film festivals – greg.org

So Abbas Kiarostami Stole 10??

An extraordinary disclosure coming in the media backdoor: Abbas Kiarostami, the late giant of Iranian filmmaking, reportedly stole the film Ten (10), which was nominated for the 2002 Palme d’Or at Cannes, from the young, female filmmaker who was its taxi-driving protagonist, Mania Akbari.

In a screenshots of a newsletter tweeted by Bulgarian film writer Yoana Pavlova (@roamingwords), Akbari writes that she conceived and shot the dashcam footage–which, famously, is almost all seemingly unscripted conversations between a taxi driver (Akbari) and her passengers.

Akbari showed this footage to Kiarostami, who asked to use it as inspiration for a script, but instead he edited it into the film known as 10. Then, Akbari writes, in a Q&A at Cannes, in her presence, he claimed full credit for the film, and that he directed Akbari through a hidden earpiece. Akbari says this is all entirely false, and that she has been dealing with the repercussions ever since.

Amina Maher, Akbari’s filmmaker daughter (who appeared in 10 as her young son) has herself addressed the sense of exploitation and violation she felt as a child who did not know she was being recorded (though presumably at the time, her mother, who was doing the recording, did. Maher’s website says she separated from her family at 15).

Maher and Akbari both assert that there was never any consent or contract between them, other family members who appear in the film, and Kiarostami, and have served notice to its producers and distributors to prevent its screening. It’s an extraordinary and shocking situation which Kiarostami’s people–he died in 2016–have yet to account for, afaik.

I’m now going to try to watch Kiarostami’s 2004 making of documentary, 10 on Ten, which also screened at Cannes. In that film, Kiarostami uses the same dashcam setup to deliver his digital filmmaking tips. It’s interesting that Manohla Dargis found it “tediously didactic” compared to Ten‘s original freshness. Maybe that’s because they were made by different people. [Turns out most of it is on YouTube.]

Gus Van Sans

Gus Van Sant, Untitled, 2010, watercolor on paper, 132×144 cm, image via artsy

I still admire his films. And I still definitely want to make that shot-for-shot remake of Gerry I’ve been contemplating since a day after seeing it for the first time. But nothing I have seen has me pumped for Gus Van Sant’s upcoming exhibition of wan paintings that Vito Schnabel’s putting on any minute. One thing I am intrigued and concerned by is something I have not seen.

This joint at Vito’s is not Gus’s first gallery exhibition. Artsy notes, almost correctly, that “In 2012, Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles gave him a joint show with James Franco, which featured watercolor portraits by Van Sant and two collaborative films that riffed on My Own Private Idaho.” According to the AnOther Magazine article linked above, the show, “Unfinished,” was in February–April 2011 at Gagosian Beverly Hills. The gallery’s otherwise comprehensive-slash-exhaustive website makes no mention of the show. The Internet Archive reveals the webpage for the show was deleted some time between November 2011 and January 2012.

This image from a deleted Artsy page for the Gagosian show is the only installation shot I’ve found.

[OK, there is one mention: Derek Blasberg brings it up in an interview with Gus in the Summer 2018 issue of Gagosian Quarterly, an availability that now feels like part of the pitch phase for the current show. Gus is photographed on his sofa, in front of one of his giant, scrawly paintings.]

And it’s not like the show didn’t happen; Patrick McMullan covered it. But it wasn’t so much Gagosian giving Gus a show, as James Franco proposing a project to Gagosian where Gucci would pay to digitize 25 hours of dailies and outtakes from My Own Private Idaho, which Franco and Van Sant would each re-edit. That did not happen. Instead, Franco, “performing as” Van Sant, edited 12 hours of River Phoenix footage into My Own Private River, and some other outtakes into Endless Idaho, an adaptation of one of the three source stories for the original film. Van Sant’s contribution, beyond all the footage, was seven large watercolors of casting photos of hustlers. [Three are still listed on Artsy. They’re not bad. Watercolor seems a tricky medium to manage, especially at scale.]

