Film Flam

Primer

When El Mariachi was originally released no one believed that someone could make a film for $7,000 dollars. It seemedinsane. Then a couple of years later, The Blair Witch Project comes out and does the kind of box office business that Hollywood films like Death to Smoochy wish they could have had. That witch changed everything.

There was a flood of movie made on no budgets at all, and plenty of them got some attention. The problem was that a lot of them weren’t any good.

The problem with the “independent” film world is people max out their credit cards by trying to make films that look just as good as Hollywood movies, or have characters that have sellable character arcs, redeemable social messages, Syd Field 101. Because when you make a movie in your early twenties you hope and pray that not only that someone will see, love and subsequently buy and distribute your movie — but that the people that do buy your movie at least have a reserved parking space at one of the major studios.

So, to make a movie for 7k about a group of engineers who build a time machine and become involved in a complex narrative riddle, with no notable visual effects, recognizable actors — or for that matter actors with any previous experience! — is just plain nutty.

But, Primer is as smart and as clever as anything that has come out of Hollywood for a long time. It was made by an engineer who had no previous film experience, who was literally self taught, and who not only delivered a brilliant narrative film but also one that had a clear and cohesive visual look and deceptively simple characters.

Primer is a step into a direction of filmmaking that I think we should all embrace, because aside from the accounting wonders, it is a film filled with amazing stuff. Usually when you watch sci-fi films there tends to be a lot of dumbing down of technical jargon. Primer embraces it. Because it doesn’t really matter what the exact terms mean, because we are shown those theories and put into practice. When we watch two mechanics work over a car and discuss the job to be done, it’s not so much what they’re saying but what they’re doing. We tend to listen with half an ear.

The film also deals with it’s audience in away that’s very different. Remember The Matrix? That movie’s ideas was hammered into our heads scene after scene, because it’s really important for everyone in the audience to stay with the movie in order for it to pay off at the end. It’s gotta be one of the first rules of screenwriting; don’t alienate you audience. But Primer doesn’t really seem to give a shit whether you’re with it or not. It’s on a path, and it will not deviate from that path to explain theories of causality. For viewers that are unprepared that can be a very jarring experience. But it also results in a movie that is lean and free of the narrative fat that clogs up the pace of a lot of movies.

While Primer is not the date movie of the decade it does definitely require you to watch it with someone else if for no other reason than to see how they interpret the events in the movie. I’ve shown the movie to a few people and their observations of the event seem to differ greatly.

By the end you’ll wonder if Doc Brown really needed a DeLorean with a Flex Capacitor after all.

Data:

Primer

Release Date: October 8, 2004
Director: Shane Caruth
Writer: Shane Caruth
Director of Photography: Shane Caruth
Running Time: 77 minutes or 1 hour 17 minutes

Buy | Rent | wikipedia entry

More and more I see trailers like these; brilliant documentaries on miscellanea that I don’t think I’ll get the chance to see. The standard process for documentaries, and independent films in general is to shuttle them around to various film festivals where they’ll (fingers crossed) get picked up by a distributor and they can live a longer life on DVD or some other home video alternative.

I often wonder if filmmakers ever consider releasing their films under a Creative Commons license, thereby making their films accessible to a larger audience. I understand the need to recoup and investment. Making films is possibly the most expensive art form in existence, and giving away your “product” might seem stupid, but like Tim O’Reilly says, “the greatest threat to an artist isn’t piracy, it’s obsurity”.