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Due to my upcoming boycott of Hollywood (terms defined elsewhere... not important here and now. I assume a lot of you will understand without my needing to explain "the need") for the duration of the year 2008, I've become increasingly interested in film and video artists who distribute their own work online. I think the most famous example of this can be found with David Lynch and his official website. Other, more obscure artists include Ken Jacobs, Ben Russell, etc.

So my quest begins.
Any links? Suggestions? Experiences? Thoughts?

Thanks!

EDIT!
A list seems fitting:

Don Hertzfeldt

Werner Herzog

Ken Jacobs

Jon Jost

David Lynch

Jonas Mekas

The Billy Nayer Show a.k.a. Cory McAbee

William Richert

Peter Rose

Ben Russell

Rob Schrab

Joe Swanberg

Hans Jurgen Syberberg

Robert Todd (Has seen his work? Care to comment?)

I thought you meant Ken Russell, but no.... you really did mean Ben Russell...

Anyway, I'm pretty sure Ken Russell is a good example of this. I haven't seen any, but apparantly he's been making films in his garden etc and has been self distributing. You'll have to ask a fan for a link, as google didn't turn up anything for me.

I'm sure I didn't dream this though...

Ben Russell is a pretty wonderful experimental film/video maker currently based in Chicago, I believe. His work centers around (or tends towards, rather) the inherently anthropological act of seeing, watching, witnessing, ect. This carries over into acts of creation (creations myths are common in his work), historical revisionism (or fictionalization thereof) and world traveling. I think his most recent work is titled Black and White Trypps Number Three, where he literally shines a spotlight onto a crowd attending a Lightning Bolt concert. He slowly pans over randomly selected faces as they react to the music/sound. It's pretty a remarkable piece, it's also shot on 35mm!

Anyway, I recommend.

Bill Nayer sells The American Astronaut and a DVD of his short films and songs directly from his site. I need to get around to ordering TAA sometime...

You should add DIY filmmaker Joe Swanberg with his Young American Bodies

The series is a bit patchy but has it's moments. But people here should check out his feature length films, LOL and Hannah Takes the Stairs. And please don't ever use the word "mumblecore" around me, unless you want me seeing red.

planetjake wrote:Due to my upcoming boycott of Hollywood...

And yet,

Made me giggle. Thanks!

True enough, though. The industry growth has spurred me on more than anything.

Cosmic Bus wrote:Bill Nayer sells The American Astronaut and a DVD of his short films and songs directly from his site. I need to get around to ordering TAA sometime...

I remember The American Astronaut being totally hilarious and crazy, and (intentionally) chintzy in its production design. It's been quite a while since I've seen it, but even now certain scenes and images stand out in my memory -- especially a dance number performed by a hitman in a bathroom stall. I should get the DVD to refresh my memory as well. Has anyone seen some of Nayer's short films?

Cinetwist wrote:Anyway, I'm pretty sure Ken Russell is a good example of this. I haven't seen any, but apparantly he's been making films in his garden etc and has been self distributing.

Sadly, there's a very good reason why he's self-distributing - the films are so toe-curlingly dreadful that no-one else would touch them.

And I write this as a rabid Russell fan who counts the time I spent researching his 1960s BBC films as one of the high points of my career.

How could I forget Herzog? I know he outright owns most of his films but he sold that boxset of a load of his films directly from his website. And prior to that you could only see most of his non-feature stuff from videos from his site.

Add Syberberg too.

Good call on Syberberg, Cinetwist. I had totally forgotten!

So, MichaelB, do you have the Ken Russell website? I'm sure, even though you don't particularly care for the films, some might find them valuable...

planetjake wrote:So, MichaelB, do you have the Ken Russell website? I'm sure, even though you don't particularly care for the films, some might find them valuable...

There isn't a website as far as I'm aware - though his latest, A Kitten for Hitler (which I haven't seen) is rumoured to be making its debut on the Comedybox site.

But this was supposed to happen last October and there's been no sign of it - unless it came and went with no reaction whatsoever, which is a tad unlikely.

PlanetJake: great thread! Thanks for starting this one.

William Richert is making the director's cut of A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon available (for free) -- along with some of his other work -- at williamrichert.com.

I'm not a fan of either version of the movie, but I am in favor of people being cranky and difficult, as Richert certainly is. (He needs some help with the design of his website -- oy.)

