Chris Monger, screenwriter, director, artist had this to answer my plea:
I started a reply which turned into a rant which morphed into my history of why Indie Film did not start, but died with sex lies and videotape – and that’s even before I’d started on why Indie Film should also forget the form of the 90 minute theatrical feature. The future is here, we are free to try anything.
And that’s the conclusion I was working towards: There’s nothing to save.
We can’t hang on to what was (and what was often totally imperfect) anymore than we can hang on to newspapers. Regular Film / Studio Film / Indie Film as we know them may limp along for a while, or may even exist like Opera for a long time, but stories / moving images are not going away.
Now’s the time to have fun with them. In the late 60’s early 70’s a lot of Indie Filmmakers (and I’m talking about people who processed their own film, ran their own printers – really Indie!) believed that film was at the same point that painting was at the turn of the 20th Century: Rather than being ruined by photography, painting was liberated into all the isms of the new way of seeing and looking and re-presenting.
So I say, where are the Picassos and Matisses, the people who will throw away the rule book?
