Beyond Miramax

Far from Hollywood, new filmmaking communities emerge

Jesse Walker from the August/September 2001 issue

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Other flash-animation pieces range from last year's pro-Napster MettaliCops series to Daniel Hamilton's highly entertaining Journey: A Tribute to America (2001), an ineffable film inspired by the 1981 hit "Don't Stop Believing." (The latter feels like a piece of outsider art, apparently by design. "I was thinking about the idea of the 'untrained web artist,'" Hamilton explains, "like folk art meets the Web.")

Non-flash Web movies often resemble their more primitive counterparts in their visual simplicity, if nothing else. Consider the Australian director Adam Benjamin Elliot, whose stop-motion claymation films about his family are crafted with much more sophistication than any flash film, but are nonetheless stark and uncluttered. His 1998 effort cousin, a touching but unsentimental short about a boy with cerebral palsy, is, in effect, an illustrated memoir: The narrator reads an essay about Elliot's relative while the clay figures offer a visual counterpoint to the actor's words.

Films on the Side

Not that such creativity is typical. The great bulk of online filmmaking, alas, is derivative and dull. Jeff Gurwood's Covert Operatives (2000), a tongue-in-cheek tale about a "Social Anarchist Front" bent on world domination, is notable for its elaborate sets and its stop-motion photography. (All the "actors" are toy action-figures.) But though the plot and dialogue are supposed to mock those movies that skip theaters and go directly to the USA Network, they feel more like a pale imitation than a parody.

On the other end of the spectrum, Alexander Pappas' Timescape (2000) is one of the most popular pictures in iFilm's "experimental" category. Consisting entirely of time-lapse photography, it is, to quote its Web site, "a sort of Day in the Life of a city." But what's so experimental about that? Many movies like it have been made before. At this point, you can see this kind of stuff in TV ads.

But there's still room online for small bursts of brilliance -- for Hyakugojyuuichi!!, or for cousin, or for Dave Kurman's poetically paranoid ...and I (1999). Kurman's film begins with a man noticing a figure outside who appears to be pursuing him; more frightening still, the pursuer appears to be himself. The protagonist tries to flee, but the pursuer bursts into the room where the man is hiding -- only to find it empty. He looks out the window and sees a figure outside who appears to be pursuing him, and we realize that we're back where we started.

Kurman's simple but effective short plays well on the Web, but it wasn't made with the Internet in mind. Kurman originally shot the film (for about $20) at the request of an employer, who thought it would be nice to have a video installation in the lobby; originally, it was to be not a two-minute short but a continuous, theoretically infinite loop. Then Kurman got a new job, and his film became an online effort instead.

Now 27, Kurman made his first movies in his early teens, ripping off Monty Python sketches with his friends. With time, his efforts grew more sophisticated, and he started screening them in 1998, when The Apartment War -- a comedy made with frequent collaborator Ben Jurin, about an apartment that attempts to secede from the United States -- went on the festival circuit. Kurman now earns his keep in Web-based advertising while making movies on the side, a combination he says he likes. "I love the idea of film as a full-time hobby," he explains. "I usually make one or two films a year, and while I'm making the film, that's sort of my job. But I like having this other avenue to work in, too."

At the moment, ...and I is Kurman's only online effort. It is also his most atypical: Most of his films are comedies influenced by Python and The Kids in the Hall. But simply by virtue of being online, it has brought him attention. Someone from the PBS show Image Union saw it, and the program intends to broadcast it in the fall. The short has also gotten him invited to more festivals.

Above all, it has brought him a lot of useful feedback. At festivals, Kurman complains, it's easy to get lost in the pack. In the much more populous online world, paradoxically, it's easier to stand out -- and to find, and interact with, an interested audience. "One of the great things online," he reports, "is that people can be very free with their comments. Lots of different people who have no idea who I am and will never meet me can say, 'Hey, that was very cool' or 'It would have been cooler if you'd done this.' I really value that kind of feedback because you can be totally open, and there's absolutely no prejudice."

So where is this heading? Mainstream success? A diverting hobby, like woodworking on weekends? Or somewhere else altogether? "I'm not looking to make a million dollars or make something that everyone's gonna love," Kurman says. "Medium-sized success is what I'm shooting for. The sort of films that I make are only going to appeal to a certain audience, but the people they appeal to -- they're going to be really into them. That's my measure of success: If 10 percent of the people who see it absolutely love it, I don't care if the other 90 percent hate it."

Life on the Road

Most of those films aren't going to go online. At 20 minutes or more, they're simply too long, Kurman feels, for the medium. A better option might be videotape.

As on the Web, several subcultures can already view a rich selection of the movies they want on tape, even if the films rarely turn up in theaters. One such category, again, is pornography. Another is Christianity, which has inspired videos ranging from apocalyptic thrillers (The Moment After) to syrupy stories for children (the Veggie Tales series). But for artists interested in topics less popular than sex and God, videotapes pose a few problems. One is the trouble you'll have getting viewers to shell out $15 for a movie they'll likely watch only once. Another is getting rental stores to buy a video that people haven't heard of and aren't likely to ask for. And it's easier -- and free -- to watch an online film than one you see advertised in a movie magazine.

This last barrier might be avoided by putting samples of your work online but saving the full films for other venues. The San Francisco writer-director Danny Plotnick, 35, has done that. But he has a more intriguing method of getting the word out about his films as well. For nearly a decade, he's been taking them on tour.