Batman Vs. Superman is an all-consuming cultural behemoth,
the purest incarnation of the tent-pole film.
Possibly the last superhero movie of any real cultural importance,
at least for the next 15 to 20 years,
until the whole genre's inevitably ressurrected after it's equally inevitable death.
Batman VS Superman is inescapable.
A quarter of a billion dollars poured just into production,
with at least another quarter billion spent on marketing in all its flavors.
In many ways, Batman vs Superman is pristine - perfect, even.
The preservation of screen direction is flawless, the continuity of action meticulous -
Multiple people were employed with the sole job of making sure Henry Cavill's sneer was
just right every take so that it would cut together without issue.
The computer-generated elements are so flawlessly photorealistic, that you'd be forgiven for not noticing
that there's more live-action Cinema in Wall-e.
It is an expertly sculpted puff of air. A dour, exhausting 150 minute ode to creative bankruptcy,
Batman vs Superman is the kind of movie that makes you question your faith in Cinema itself.
Why did we ever care? On some levels, its existence functions as a commentary on the nature of audience.
Is this not what we signed up for? A high mass, where we ritualistically recount the exploits
of untouchable demigods in a detached language, intentionally posturing itself
above the supplicants in the pews?
In the beginning, there was darkness,
and then Joe Chill shot Thomas and Martha Wayne. Let us pray.
You may have gathered this already, but I didn't much care for Batman vs Superman- though like I said
in many ways the film is perfect. It polished and buffed to a brooding shine.
It is technically flawless in the way that only a quarter of a billion dollars can buy.
The script is trash, of course, a trifling, joyless tour through plot cul-de-sacs and
actions the characters take - or fail to take - for no internal reason other than to progress the meager plot.
This sounds damning, but in truth it describes far more films than it excludes.
It's true failing is spiritual, it is an empty vessel, it is a vast revival tent with nothing inside.
Men & Chicken is the opposite of a cultural behemoth, it is also a deeply flawed film.
A Danish absurdist comedy, there is a good chance that you've never heard of it, and
an even better chance that you'll never see it, or even possibly have a chance to see it.
Mads Mikkelson rapes a bunch of chickens.
That's not even a terribly important point to the overall structure of the film...
But... It gets your attention.
The Lure is a polish electro-Pop strip club musical adaptation of The Little Mermaid.
Nuts is a documentary about the history of medical quackery told mostly through
the lens of a quack doctor's self- mythologizing biography. It is as much about quack medicine and cure-alls
as it is about the way that we, as an audience, interact with the authority of authorship.
Lace Crater is a mumblecore horror about a woman who catches an STD from a ghost.
Thematically, it's about the unpredictability of existence and the lack of a storybook arc to our lives.
Under The Shadow is an Iranian horror film about the way that our context shapes and confines us.
This isn't to say that there are some inherently noble dimension to films that
succeed at simply not being Batman vs Superman, even indie underground films are
still products made by creators, who are generally aware of the context that they exist in.
Whether you are Lace Crater or Batman vs Superman, you still need to address fundamental questions of
appeal, of audience, of marketing... The key differences in the answers to these questions, the sense of scope and scale.
Where Snyder and friends come up with a solution of throwing a quarter billion dollars of advertising at the problem,
meaner artists rely on taboo, gimmick and hook.
Luma quarterly, a local online arts magazine, commissioned me to
create a video essay about the Calgary Underground Film Festival.
The topic was left to me to decide, however broad or specific I wanted to make it,
whether I wanted to talk about something only broadly tangential to the idea of
the festival or if I wanted to drill down deep into the specifics of any one film that I saw.
I was given a Press Pass, a collection of trailer stubs, and left to run amok
I mention this because it's the critical context through which I experienced the festival.
It is the context that this essay exists within, it is the product of a process where
I have been asked to make something and within that space I am now confronted with a number of questions.
I would most certainly like to make something that I am personally comfortable attaching my name to,
and to make something that the editors at Luma will feel reflects the tone and depth that they want for the publication.
I would like to make something that my regular audience would engage with, and share.
I want to take the opportunity to push myself, stepping outside the boundaries of the work
I traditionally produce, but not so far that I end up in unfamiliar territory.
I am pulled between the competing desire to produce something novel and risky, but also safe, familiar, and appealing.