That summer My Own Private River appeared at PS1 as an exhibition slash film series curated by who knows? But the Franco indulgence and the double row of unwatchable monitors points to Klaus. The film was shown on an old TV facing a casting director’s table at the end of a hall, so I guess we’re all performing Gus Van Sant now. There was also Franco’s 8mm adaptation of an earlier source script, featuring younger, Hispanic versions of Keanu & River’s characters; and Aa 20-years-older Udo Kier reprised his daddy role. Not at all confusingly, it was called My Own Private Idaho. Instead of watercolors, Van Sant showed a wall of large-scale, unmounted prints of film stills.

installation view of Summer School / My Own Private River at PS1, 2011, image: moma.org

In September 2011 Franco and Van Sant showed an installation titled “Memories of Idaho” in the lobby of the Toronto International Film Festival. It comprised Gus’s large photos “of actual street hustlers” and a new version of My Own Private River [below], edited down to a two-hour alternate take version of the original film after Joaquin Phoenix complained about the invasiveness of the 12-hour clip dump. The Film Society of Lincoln Center screening in February 2012 (programmed by Film Comment) also included Van Sant’s photos.

Franco apparently wanted to release his reworked version, but New Line wouldn’t let him. Art was fine, though. It was enough for the film and the title/hashtag to be ensconced in the River Phoenix fandom. It was uploaded to YouTube in 2015. In 2018, Franco was accused of inappropriate sexual conduct by several aspiring actresses at his film school, which he abruptly closed. Which I mention because by this point Van Sant feels oddly peripheral to this whole project, displaced or subsumed by Franco’s hustle.

It appeared and was covered elsewhere, and vestiges of documentation exist, but it still seems odd for the gallery who staged a show to delete any record of it from their archive. In just a few years this show has appeared to be many things: a project in a gallery; a film screening in a museum; an art installation in a film festival; a test of the meaning of context and the power of celebrity; and now, a tossed-off promotional claim for attention and artistic credibility that gets obfuscated and complicated upon even a cursory examination. Art is so wild, y’all.

Escape And Curry Service

I’ve been wanting to see Rirkrit Tiravanija’s film Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors since it came out in 2011. I’ve been sleeping on it/booked up with other stuff almost the whole time it’s been on view at the Hirshhorn, along side his curry and protest drawing piece, newly acquired, Who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green? Instead of mosaicing snippets from various visits, I wanted to see the whole thing in one sitting. Yesterday was the second to last day of the show, so I jammed downtown first thing.

Rirkrit and his dealer’s brother shot 16mm a week at a time, here and there, for two years, following the Chiang Mai farmer/laborer on his daily routine. He compared it to portraiture rather than narrative, and so I expected 2.5 hours of fly-on-the-wall footage, minus the walls.

It’s an extremely quiet, unassuming film, especially for a gallery setting. It does not grip or demand attention. So when I sat down on the Hirshhorn’s Miesian daybed in what turned out to be the middle of the film, I expected a bit of endurance and, frankly, escapism. Even a couple of weeks ago, Rirkrit had talked about Lung Neaw as a guy who’d helped build his studio, and who could be seen walking through the forest, foraging for wild eggplants. I imagined a shaman at one with nature who could free (or distract) me from the daily shitshow of the world we’ve created. It did not turn out that way. Continue reading “Escape And Curry Service”

Abstract In Concrete (1952), The Making Of

Nayland Blake just posted this on his always eye-opening tumblr Knee-deep in the Flooded Victory. Abstract in Concrete is a 10-minute short film by John Aravonio, which pairs reflections of neon signs in the rain puddles of Times Square with a jazz/classical score by Frank Fields. The date given on this recent YouTube upload is 1954. And it is credited to the United States Information Agency.

Which is just nuts.

