Cinema is a driving force in my life. I don’t want it to leave us, nor do I want to have to leave it behind; it’s provided me with hope and inspiration, and an incredibly fulfilling livelihood.
It is also a 100-year-old industry and, in my opinion, damn close to both a perfect art form and a perfect entertainment. But it's also one whose applicability to our lives and livelihoods must be completely re-evaluated.
Cinema is no longer the most complete and representative art form for the world we inhabit. It is a rarefied pleasure requiring us to conform to a location-centric, abbreviated, passive experience that is nothing like the world we engage with day-to-day.
There also is no workable present-day business model to support the current mode of cinema, other than one built on the exclusionary practice of isolated control of funding, marketing, distribution and exhibition.
We know the model for financing and distribution – and, by extension, creation – is now running on fumes. How long can the studio model survive when the wall of control has already come down and the people have recognized the power they have as audiences and creators?
How long can a business based on library assets survive when everything has been digitized and can be copied and spread with the touch of a button?
To think forward, we have to look backwards and recognize cinema for what it truly is and stop naming a part of it as the whole. It is the entire process, the dialogue that goes on between the audience and the content, the experience that resonates long after the lights have been turned on.
Cinema is supported by six pillars. Until now, creators truly only participated in two of them: content and production. For the last two decades, independent filmmakers mistakenly perceived it as some sort of victory that they had the opportunity to participate in the first two pillars. But we haven’t seen the forest for the trees.
When we look at the great woods that surround us now, we should recognize that we have not just the possibility, but also the necessity, to participate in the other four pillars: discovery, promotion, participation and presentation.
With our new access and involvement, the power to create, to access, to spread and to appreciate, is going to be owned by each and every one of us.
In denying the creative class access to those other four pillars of cinema, our industry also inhibited the narrative form from expanding beyond a linear structure and its delivery from migrating from a singular platform.
Yet the creative side somehow did not just readily accept but also propagated the myth that this is how it was supposed to be. When considering the audience’s actual experience of cinema, the creative class has embraced false and unnecessary demarcations: between commerce and art, between content and marketing, between creator and audience.
Marketing and narrative each influence each other.