I lurked around the festival edges for days, I interviewed several of the creators involved with CUFF-cade,
an arcade-style addition of Indie games so the festival as a symbiotic attempt at broadening the umbrella of art
that the festival promotes, and giving the public more ways to engage with the space.
One of the creators is a woman whom I've had several exchanges with before on Twitter,
none of which were terribly polite on anyone's part.
The backstory behind the interactions are so petty and obtuse that it would take an entire essay just to explain,
and the stakes are so low that irrelevant feels like too soft a description.
Nonetheless, the anxiety of that interaction hovered over me for days.
The interview itself was lightweight and cordial, little more than an opportunity for self-promotion.
After publishing an edit of the interviews, I reflected on the puff-piece nature of it and
vowed to come back to the subject later in the week to try and get a meatier bite at the idea of games as an independant art.
I wanted to come back and talk about the way that we interface games with the public,
the performative aspects of arcades as gaming in the public space,
and how that context changes the way the creators think about their own work. Never did come back to it. I
I never did come back to it.
I took the opportunity afforded by the privilege of a Press Pass to interview several of the festival programmers and volunteers.
They were good interviews, but what is there to say, really?
CUFF is a somewhat self-explanatory thing, an opportunity to throw a party, promote some niche works have some fun, and make a few bucks.
There are worse reasons to do things, and there's not a lot of hard questions to ask.
This is a dimension that has always haunted my attempts to say something about festivals and conventions.
They are commercial ventures in a niche ecosystem, a chance for self-promotion,
a chance to share something salacious with an audience looking to get off the beaten path,
but it is ultimately mitigated risk.
It is delivering a desired product to a willing audience. It is an act of commerce, not an act of rebellion.
"Underground, to me, means shining a spotlight on films that might not otherwise get to be seen so, I see us as a festival that, uh,
is specifically curated to select films that might not otherwise get a wider release,
with a few selections that will bring the crowds"
This is the context that the festival itself exists in, asking the same questions
What kind of a product do you want to make and attach your name to?
How do you balance the pressures of novelty and the pressures of appeal?
The week culminated in taking Harrison Atkins, the writer, director, and editor of Lace Crater out to breakfast and recording an hour-long interview
about the philosophy of filmmaking while we ate waffles and omelets. I wanted to talk about the maturing of mumblecore in the sense of
generational anxiety that I've always felt lies at the root of the sub-genre.
Mumblecore is an expression of Millennial angst, our crack at Cinema verité, our attempt at capturing something authentic and real.
"...there, I think mumblecore corresponds both to like a- to like um, a...
Like a simple like, pragmatic sensibility and also like this like - this ethos, that's sort of um ...
Interested in like a more... um, Naturalistic or emotionally truthful... um, like random storytelling."
The version of this essay built around that idea never materialized.
I began to write it, but quickly self edited it into oblivion.
It wasn't good enough, my research wasn't complete enough, my familiarity not comfortable enough. It was stale
I threw it out because the anxiety at the core of my self-assignment was to
try and capture something more than just a puff piece promoting a local arts festival.
Men & Chickens stars Mads Mikkelson because without the brand power of the name actor,
the film would never have been made.
Deep down I know I'm not giving CUFF enough credit. Maybe I'm undermining myself due to my own perceived deficiencies
I want to tap into something deeper than the surface, some ephemeral real that is beyond simple commercialism,
some active rebellion, and in that I blind myself to what's actually there
I don't want to perceive myself as the puff piece writer, and that makes me dismissive of things that are easy to explain. This is a flaw.
My desk is littered with Dr. Pepper cans promoting Batman vs Superman
Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor stares at me from the side of a dozen empty cans that I haven't bothered to move to the recycling bin I keep not 6 feet away.
CUFF sells swag, arranges deals with sponsors and promoters, the booze flows and the concession is cash only,
the subversive, the offbeat, the flawed, the undesirable - these are the products, and they are for sale.
In the context of capitalism, is there any act of rebellion, or is it all just making the machines of Commerce work in favor of your interests?
Batman vs Superman spent a quarter of a billion dollars to fill my peripheral vision with endless reminders of the other
quarter of a billion dollars spent making a vapid pay-in to the idea of the audience as willing idiots... Honestly, I had started to believe it.