Continue reading “Abstract In Concrete (1952), The Making Of”

International Jarman Blue

I am so stoked to see Derek Jarman’s Blue in the 2nd floor galleries at MoMA. It is truly one of the most formative film experiences I’ve ever had, and it changed the way I thought of both movies and monochromes. And it captured and collapsed art and film and a moment of outrageous, despairing history, when the personal and cultural toll from HIV/AIDS seemed almost beyond hope. Which is a lot for any film to carry, much less one as unusual as Blue.
The last year and a half or so, whenever the radio gets too cloying or annoying, I’ve taken to listening to the soundtrack for Blue sometimes in the car. It’s weird that an angry elegy against indifference, AIDS, and death would be so pleasant. Maybe emotionally satisfying is a better term. But I can easily recall the first times I saw Blue, at the NYFF in October 1993, and then at the New Yorker Cinema during its release.
But enough about me, because there are important things that I still didn’t realize about Blue precisely because my own intense personal encounter with the film blinded me [sic] to them.
Like I knew that Jarman had chosen Blue‘s blue for its reference to Yves Klein, but I did not realize that Jarman had been contemplating a monochrome IKB film for Klein as early as 1974, as sort of a cinematic answer to the painter’s Symphonie Monotone. Blue went through many titles and Klein-centered iterations before becoming what it finally was: a poetic documentary of Jarman’s own life and illness. [A lot of this stuff comes from Rowland Wymer’s 2006 Derek Jarman biography, which is a good read, even if “colour field” doesn’t mean what Wymer thinks it means.]
It very much became a film about Jarman’s losing his sight, and the effective end of his career, even though that’s not at all what it had been before. Because before also meant before all that went down. Blue‘s unchanging monochrome field was able to accommodate whatever content changes Jarman brought to it.
When Blue was still called Bliss, back in 1987, and was a Klein-related companion film to The Last of England, Jarman filled a notebook with dialogue, poems, and IKB monochrome paintings. The Bliss Book and other Blue-related preparatory and archival material will be in “Almost Bliss,” an exhibition next month at Chelsea Space, London, England.
Blue really took its finished form beginning in 1991, not as a film, but as a performance/event. Jarman and Tilda Swinton first performed Bliss at a charity fundraiser for his hospital, sandwiched between a performance of Klein’s Symphonie Monotone and a screening of The Garden. [Which must’ve been quite a night: the Klein’s supposed to be 40 minutes, and The Garden‘s an hour and a half.]

A still of Klein’s IKB 71 (Californie), 1961, which, I have no idea what his film loop looked like, but this one seemed appropriately cinematic. It’s in a private collection, but was at the Met a few years ago.
At first Jarman used a film loop of a Klein monochrome. When the film jammed, Jarman switched to a blue gel. I don’t quite know why, but I find this easy passing between media and image to be fascinating. Bliss‘s blue began as a film of an object, but then the object disappeared, replaced by a light effect. Later, when Blue was complete, and aired simultaneously on Channel 4 and BBC radio, listeners were invited to send for a monochrome blue card they could stare at during the broadcast. A broadcast image replaced by an object.
The project evolved and funding came through in 1992, and Jarman’s own stories became the central theme. All along I figured that Jarman maybe didn’t film anything, that the blue was a chemical aspect of the film print itself. But Wymer’s book says the blue was “electronically produced.” I confess, I find this something of a letdown, even if it means MoMA’s probably OK to show Blue on digital projection rather than film. And it makes me want to do something around or to Blue and its visuals. I don’t know what yet.
#53 Almost Bliss: Notes on Derek Jarman’s Blue, curated by Donald Smith, 29.01.14 – 15.03.14, Chelsea Space [chelseaspace.org]
buy Derek Jarman (2006) by Rowland Wymer [amazon]
JUNE 2014 UPDATE In Issue 165 of Frieze (May 2014), Paul Schütze talked with Simon Fisher Turner about his longtime musical collaborations with Jarman, including the making of Blue.
Turner says they probably did six or seven live concerts of Bliss/Blue before the film. I wonder if any of them were recorded? Also this bombshell:

Derek and I had really big arguments about Blue, because at one stage people wanted to put images into it and I said, ‘You’re mad!’ By then my relationship with Derek was really good. I’d say, ‘Listen, this is really what I think.’ Then he suggested that it would be great to have some gold drifting down amidst the blueness, because he loved gold, or the occasional shadow of movement. I objected and said, ‘Please NO! It has to be pure.’

Yikes.

Less Filling, Looks Great: Doug Aitken’s Song1 On The Hirshhorn

We came out of the Hirshhorn tonight after the surprise [to me] screening of Space is Process, a 2010 documentary about Olafur Eliasson, only to find they were testing Doug Aitken’s Song1, a 360-degree projection on the barrel of the museum.

