Art house cinema is dying

[ievenlostmycat]

damn. sucks

[Antoine Doinel]

The Los Angeles Count Museum of Art cancels its weekend film program.

[Antoine Doinel]

Northwest Film Forum needs your help.

[Adam]

This is the official email announcement from LACMA:

Dear Friends of the Film department,
 
Please find below a statement from Michael Govan, LACMA's CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, in regards to Film's restructuring:
 
As of this fall, LACMA will be changing its overall approach to film programming, ending its weekend film program by November in order to reconsider the nature, scale, and scope of our film programs. My hope is to engage in a full discussion among the staff and the Board about developing and increasing our commitment to film as central to our curatorial programming.
 
As part of that, and for the present, we will certainly place greater emphasis on artist-created films reflecting the museum's growing relationship with contemporary artists and the contemporary art world. We will also continue to plan art exhibition-oriented festivals that will be presented in the context of the museum's overall curatorial program. These films will be presented in the Bing Theater occasionally throughout the year. Additionally, the museum will continue its weekly Tuesday matinee program, which presents Hollywood film classics at a discounted price for seniors.
 
As a result of this programmatic change and the reduction of program hours, Ian Birnie's responsibilities at LACMA have been restructured: he will become a consulting curator, charged with advancing LACMA's ongoing discussion about the type of film program the museum should envision in the future. He will also be pursuing other professional opportunities. Ian has done a marvelous job on ever-smaller budgets to produce respected film programs for LACMA.
 
Curators from Contemporary Art, Modern Art, and Photography will take an expanded role in many of the upcoming programming decisions, and in the selection of artist-created films. And we will continue exhibition-related film programs across disciplines and presented in conjunction with LACMA's special exhibition offerings.
 
As we scale back our budgets, this is a good time to slow programs and spend more time thinking about how to build a more sustainable long-term foundation for the presentation of film at LACMA. My hope is to reemerge with a major commitment to film that helps define LACMA's curatorial mission.

Kenneth Turan's response to LACMA

[onedimension]

Art house cinema is dying, but art cinema in our houses is thriving

[Adam]

A direct relationship, no?

[R0lf]

I don't think there will be a case of studios streamlining their small releases to DVD. I think studios wear the cost of a theatrical release as promotion for DVD sales. I think audiences are still hard wired to believe if it is straight to DVD it is subpar.

In Melbourne we have a very popular Cinematheque every Wednesday. That theatre also shows a lot of rep movies and we have another older theatre that shows classics and double bills. We also have a smaller theatre that shows most new foreign and arty movies on limited release. I find all of these very agreeable with polite clientele and always very popular with the crowds.

On the popularity of yesteryears directors aren't the likes of Fellini and Antonioni more comparable to say Wong Kar Wai and Almodovar?

[MichaelB]

On the popularity of yesteryears directors aren't the likes of Fellini and Antonioni more comparable to say Wong Kar Wai and Almodovar?

Yes, absolutely - when I worked in rep in the early 1990s, Almodovar and Kieslowski were the big contemporary arthouse moneyspinners, just as Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni were in the 1960s and Bunuel and Wenders in the 1970s. (Bunuel wasn't a really significant arthouse draw until the Serge Silberman period, probably Belle de Jour onwards).

Screening their stuff on a Saturday or Sunday night would subsidise the riskier programming while still allowing us to avoid accusations of selling out to base commerce - even though, in effect, that's exactly what we were doing.

[Antoine Doinel]

Northwest Film Forum needs your help.

Sub Pop donates $10 000.

[Antoine Doinel]

Martin Scorsese writes an open letter to the LACMA.

[Perkins Cobb]

Martin Scorsese writes an open letter to the LACMA.

An exceptionally well considered and articulated rebuttal to the various stupidities, some of them subtle, in LACMA's argument for dumping the film program.

Although I fear that, no matter how big the names get, LACMA will just ride out the storm and do what it wants, unless somebody figures out how to endanger its endowments based on this issue.

[Adam]

I'm one of the Save Film @ LACMA folks. We have a meeting set with Govan.
It will all come down to money being found (by whom?) for the program, and also LACMA embracing the film program as part of their essential mission, and not as a bastard stepchild. But things are looking more positive than they did 2 weeks ago, just due to the volume of responses, utterly unexpected by LACMA

In any case, please sign up on the petition and/or join the Facegroup page if you haven't already! We always need more! Among those on the petition are Paul Schrader, Alexander Payne, Curtis Hanson, Scorsese, Kent Jones, David Schwartz of MOMI, Hadrian Belove of the Silent Movie Theater, Jeff Masino of Flicker Alley, Antonioni's former assistant, John Baldessari, and lots more filmmakers, critics, artists in various media, and programmers.

