Sundance Film Festival

Park City’s weather continues its upswing, with optimistic blue skies, blinding daylight that makes snow banks dazzle like Hollywood teeth, and thin, icy mountain air that invigorates exposed skin and reveals your every breath.

No matter how good the films—and they are good this year–after being cooped up in the gloom of flickering shadows all day, a shot of cold air to the face is as bracing as a shot of strong spirits would be. Good thing, because the latter is a delicacy in Mondo Utah, where buying a round requires temporarily joining a club, usually for the duration of the imbibing.

Sundance is the ultimate temporary club membership, ten days of pretending that the world revolves around a resort festival of small films with limited commercial appeal. Where, absurdly, festival volunteers must shout, “Please turn off your Blackberries!” as the lights dim.

Not your Treos, your Motorolas, your iPhones… tellingly Blackberries are the official mobile communication tool of Hollywood, whose flying monkeys monitor Sundance premieres while compulsively stealing glances at their email in the dark—or is it the other way around? Do they really expect to find box office champions here?

Brigham Young did once proclaim, “This is the Place” (to be). Although he certainly meant nearby Salt Lake City (“This is the Place” is also Utah’s state song), Sundance has copped and extended his certitude to this year’s festival motto, “Film takes place.” Preceding every Sundance 2008 screening is a motion graphic of an endless empty road stretching out before us, with snow-covered peaks that remain forever in the distance and clouds that boil overhead, as if the heavens might spill out. Eventually the tagline, “Film takes place,” appears.

“Film takes place”? Sundance should probably stick to indie film promotion and leave phenomenological enquiry to the experts. Do they mean exists, or does “takes place” imply temporality or geography? And where did Sundance’s own sense of mission disappear to? “Film takes place”–not quite what I’d call a bold battle cry–is a far cry from the world-changing ardor of Sundance’s early days. (This is my 21st Sundance.) Its passivity echoes John Mayer’s recent lyrics, “So we keep waiting (waiting), Waiting on the world to change,” as compared to Graham Nash’s “ We can change the world, rearrange the world, It’s dying to get better.” (CSNY Déjà Vue, directed by Neil Young’s cine alter ego, Bernard Shakey, closes the festival.)

Whether or not Sundance succeeded in changing the world or instead surfed generational change over giant waves of digital innovation that reinvented low-budget production—both are likely–at least two trends are evident this year. As fellow New York DP Jendra Jarnagin pointed out over dinner last night, at this year’s Sundance there seems to be a record number of films DP’d by women, at least twenty, including Laela Kilbourn (American Teen), Maryse Alberti (Gonzo, The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson), Lisa Rinzler (Sleep Dealer, The Year of Getting to Know Us), Petra Korner (The Wackness), and Ellen Kuras (Be Kind Rewind). The count grows if you add the category of producer/director/cinematographer in documentaries like Lisa Jackson’s heartbreaking The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo and Ellen Kuras’ stirring Nerakhoon (The Betrayal).

And, as noted in yesterday’s blog, gone are the days of gritty, grainy images with dodgy audio, epitomized by anything John Cassavetes. Gone too is 16mm projection. Since the beginning of the decade, when Sundance restricted projection formats to 35mm and HDCAM, low-budget producers have been forced to up their production and postproduction games. Even a humble ITVS documentary, Dinner with the President: A Nation’s Journey (co-DP is Claire Pijman), in which Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf accepts a dinner invitation, is photographed beautifully in 16:9 digital video (production notes were missing, but I’d guess it’s progressive-scan, perhaps HD in places) and paced like elegiac cinema instead of breathless TV. (I highly recommend this film. General Musharraf’s integrity, intellect, vision will shock, and you will find yourself rethinking the efficacy of democracy.)

Indeed, as image-capture technology available to low-budget productions brings further gains in image quality (e.g., Sony’s EX1 or Kodak’s new, nearly grainless Super-16 negative, 7219), the challenge will be to reclaim, as desired, the distressed textures and bad lens-induced murkiness once typical of small-gauge film and analog video cameras—that is, if cinematographers want to retain the full palette of graphic and atmospheric choices available to still photographers and graphic designers. (Plasticy skintone highlights, a gift of Sundance’s digital projection, don’t count.)

Enough of the fresh air already. I’m heading back into the dark.

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