...I thought I'd leave you with an excerpt from a book we're publishing in the late Spring of 2008. It's the autobiography of Alex Cox, who made Repo Man, and Sid & Nancy and it's called X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker. But as you can tell from the below, it's way more than just an autobiography, it's a bloody manifesto. And I thought I'd make sure, while doing all my pimpin' and ho-in' at the Frankfurt Book Fair, that the blog is reminding me that there's serious business to be working on, in the world of independent culture making...
From X-FILMS by Alex Cox.
This book is about ten films I made. It’s called X FILMS because I like the Roman numeral, because I have two Xs in my name, and because it reminds me of the banned, adults-only films of my childhood - mainly horror films and Spaghetti Westerns. Not all of these were revolutionary films. But some were.
I grew up with a passion for the pictures, and for weird, marginal, independent films. The ninety-minute form is the length of our dream cycle, we’re told. As Buñuel and Dalí knew, there’s something particularly empowering and exciting about telling stories that resemble dreams. The cinemas I was raised in were real buildings: often huge, with vast, nicotine-yellow screens, and I would head upstairs to the circle, or down to the stalls, and watch two films - a double feature - through rising trails of cigarette smoke.
Going to the cinema today is a more ordered affair. The cinemagoer is forced to undergo a shopping experience, sees only one film instead of two, pays a lot more for it, and endures a barrage of loud, assaultive ads before the film begins. It’s this advertising, along with sales of highly-salted, shit-smelling popcorn, and sugared water, that makes the cinema chains their money. Only the studio-distributors make money from the films themselves.
Talking to students and younger people now, I get the impression that they think a film is “given” to a filmmaker - by a studio, or a production company. This is not so. If you’re a real filmmaker, a film is something which you personally conceive, and then, in partnership with similarly-minded colleagues, make yourself. It might be shot on film, or digital video. It might be 19 minutes or 370 minutes in duration (I’d recommend 80-95). It is entirely within your power to make an independent feature film, as long as you belong to one of two groups. To pull it off, you must be either:
1) a vocational filmmaker, affronted by Hollywood and its power, caring little about money or rewards, determined to tell your own tale;
2) a computer (or other) hacker, because hackers are brave and curious, and not afraid of acquiring, applying, and sharing information.
I include hackers because I suspect that feature film is dead, or dying, and that new blood and brains are needed to bring the twitching corpse-thing back to life. In the last few years I’ve learned a great deal from hackers: from 2600, from Richard Stallman, from Lawrence Lessig, from The Cathedral & The Bazaar - and I believe we’re hoeing the same row. Most of what I know about the loss of my civil liberties I’ve learned from computer magazines: only here, on a monthly basis, can the general reader learn about the destruction of the fair use doctrine, about abuse of patent and copyright law, about the monopoly power-grabs of Microsoft and other corporations, whose stupidity and cupidity rival the Pentagon’s. Patents and copyrights are complex things, far too difficult for Guardian or New York Times reporters, so it’s a good thing we still have Computer Shopper to remind us that we’re being screwed.
Today, an independent filmmaker is a revolutionary fighter, in a prolonged popular war. This is the same war that Free Software and GNU/Linux activists fight against Microsoft; that the Slow Food movement fights against McDonalds; that independent musicians fight against the RIAA and the Apple Music Store; that Fair Trade activists fight against WalMart and the WTO; that the Zapatistas fight against patriarchal systems of control in Mexico. There are no spoils to be had on this battlefield, and no prospect of a quick and easy victory. Yet, buoyed by belief, and by the lack of a sustainable or sane alternative, the guerrilla soldiers on. In the case of feature films, the battle for an independent, personal art form is already won (thanks to the Mini DV tape and the DVD), lost (thanks to the studios and their admirers), and irrelevant, anyway.
Irrelevant, because the feature film was the original art form of the twentieth century. It can’t be the original art form of the twenty-first, as well. Something that goes beyond it will displace it - some medium equally visual and visceral, but interactive, with multiple narrative possibilities. It’s already being born: out in the same uncharted territory as the computer game, the “readjusted” corporate website, and the home-made CD of “illegal” MP3s. But the birth won’t be easy, and the new form is destined for a long and hard-fought war.
Lined up against the development of new art forms are the financial beneficiaries of the old: the studios and record companies, and the politicians, academics and media who work for them. Their world is already dying. Soon it will be gone. In the meantime, there are still a few jobs to be had there. This is the filmmaker’s choice – dependency, and the money which comes with it, or independence, which may involve lean times.
At the same time, as the studios retrench, consolidate, and fight for dominance in a diminishing market, it becomes even more important for them to suppress the individual, or the regional, voice. In some countries, the idea of film as a distinctive, national art form has been abandoned.
The British and the Mexicans face the most acute cultural challenge. Mexico suffers from its military and economic weakness and geographical proximity to the US; Britain suffers from a common language and from a ruling class which is scared to defy the biggest bully in town. As a result, our governments and cultural classes invariably bow to American influence. Instead of encouraging regional voices, and developing new creative forms, they gather in secure redoubts in the capital city, and assist in the creation of amnesia, in the effort to wash away our feelings, and our brains.
Rather than encouraging new forms to develop - in film, in art, in science, in copyright law - our leaders, cultural and political, seek to enshrine the old. In film and television, the entire panoply of human emotion is carved up into bite-size segments - serving a massive, antiquated, violence-fixated Hollywood fast-food chain which Peter Watkins has called the Monoform.
On Paul Robeson’s tombstone are the words, “The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I made my choice. I had no alternative.” What this great actor said applies to directors, to writers, to journalists, and indeed to almost everybody. But not everyone is in the fortunate position of the artist, able to weigh the political implications of each possible job, and to accept or to reject the work accordingly. The choices that we make, as artists, hackers, filmmakers, are visible in our work. No one is forced to make a film.
Slavery is profitable. Freedom is difficult. Money is plentiful for those who promote obedience; it’s in short supply for those who disobey. And yet, all over the world, people refuse to be slaves, and give up careers and even lives, because their sense of self-worth, or their community’s survival, obliges them to.
Another world is possible.