And yes: Don Hertzfeldt is a God.

Jon Jost.

I think he distributes his own work, at least some of it.

The Jost website is great.

He distributes all his own work and encourages email correspondence!

I don't think he has the rights to the films produced by Henry Rosenthal, but I heard that he's disowned those films, or at least tells people not to watch them.

The name of the San Francisco band/visual art project is technically The Billy Nayer Show. It's the brainchild of Cory McAbee, who writes all of their songs and is the driving creative force behind their films.

I've been playing their music on the radio for years... Hard to pin them down musically -- their albums definitely skew through many musical styles. I personally tend to think of them as a hybrid of The Residents and They Might Be Giants (due to my love of both bands); but they do have a short, catchy style structure reminiscent of TMBG coupled with the more serious darkness and love of concept albums of The Residents. Their songs are darkly poetic and beautiful -- even their simplest and cheeriest songs are caramel apples with razor blades inside. Some of their more recent albums have had some very beautiful and plaintive songs.

The DVD of short films has been in my collection for years and I play it again and again. It contains three short films and some extra songs and live footage; I'll sum up my feelings on the short films:

"Billy Nayer" is a short Cory McAbee painted/quasi-rotoscoped of himself singing one of the band's earliest songs. He painted it with housepaint because it was cheap. It's a fine short flick and a pleasant reminder of when people used to animate without computers.

"The Man On The Moon" is a 20-minute pixel vision flick that bears the most similarity with McAbee's later feature "The American Astronaut." I find it drags at moments and some of its humor finds a better home in the later feature. But all in all it demonstrate's McAbee's ability to get a lot out of very little in terms of production value. His sets and art design (which I also found to be true in "American Astronaut") are never kitschy or ironic, they are executed in seriousness and seem to carry weight.

The absolute gem and reason to purchase this disc is "The Ketchup and Mustard Man," a beautiful half-hour musical grouping of short song/stories encompassing much of the band's first album. The film skews between black and white footage of McAbee singing the songs directly to a film camera and then transports to color sequences of by McAbee in a frightening papier-mache mask (as the titular condiment man) and his band playing around him in suits. I believe it began life as a performance art piece and was later translated to film. I swear they must have shot from a dozen or more angles and the piece is very nicely put together. I run this in the background while writing all the time.

If you have a love of odd music, I highly recommend this disc. For a more cinematic experience, I'd recommend "American Astronaut" which will serve as a very nice introduction to the music of BNS.

Rob Schrab, the creator of the old "Scud the Disposable Assassin" comic, and co- creator of Channel101.com (a touring show of oddball "television" series that run on the web, like "The Animation Show", but even weirder... it's the site that gave birth to "Yacht Rock", if that means anything to anyone), has made some great animated and puppet shorts, including the "Molly & Ringwald" series, about a dinosaur and a spider who solve mysteries. He self- distributes off of his site here.

It's extremely low- fi, DIY filmmaking, but there's so much love and care put into such deeply weird, off-putting humor that it's a thing of beauty. His movies rarely ever stray far from my DVD player.

Thanks for the great thread, by the way! It's great to see so many people who are into this.

Yes! This has turned into a great thread! I'm really thrilled we're all putting so much into this. I've already been exposed to a fair amount I hadn't yet seen. So hurray for that!

OK, here's Ken Russell's A Kitten for Hitler.

Consider yourselves warned.

Wow. "A Kitten for Hitler" is all I had imagined that a Ken Russell film called "A Kitten for Hitler" would be.
I've also been downloading off the Jonas Mekas site, which has some neat shorts available, conveniently in iPod video format. My girlfriend and I also watched the Mingus film and were blown away by it- it's dirty and flawed, and some of the "narrative" is a bit sketchy;l the director really seems to want Mingus to be evicted from his house, not his studio, and as a result there appears to be some bait and switch about the "place" he's being evicted from to heighten the drama - but then again, the sound wasn't very good, so maybe I just misconstrued what they were trying to do. But man, is Mingus fire on screen.

Also, though it can be found through the Schrab site, here's a link to Channel 101.com. It's a bunch of free and interactive web television series, and you can vote on which shows get canceled or get season extensions. It's really fun, there are literally hundreds of hours of film to see, and there's some quality work available too.