Sundance Film Festival

Yesterday I touched upon some of the reasons the air has been let out of Sundance’s balloon this year. And ballooned it has, for a decade. Today walking Main Street’s uncrowded sidewalks, devoid of the usual hypesters and scenesters, I’m thinking that this year’s soft attendance is a gift. And a sign that the Festival might want to recalibrate.

When the Sundance Institute took over the Festival 25 years ago, American independent films were 16mm, low-budget, and all but locked out of the box office. While chances of theatrical success remain as remote today as ever—admittedly there have been giant strides for documentary, Michael Moore’s body of work for example, or those penguins—digital technology with its protean reach, low entry cost and endlessly rising quality has at least leveled the playing field as far as production goes.

Indie films, for instance, no longer get stuck in the film lab because the filmmaker can’t afford processing. As Spike Lee has pointed out, all that holds back a filmmaker today are the limits of his or her own talents—not money.

Even the big brass ring–theatrical distribution–feels more past than future. With small screens exploding in popularity, can the big screen continue to matter as much? (I’m asking this rhetorically, not questioning the value of scale or screen size to Cinema.)

Two recent box-office successes suggest another dimension to the shadow over this year’s Sundance. Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is nothing if not an indie film in spirit. Shot fast with few takes, limited lighting, and nonprofessional actors, it succeeds because Eastwood brings remarkable chops as a filmmaker. But if Hollywood is making its own Sundance films, what does Sundance stand for?

Similarly, as Michael Goldman detailed in his incisive profile of The Wrestler in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Millimeter, director Darren Aronofsky chose to shoot in Super 16mm because a compact, lightweight ARRI 416 and a 12mm Zeiss Ultra Prime wide-angle lens provided a means to shoot very close to Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, continuously penetrating their character’s personal space with a nimble handheld camera. This technique isn’t new—Aronofsky associates it with recent films of Belgium’s Dardenne brothers; I associate it with any number of documentaries shot in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, for example Jeff Kreines’ and Joel DeMott’s classic Seventeen, which won the Grand Jury prize for documentary at the first Sundance in 1985.

No coincidence that Wrestler DP Maryse Alberti hails from documentary, with many Sundance Festival credits. Or that Aronofsky’s debut feature, Pi, won the Sundance Directing Award in 1998.

Again, with Hollywood sanctioning, promoting, distributing, and handing out awards to films that could pass as Sundance films, how is the Festival still necessary? It’s no longer in the business of showcasing films that could never get a shot commercially–if it ever was. That’s why Robin Williams was strolling down Main Street this afternoon, why Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon were chilling at the New York Lounge yesterday.

So it helps to remember that the Institute’s workshops and development programs for directors, producers, composers, screenwriters and playwrights are its raison d’etre; that the Festival was added as a sidebar in 1985. Judged solely from the standpoint of its contributions to filmmaking craft, the Institute’s initiatives have never been more consequential. Perhaps the victim of Sundance’s success is Hollywood itself? (Would explain recent Oscar trends…)

This being a festival blog, I need to lighten up… So I went over to Slamdance this morning to view Lee Storey’s Smile Til It Hurts: The Up With People Story, a beautifully produced documentary exploring the history of “the clean-cut, smile-drenched [group] singing phenomenonâ€? of the ‘60s underwritten by Establishment types to co-opt the youth movement and its profane rock music. (Smile Til It Hurts could bookend Tom DiCillo’s paean to Jim Morrison and The Doors, When You’re Strange, cited in yesterday’s blog.)

Storey, it turns out, discovered that her husband had kept his former participation in Up With People a secret from her. In effect a cult, UWP was initially funded by a shadowy but moneyed post-WWII evangelical movement called Moral Re-Armament (MRA), and later by the U.S. Government (Nixon loved the scrubbed, wholesome singing teens) and corporate boards. To get a flavor of the cultural thrust UWP embodied, think Anita Bryant.

MRA in particular was in the business of controlling its members, their money, their movements, their love interests. All the while cultivating in “the youth� those beaming smiles, perky dance moves and relentlessly positive (“patriotic�) energy. A teenaged Glenn Close is a stand-out. Perhaps she should do the right thing and extend a copy of this creepy, cautionary film to her friend Tom Cruise.

Later at Sundance I saw the Dirt! The Movie in the documentary competition–like Smile Til It Hurts handsomely filmed. Well-intentioned and concerning a most worthy “greenâ€? topic—this year’s fad at Sundance—I found it to be basically a PBS science film, pedantic yet lacking a particle of critical inquiry, a collection of wall-to-wall talking heads emphasizing the same points over and over, as smiley and self-satisfied in the righteousness of their cause as the Up With People kids. I particularly took umbrage at the chirpy animated microbes with cute smiley faces, straight out of the science education films you hated in high school, at least if you attended high school in the ‘60s.

Documentary competition? What were they thinking? (I did hear through the grapevine that there are regrets they turned down Smile Til It Hurts.)

Here’s a suggestion for refreshing the Festival: can we get back to rough-around-the-edges, truly independently produced films that take audacious aesthetic or political chances? And leave the TV product to its natural outlet?

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