I had been worried about how well buff-colored aggregate would hold up as a projection surface, but I tell you, it looked pretty great. Amazing, even.
And seeing it suddenly makes you wonder–and by you, I mean me–why doesn’t the Hirshhorn project things on the surfaces of the buildings more often? You know what, why not all the time?

And that leads to the next logical question: what should be projected on the Hirshhorn?
Song1 is a hypnotic, laconic, melancholic sequence of closeups of an LA Basinful of people singing “I Only Have Eyes For You,” intercut with abstract CG motion graphics. Its narrative doesn’t seem anywhere as complex as the multi-screen Sleepwalker, projected on MoMA, but it seems thoughtful, and definitely works as a beautiful proof-of-concept.
But. So.
What else is going on the Hirshhorn Channel? The potential [or maybe the temptation] for agitprop and politically charged artworks seems either irresistible or anathema, depending no how involved one is in wooing Congress. The Hirshhorn and the Smithsonian at large are likely not interested in actually biting any hands that feed them.

And starting Thursday night at 8pm, that strategic non-engagement pact will be on view from the Mall in full, dazzling force.

The View Of Punishment Park From Zuccotti Park

Punishment Park? How did I not know about Peter Watkins’ incendiary 1971, anti-war, anti-fascist, faux-news documentary? I mean, it was the movie Rirkrit chose to broadcast on his unlicensed TV station in the Guggenheim. I sat in Anthology’s rickety seats for the entire 5+ hours of The Commune (Paris, 1871). Is it one of those things that just looks so completely, unrecognizably different in the light of Occupy Wall Street, that–no.
When Punishment Park was finally released on DVD in 2005, it was the peak of a globally unpopular war, which was tainted by torture, unlawful detainment and military tribunals, violations of basic constitutional and human rights, and polarized rhetoric within American culture. So no, I don’t think I registered what Watkins had done.

Which, holy smokes. Here’s how Holland Cotter describes Punishment Park in his 2005 review of Rirkrit’s show:

it is a docudrama about the brutal silencing of antiwar protesters during the Vietnam period. Many of the actors were amateurs. The people cast as activists were, in fact, real-life activists; the police were played by former police officers.
Their lack of theatrical training gives the film a curious tension, making it seem both authentically documentary and stagy. It feels something like that era’s political street theater, which was cropping up all over the United States and Europe at a moment when anger and paranoia were at flood tide. This aesthetic certainly suits the low-tech character of the broadcast facilities, which are pretty rudimentary.

Shooting in an army tent and the Mojave Desert, a British news crew follows two groups of activists/protestors as they are run through a sham tribunal and are given the choice between excessive federal prison sentences and an impossibly brutal three-day race across a vast desert reservation, aka “Punishment Park,” where they are hunted down by National Guardsmen training for the next Kent State.

It’s like Predator and The Tenth Victim gave birth to the sequel of Zabriskie Point, starring the Chicago Seven. It is not pretty.
Punishment Park may not be a great movie, but it is definitely a fascinating one, one which is difficult to watch, and apparently difficult to like. I think that’s by design, though; it seems calculated to antagonize and/or enrage basically anyone with a political opinion and a stake in the outcome of the American experiment. It deserved a little more credit than it got, though, and certainly better consideration than Vincent Canby was capable of:

Because all literature, including futuristic nonsense like this, represents someone’s wish-fulfilling dream, I can’t help but suspect that Watkins’s cautionary fable is really a wildly sincere desire to find his own ultimate punishment.

Yow.
The freaky thing, I guess, is the way Punishment Park manages to both over- and under-predict the cultural rifts and abuses of power in American politicized culture over the intervening 40 years. I think had I seen Punishment Park in 2005, I would have distanced it as a historic, histrionic artifact. But given the last few years/months/weeks, I can’t help but see parallels and hear echoes between the film, its time, and today.
The other, less uncomfortable thing–I mentioned Zabriskie Point for a reason–is how Punishment Park alters the context of the 60s and 70s for me. I can’t help but see the counterculture and the desert, the military and the desert, war and the desert, art and filmmakers in the desert, quite differently now.
The New Yorker Films DVD release of Punishment Park is available on Amazon and Netflix.