Petition:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-LACMA-film" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Film ... f=nf&__a=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Blog:
http://www.savefilmatlacma.blogspot.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Scorsese's letter on the LA Times page (listed above) has at the bottom links to various other LA Times coverage of it, plus Kenneth Turan's letter. what doesn't come across from the link is the incredible placement of the letter in the print edition - front page of the Calendar, above the fold, with a big headline and photo of Scorsese.

Please sign the petition and get other film lovers you know to sign it. You can click on a box so the petition site won't bother you with more emails. And it doesn't work in Safari; use IE or Firefox.

[Perkins Cobb]

Among those on the petition are Paul Schrader, Alexander Payne, Curtis Hanson, Scorsese, Kent Jones, David Schwartz of MOMI, Hadrian Belove of the Silent Movie Theater, Jeff Masino of Flicker Alley, Antonioni's former assistant, John Baldessari, and lots more filmmakers, critics, artists in various media, and programmers.

Also Phillip Noyce, Allen (Blast of Silence) Baron, Jeff "The Dude" Dowd, Fred Savage, and one of the kids from The Waltons! Too bad it's not a picket line....

Edit: And our own cdnchris, complete with avatar. Nice!

[MoonlitKnight]

You know what would save art house cinema, don't you? Films with more chases and explosions!!

[MichaelB]

You know what would save art house cinema, don't you? Films with more chases and explosions!!

I disproved that rather spectacularly in 1993 when my boss and I decided to favour John Woo's Hard Boiled over Alfonso Arau's Like Water for Chocolate. Though the latter had been a huge arthouse hit in the US, we assumed that it wouldn't translate, there being much less of an audience in Britain for Latin American films - and the buzz about Woo was enormous. So we booked Hard Boiled for three weeks and waited for it to open, our confidence boosted by the fact that distributors Tartan Films seemed to be spending an absolute fortune on marketing, including a double-page colour ad in Time Out highlighting all the rave reviews.

But it was an absolutely calamitous disaster - one of the biggest flops I've ever been involved with.

I was so stunned by the Monday morning box office figures that I immediately rang the manager of another cinema that was playing it, and he had had exactly the same result. The film basically died on its arse everywhere it opened: possibly because it was too much of a chase-and-explosion film for the arthouse audience, and too subtitled for the chase-and-explosion audience. (Bear in mind that this was 16 years ago, before Hong Kong action films had really broken through into the wider public consciousness).

Anyway, whatever the reason, it was a total disaster - and you can probably guess the punchline: Like Water for Chocolate opened at the Screen on the Hill just down the road and did what appeared to be blazing business. To add insult to injury, when Hard Boiled came out on VHS a few months later it was also a colossal smash hit - though I think it was in an English-dubbed version at first, which probably helped.

[Antoine Doinel]

I wish every cinema would do this.

[kaujot]

The videos they play before showing that message are great. It's some person talking on a phone, people tell the person to shut up. Naturally, he doesn't and then some monster eats him. Or zombies attack the theater. They've used Homestar Runner a few times as well.

[lacritfan]

LACMA film program gets stay of execution

[Nothing]

A vital article in Screen this week if one wishes to understand the present outlook for arthouse cinema. Whatever one's views on the sales outfit Fortissimo, Werner speaks for the industry - and the financial reality - when he says:

"When the arthouse market was more vibrant, you could sell to 20-25 countries. Now we find that, although some films still sell to the broad spectrum, pure arthouse only sells to around seven territories.”

The concept of crossover arthouse (as opposed to 'pure' arthouse) has been pioneered in recent years by the French sales outfit Wild Bunch, with the likes of March of the Penguins, The Wrestler and Maradona by Kusturica, leaving everyone else in the dust. Now everyone is getting into it - everyone has to get into it, because it is the only way for the sales companies (and their customers) to survive. What this means - given that sales are a pre-requisite of public funding - is that we're going to see fewer and fewer arthouse films getting made without a commercial twist - whether that be sports, kids, kung-fu, Christianity, Hollywood casting, etc. Marque name directors like Haneke and Trier will be immune for a while, but the situation is only going to worsen. In short, we really are facing the death of arthouse cinema as we know it, unless the European funding bodies (who operate at a massive loss anyway) find another way to get their product directly in front of audiences, without the increasingly impossible commercial veneer that the system presently demands. There's no sign of this happening, so expect things to get much worse before they (possibly) get better.

