even in the 'good old days'. So now, in 08/09, even the sales companies are struggling and they want to lead things in a more commercial direction... What I'm saying is perhaps the cultural bodies need to stop focusing on imaginary profits and bypass the market altogether. In fact, this has to happen at some point if cinema is to remain an art in any way, shape or form.
Well, one example that springs immediately to mind is Shane Meadows' Eurostar-funded Somers Town - though as I haven't seen it, I can't comment beyond that. But I then recalled that Karel Reisz's early work for the Free Cinema movement was funded by the Ford Motor Company over half a century ago, that Humphrey Jennings and Lindsay Anderson each came out of the corporate/industrial film sector, and of course the GPO Film Unit has a strong claim to being one of British film history's great creative hothouses. More recently, more than one Jim Jarmusch feature was funded by Japanese electronics giant JVC (I believe its CEO, or someone very high up, was a passionate fan). So "the client" has been a factor for a very long time.Nothing wrote:Sorry, I didn't voice that very clearly. What I meant was that, within the commercial sector, corporate and feature filmmaking have become virtually indistinguishable (Duncan Jones, Hammer & Tongs, et al. I even wonder with Michael Mann at times). It is all about the talent servicing the client - whether that be the CEO of a toothpaste manufacturer or the executive producer of a mini-studio. The same point Bertolucci was making, in essence.
And the good thing is that the ticket price is going to be 50 EEK (around $4.5), which is below the average ticket price in Estonia.