I, For One, Welcome Our Black Mirror-Wielding Motion Control Camera Overlords

So you should really read Daniel Kasman’s review of the Venice debut of Mark Lewis’s awesome-sounding short film, Black MIrror At The National Gallery, because Kasman is sensitive to both the tone and surprise/reveal of the film in a way that the official synopsis, oddly, does not.

But if you’re not going to read either of those, I’ll just say it sounds like Russian Ark meets 2001, with the Marquis de Custine replaced by Martin Szekely’s silicon carbide “Black Sun” mirror, the Hermitage replaced by the National Gallery, and everyone and everything else replaced by Hendrick Avercamp’s Dutch Golden Era tondo A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle.

Sounds awesome.
Venice 2011. Art Is Terror from Any Other Angle [mubi.com]
Orizzonti – BLACK MIRROR AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY – MARK LEWIS [labiennale.org]
Miroir- Soleil Noir, 2007 [galeriekreo.fr]
Avercamp’s A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle, 1609 [nationalgallery.org.uk]

‘Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Favorite Farmer’

Chiang Mai farmer/laborer Lung Neaw has worked with RIrkrit Tiravanija for several years now. He helped build the artist’s house. Tiravanija’s footage of him has appeared in various gallery and museum installations.
And Saturday, Tiravanija’s film, Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors, will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Maybe there should be a spoiler alert somewhere, because from the synopsis, the title pretty much gives the entire 2.5 hour movie away.
In a Q&A on the Lung Neaw website the artist says he sees the film not as “a documentary and not a narrative, perhaps it’s more of a portraiture.”
He and his longtime Mexico City dealer’s brother Christian Manzutto shot a week or so at a time:

So we shot over a period of two years and another to edit and postproduction, the film was really made very simply and with very little by way of crew and equipment, in that relationship for me very much like a documentary but also very much like how an artist would approach the production, also with very small but cost-effective budget. We shot in film (super 16mm) so rather small and light unit but with frames and quality which was not video.

An interesting choice, and an interesting approach. Two of his galleries, kurimanzutto and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, have associate producer credit.
See the Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours trailer [vimeo]
Thai media article on the project: Lung Neaw goes to Venice [nationmultimedia.com]

‘The Whole Kit And Caboodle’

So I’m kind of dying because there’s a screening next week, and I’m trying to figure out how to go.

Three houses were used for the principal location; the production moved from one to another depending on the direction of the sun. “Terry’s not really a stickler for continuity,” Mr. Fisk said.

Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life premiers at Cannes [nyt]

Shh, Don’t Speak.

From Dennis Lim’s brief Q&A with Gus Van Sant at Cannes, where Restless is [finally?] debuting:

We did silent takes of almost every scene so we could maybe use them in the editing. Terry Malick apparently shoots silent takes so he can mold what he wants out of the scenes. But with our takes we actually created a silent version because we had enough material and we realized we could — maybe it’ll be on the DVD. Everything is there except the dialogue — all the sounds and music, and you hear all the footsteps, but there’s nobody talking and no lips moving. They’re the same scenes, but it has the distance of not being dialogue-driven. It’s the exact same love story but it plays like a different movie.

It’s funny, because Gerry and Elephant only have like 10 pages of dialogue between them anyway.
Previously: Gus Van Sant’s go-to guy, the greg.org 2003 interview with producer Dany Wolf

Know Hope

Producer Ted Hope is at least three installments into his solid post-Sundance, post-Toronto explication of what he’s calling “The New Model of Indie Film Finance.” It’s a pretty clear-eyed look at the challenges even a celebrated, experienced filmmaker faces in realizing a project–and a profit.