[Giulio]

Here is a small extract from a bbc interview to bernardo bertolucci taken by john tusa, very interesting, he speaks about 'arthouse' cinema and what is hollywood today compared to what still was 20 years ago

(you can read and listen the whole interview here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusaint ... ript.shtml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)

(J for John Tusa - B for Bernardo Bertolucci)
J:
Well having seen a screening, very recently, and the audience, a lot of whom weren't born when The Conformist was made, clearly recognised its topicality and its immediacy. I want to ask you another sort of political question and that is your view of Hollywood because, if you're talking about expression, if you're talking about freedom, if you're talking about giving something to the audience, the Hollywood system doesn't do that, does it?
You know, Hollywood , a long time ago, was a fantastic factory of movies.

B:
A dream factory.
A dream factory. But there were great directors able to find their freedom in Hollywood . There were fantastic movies coming from Hollywood . In the last let's say 10, 15 years, it's like, in my opinion, if Wall Street had taken over Hollywood . I think that what there used to be this kind of sometimes, not very cultivated producers, but great taste, adventurers maybe. Now, they're all these executives, very often like bankers or like businessmen. So, their relationship with the movies they produce, it's kind of purely based on market researchers...

J:The elimination of risk.

B:... the complete elimination of risk. That makes Hollywood movies more and more uninteresting.

J:And what does it do to us, to our culture. I mean you've used a striking phrase, you regard it as like the military occupation of the multiplexes?


B:Yeah, I'm smiling but there's very little to smile. The situation at the moment is that almost all theatres all over the world, are occupied by Hollywood movies and it's very difficult for independent movies who are not in the chain of Hollywood distributions, to be able to be shown to an audience. A movie, which is not shown, is like a baby who is not born. It does exist but the proof of a movie is to be seen by the eyes of an audience. It's an old terrible question, it goes beyond the Hollywood super power of this moment. I think that half of the masterpieces we love, obviously of cinema, have been seen very, very little. How many people have seen Bresson movies, how many people have seen, in the West at least, Mizoguchi movies or Dreyer movies?


J:But they're part of the collective sub-conscious, that's the important thing. They are seen and they are shown and they are there. They're an available, imaginative resource.

B:You're right, it's true. But, in fact, it's a kind of reason of sadness, for a director, the fact that his movie is being seen in a very, very, very reduced milieu.

J:But your movies are still going to be shown, they are shown, and nothing will stop you, even the power of Hollywood , from making the films you want to make?

B:So far I was able to... yah. I was able to do more or less what I wanted. Let's see if it goes on like that, now that the cinema is in one of its big moments of mutations. Mutation is what's going on now and that makes me very excited. The new technologies, the digital technologies, and also the chance that you have, that everybody has to do a little movie and to show it through the Net, it's something completely new, something that has not been analysed and studied, but that will change the way of the language of cinema. It will change because it's such a structural mutation that it will have a dramatic effect on style, language structure, the way of telling a plot, the way the actors will act. Everything will, I think, will be very different in 10, 15 years, and thank God for that because there were other big mutations in cinema, from the silent to the sound, from the black and white to the colour and this is another of these great moments. So, I think that we all should be excited about that.

[Nothing]

Forget about art in Hollywood, a long-lost battle despite the occassional old-hand proving an exception. What Werner is talking about, albeit in sugared terms, is the imminent collapse / corruption of the system by which most of the films discussed on this board now get made - the European-funded films at Cannes, Venice, Berlin. When Van Sant or Soderbergh want to make a decent film, they also tap into this system. Of course, feeding back from what he says, the ultimate problem is a shrinking, ageing audience, leading to increasing exhibitor cowardice and distributor caution; cinemas that once would have played a Bresson triple bill without hesitation now settle for the Hollywood faux-arthouse of Coco avant Chanel and Twilight. As for Bertolucci's comments on the digital revolution, I fear this is an old man's pipe dream. The reality is that new directors will be judged on the number of You Tube hits they can draw to their 30 second camcorder calling-card. If they want to earn a living wage, these proven populists must then surrender to The Man, making commercials and commercial films (there's little difference anymore between the two). There is, perhaps, some milleage in the concept of digital distribution - once producers are able to offer their product directly to the mass of audiences through i-Tunes etc, easily and effectively in the way that many independent music artists distribute now, this could provide a much needed stream of revenue. We'd then be looking at a model, in five or so years, whereby arthouse films premiere at a festival then skip and jump straight to download. The challenge, in this case, is marketing, without the benefit of a theatrical run and with the voices of professional film critics becoming increasingly redundant, for these films not to get lost beneath Hollywood's multi-million marketing deluge.