The simplicity of CUFF, the fact that film Festivals aren't some unique synthesis of elements creating some new thing greater than
the sum of its parts isn't important - CUFF may be self-explanatory, it may be exactly what it says on the tin,
that may very well be a strength, there may not be deeper questions to ask about the metaphysical idea of an underground film festival,
because all the important stuff is right there, laid out front. It is a party where movie fans ring in some weird stuff for fans of weird stuff.
It's that simple, and that's enough.
Underground film is not some strange, unknowable thing - it's movies.
Its films made with passion, films made with cynicism, films made with aspirations for greatness and films made out of lazy inertia
There is no mystical quality that is imbued into a film by virtue of being "underground"
in many ways, you could say underground films aren't even special - the difference between mainstream and underground is largely semantic anyway.
Independent, underground films are still just films. It is an industry with an audience.
"That question, which is kind of like the commercial question,
Has become so much more, like, for granted for me in the wake of Lace Crater, than it was like while I was making it."
Dan: Because now you've got a product that, like- well, do you sell it, do you... Like, what do you do with it? Harrison: Right, well that's the thing...
"It's like, when I was making the movie I wasn't thinking about selling the movie,
I was thinking about making something that adhered to the movie that I saw in my head I wasn't thinking about whether that movie I saw in my head
was something that, um, you know, like a company could come and make money on by exploiting.
And I don't think Lace Crater's like uncommercial,
I think that there's a lot about it that like hooks audiences in that like art there, it's a little bit high concept which i think is a cool trait
for trying to sell it, but it's like that same kind of question, that same kind of tension between filmmaking that's personal
and filmmaking that's commercial. That's just reverberating in my head a lot, that decision."
Lace Crater is about lost souls, literally and metaphorically.
It's a bittersweet film about two people who find mutual comfort and their shared oblivion
It's about small deaths, the death of a relationship, the death of a phase of our lives, we move on and the old version of us dies.
It's about anxiety, trying to reconcile our private selves with our public faces and the way that we tailor our interactions to craft the self that we imagine others want to see
or maybe it's not about those things at all - maybe those are the themes that I crafted of the raw material of the film,
because that's what I wanted to see up on the screen, the meanings of the films shaped by the context in which I saw them.
Batman vs Superman looms so large over this essay because it looms so very large over the idea of this essay,
I want people to see my work, I want people to be affected by what I do, I want them to take something personal away from it,
I want them to engage, and think, and respond, and they can't do that if they don't see it.
Batman vs Superman's tent may be empty, but the tentpole is so very tall
that it can be seen from miles around. It becomes a common reference point, a geographic feature, a shared word.
The comfort of that familiarity eases people into the discussion, even as the discussion wanders far afield from it.
All creators are beholden to the realities of process and the pragmatics of finding an audience,
Film Festivals like CUFF are part of that pragmatic framework.
I have worried about the reach of my work, as much as the programmers of CUFF worried about the draw of their lineup,
as much as the creators of the films shown worried about finding a venue for their work.
We like to think of creation as something pure, some act unsullied by any concerns external to the creation itself
but it's not - all creation is a sequence of decisions, a series of compromises, and often those answers are dictated by externalities.
Let's frame this another way - Warner Brothers was so anxious about ensuring they would find an audience for Batman vs Superman
that they spent a quarter of a billion dollars on promoting the movie.
I spent a lot of time here talking about context, about the themes of context, in the way the context influences creation and decision making,
and the last note of that I want to bring this back around to, is the context in which we engage with art.
In a lot of ways I find it difficult to feel animus towards the films that I see at festivals because the festival environment irrevocably changes
the way that I engage with the films. It is a completely different frame of mind.
When I go to a film at a festival, I am keenly aware of the fact that I, in all likelihood, know very very little about the film itself or the background behind it.
That arrangement is inherently challenging, it demands that I bring more of myself to the film, that I exert more effort in keeping up with where the story is going and what it's doing.
That relationship alters the outcome, flaws and failings are cast in a more charitable light, as experiments that perhaps didn't turn right.
Conversely Batman vs Superman cannot escape it's context, it cannot shake it's existence as an ever-present monolith, with a price tag higher
than the GDP of a small nation. It's flaws in that context suddenly become industrial in scope, and that knowledge colors everything.
Because in the end, we and what we bring with us is the most important context there is.