Beyond Miramax

Far from Hollywood, new filmmaking communities emerge

Jesse Walker from the August/September 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

The idea is not new: There was a time when even some Hollywood epics went on the road, traveling from town to town like a circus troupe. But Plotnick seems to be taking his cues not from any cinematic tradition, but from the music world. Just as a local band tries to extend its audience and sell a few CDs by hitting the road, Plotnick packs a projector, his films, and some videotapes to sell, then starts driving. Mostly, he tours the West Coast -- "logistically, it's the simplest" -- but he has also made it to other parts of the country, and even, twice, to Europe.

Sometimes he screens the films in a proper theater. Other times, he has to make do with smaller venues. I first became aware of his work because I happened to be in Shreveport, Louisiana, the night he was showing his movies in the back room of a local café. I liked most of them, and I thought one -- Pipsqueak Pfollies (1994) -- was exceptional. A 24-minute picture that, in Plotnick's words, "painstakingly details all the crap little kids can get away with," it's not merely clever, well-crafted, and funny, but genuinely insightful.

When Plotnick started making movies, in the late '80s and early '90s, there was less room at festivals for films with a punk/alternative aesthetic. "So," he recalls, "we decided, 'OK, the network doesn't exist for us -- let's create our own.'" The first result, in his case, was a tape called Small Gauge Shotgun, compiling shorts by Plotnick and the Chicago director Jim Sikora. Plotnick did his first tour to promote the video. He also sent it to several film and music magazines. The latter, he discovered, were more supportive, something that has remained true throughout his career. Most of his movies don't deal with music, but they still fit the sensibility of the indie-rock world, and they've gotten most of their publicity from such magazines as the punk mainstay Maximum RockNRoll.

Today, Plotnick makes a living coordinating workshops at San Francisco's Film Arts Foundation, while doing his own films in his spare hours. There's a strong filmmaking community in the Bay Area, he reports; and there's an increasingly strong national community of punk filmmakers as well, with their own festivals and their own approach to getting their pictures seen. "People have really grasped onto touring and alternative distribution in the last three or four years," he says. "I get a lot of calls from other filmmakers who want to do tours and want advice."

But there are still gaps in the path, barriers keeping the movies from some of the people most likely to enjoy them. Plotnick hopes that will eventually change. "The independent music world is a pretty good model," he remarks. "When that took off, it was a network of independent labels, distributors, stores, magazines, and venues, all feeding each other. But in film there isn't really any video 'label,' so to speak. There's one or two people doing interesting things, but they're dealing with the regular distributors."

Meanwhile, Plotnick is starting to make more use of the Internet. This year, for the first time, he has put an entire film online. It's a new short called Tour Tips, made with a flash-like tool called aftereffects animation.

Pictures as an Exhibition

Antero Alli, 48, has been making movies for about a decade, but you shouldn't expect to see many of them online soon: He's happy to use the Web to draw attention to his work, but he has no interest in actual Webcasting. In the past, he has released a few pictures on videotape, but lately he's decided not to do that either. "I've come to the conclusion," he says, "that I'm an exhibition filmmaker. I make movies specifically for projection onto a big screen. That includes everything from the lighting to the composition of the frame. The depth, the sound, the narrative -- all of it, as an expression of my so-called art, for me demands a large screen and a very big speaker system."

Alli has another reason for preferring public exhibitions, one that invokes the people facing the screen rather than the screen itself. "I'm a great believer," he explains, "in this 20th-century ritual of a dark, cavernous room full of strangers, all looking through the same window. I think it's an important social ritual worth preserving, and I see it in some ways being threatened, or its value diminished, by more convenient Internet streaming and video-on-demand."

In that sense, his stance is a philosophic one, even if it means limiting his audience to those who can make it to screenings in Berkeley (where the Finnish-born filmmaker now lives) and selected other cities. (Like Plotnick, Alli takes his movies on tour, though he pretty much sticks to the West Coast. For eight years, he's also run the Nomad Videofilm Festival, an annual traveling show featuring an assortment of short films and videos from around the world.)

If Plotnick looks to independent music for a model, Alli's framework comes from theater. He has acted in and directed plays since the '70s, often combining live theater with projected moving images. If you're used to working in a live art form that can't be mass-produced, it's no small leap to treat your video work the same way.

His latest feature is Tragos (2000), an inventive two hours of myth, science fiction, and film noir. In it, a cult of "technopagans" spends its nights communing with Tragos, a virtual-reality device that tests one's ability to distinguish the virtual from the real, forcing its users to fight for their consciousness while they're plugged in -- and enhancing their awareness of the real, and their disdain for the virtual, during their waking hours. After one session, the cult leader loses her sight and her sister dies; further deaths soon follow. A witch hunt ensues, led by a fiercely Christian prosecutor who regards Tragos and the technopagans as Satanic threats to public morals.

In rough outline, the story might sound like an opportunity for countercultural self-congratulation, with heroic pagans fighting off an oppressive church. Yet the prosecutor, though misguided, is one of the most sympathetic characters in the movie, and the priest who regularly gives him advice offers nothing but wisdom. In a film about scapegoating, Alli seems intent on making his audience consider its willingness to scapegoat as well. The cult leader, meanwhile, is clearly on the brink of madness. The film may sympathize with her, but her personality has more than a few shades of gray. Alli clearly has ideas to present, but they often take the form of questions, not answers.

And there is another character, an unemployed actor who hopes to play a detective in a Woody Allen movie and who prepares for his audition by living the part. Unaware that the actor isn't a real investigator, the prosecutor hires him to infiltrate the Tragos cult. Besides offering comic relief -- the dialogue between the prosecutor and the faux detective is often very funny -- this portion of the plot adds another dimension to the story, giving us a viewpoint character who isn't really affiliated with either the Christians or the pagans, though he must pretend to side with both.

Tragos was made for about $7,250, and though it features some visually interesting special effects, they were actually among the picture's least costly expenses. Obviously, it represents a revolution in filmmaking, a series of technological changes that have made it much cheaper to make a complex, feature-length movie. Less obviously, it represents a challenge to conventional ideas about how and why to reach an audience.