[MichaelB]

The challenge, in this case, is marketing, without the benefit of a theatrical run and with the voices of professional film critics becoming increasingly redundant, for these films not to get lost beneath Hollywood's multi-million marketing deluge.

Which presumably explains why there's a blatant plug for The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael during Soi Cowboy. But this sort of thing might get trickier with a more substantial back catalogue to namecheck.

[Nothing]

Hmm? I think you're missing the crux of the argument... Sadly, you'll get it in 2-3 years.

[MichaelB]

Hmm? I think you're missing the crux of the argument... Sadly, you'll get it in 2-3 years.

What's there to get? What you're describing is a simple statement of the facts on the ground, which anyone with even the most peripheral knowledge of the arthouse sector is all too aware.

But there's no point opting for rose-tinted nostalgia - for all sorts of reasons, the arthouse golden age of the 1960s and 70s isn't coming back, and "exhibitor cowardice" is far too easy an accusation. The simple fact is that the audiences just aren't there in sufficient numbers to support Bresson triple bills any more, as they have too many other distractions - not least the ability to watch a bewilderingly wide range of world cinema (including Bresson) on big wall-mounted screens in the comfort of their own homes. I was probably one of the last cinema programmers to screen Bresson triples on a reasonably regular basis (I reckon at least quarterly in the early-to-mid 1990s), and the writing was clearly on the wall even then.

In fact, the biggest blow isn't so much to do with theatrical/DVD distribution as the fact that arthouse films have been ghettoised on tiny minority-interest digital TV channels. When I started out in the late 1980s, a BBC2 or Channel 4 sale was a vital part of the distribution equation, and in some particularly happy cases it even meant that the film had more or less broken even before it opened theatrically. Nowadays, it goes to the likes of BBC4, which has a far smaller audience and consequently pays far smaller sums - nowhere near enough to make a significant difference. Which means that there's far greater pressure on the films to perform theatrically and on DVD (effectively the latter, since most theatrical openings are essentially to grab coverage for the DVD release) - which means that the kind of pure, uncompromising visions you're talking about inevitably get marginalised.

Part of the problem is that because we have vastly more access to world cinema than we ever used to, our viewing has become much more fragmented and individualised, and we develop much more specialist tastes that can really only be reliably catered for on DVD unless one's in the habit of touring the festival circuit. I myself used to make a point of seeing the vast majority of artistically significant arthouse releases 15-20 years ago (and not merely because it was my job to stay on top of things), but I now barely see 10% because I'm too busy delving into national cinemas that were largely off limits to me before. How are you going to attract me back? Realistically, you probably aren't.

More digital distribution channels are clearly the only viable way forward (and I agree that your festival-to-download model is a highly plausible scenario of the way things are heading), though quite how they're monetised effectively is another issue entirely - especially given current levels of piracy. I was chatting the other day to a distributor who'd just put out an archive restoration that had got decent reviews - and was shocked to discover that it had barely sold 200 copies in its first month. He ruefully assumed that many of those were being ripped to DVD-R and uploaded to torrent sites and circulated among fans who'd convinced themselves that they were helping to "spread the word" regardless of whether the people who'd actually got these films out of the vaults made any kind of return on their investment - and it was hard to disagree.

As for selling out to The Man, though, many arthouse auteurs including Bergman, Fellini, Losey and Roeg regularly shot commercials, and Polanski and Skolimowski acted in mainstream films - in fact, when I interviewed Skolimowski earlier this year he told me that acting in Mars Attacks! was the best job he'd ever had in terms of pay for actual effort. I'm also hard pushed to think of a single animator throughout the medium's history, no matter how renowned, who hasn't had to work on commercials and/or children's telly at some point. So it's not quite as new or indeed as horrifying a prospect as you're implying, though I agree it's likely to become increasingly essential.

[Nothing]

Of course this stuff will be fairly obvious to industry bods, but I thought there might be others who would find the article interesting / enlightening.

"exhibitor cowardice" is far too easy an accusation.

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...

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).

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.

many arthouse auteurs including Bergman, Fellini, Losey and Roeg regularly shot commercials

Sorry, I didn't phrase that clearly enough. 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 studio. The same point Bertolucci was making, in essence.