Clearly we are at a point in US film culture where the infrastructure is not serving either the investors, the creators, or the audiences. Good films are getting made but not being delivered to their audience. Last year I went to a film investor conference. Several other producers were invited and we all asked to pitch projects. None of us left with funding, but the investors said to me that I was the only one that addressed how we would deal with the reality of not just getting our film to market, but bringing it to the ultimate end-users — the audience. As artists build communities around their projects in advance of actual production, they are developing a plan to give domestic value to their films. It is hard to imagine that any artist will be able to do enough pre-orders to predict 20% of negative costs from the USA — unless they are working on microbudgets — but taking a step forward is still a better plan than surrender to the unknown.

With uncertain economic conditions, shifting revenue streams, and a continued reliance on admittedly outmoded valuation metrics, Hope describes indie finance as being in “an era of risk mitigation.”
Twas ever thus, though, no? Frankly, if 7500 features were actually made in 2010, the vast majority of which will never make back their production cost, much less turn a profit, it sounds like the film financing business could use more risk mitigation, not less. But I’d guess that exponential increase in production volume over the last decade correlates to the drop in digital/HD production costs. It’s just that those losses are distributed across many more microbudget filmmakers’ uncles than ever before.
Hope hasn’t gotten to the profit part yet, but I expect it has something to do with microbudgets, non-theatrical distribution, and filmmaker audience/community-building. And that the answer has something to do with scrappy, groupie-friendly directors like Ed Burns and Kevin Smith. Stay tuned.
Part 3: The New Model Of Indie Film Finance, v2011.1 Domestic Value & Funding [hopeforfilm.com]

Slow Cinema vs. Art Cinema

On the occasion of Apichatpong Weerasethakul [1] winning the Palme d’Or, Frieze‘s Dan Fox has a incisive recap of the debate over Slow Cinema that erupted after Nick James’ Sight and Sound recent op-ed calling the genre out as a passive-aggressive dare to the audience to admit they’re bored.
The row among film critics and festivalgoers is as annoyingly insidery and lingo-obsessed as any art world argument. [Fox is careful to give equal time to competing terminologies. One blogger critic, Harry Tuttle, thinks Slow Cinema is pejorative, and proffers Contemporary Contemplative Cinema instead, which seems arbitrary. Might as well call it Minimalist Meditative Movies.]
Fox’s dead-on point is how insulated and blind these two systems of production and distribution–theater/festival/DVD vs gallery/installation/edition–are from each other. And this, despite the remarkable confluence of interests, strategies, and styles among filmmakers and artists on both sides of the divide:

Much as I admire Tuttle’s spirited engagement with his favoured genre of contemporary cinema, nowhere on his timeline of CCC/Slow Cinema is there anything that represents, for instance, the achievements of Structural cinema. This is curious, for if ‘plotlessness’, ‘wordlessness’, ‘slowness’ and ‘alienation’ are what he is trying to chronicle, where are Andy Warhol’s Empire, from 1964, or Michael Snow’s 1967 film Wavelength for example? Nor is there any acknowledgement of how these multiple strands of experimental cinema history have fed into the work of artists today.

Artists such as Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart, and Matthew Barney, for example. [On the other side of the fence, I’m not sure why no one seems to have mentioned my own personal favorite Slow Cineman, Gus Van Sant, who emptied Sundance theaters with Gerry and whose lingering, looming Elephant also won at Cannes.]
Barney has broken theatrical and festival ground with his Cremaster Cycle, of course. But I think Frieze, which has commissioned projects from Weerasethakul, has high hopes for him as a candidate for bringing the worlds of these two film traditions together. We’ll see.
Slow, Fast and Inbetween [frieze]
[1] yes, he’s in the art world pronunciation guide.

Roel Wouters’ Shiny Silver Balls

Suddenly silver mirrored balls are everywhere.
Music video and filmmaker Roel Wouters created the trailer for last year’s International Film Festival Breda:

A silver sphere on an endless checkerboard floor is the default for many 3D modeling applications. It can be seen as an icon for a sterile, makeable world. Reality though, is dirty and unpredictable. By recreating this icon in reality the beauty and imperfection of real life gets emphasized.
The recording was the result of 3 people controlling different parts of the installation, Roel controlled the speed of the balls, Benoit (Eurogrip) controlled the speed of the dolly and Sal focussed and zoomed the camera. It turned out to be a play were the 3 of us playing harmoniously together.

It’s awesome. Coincidentally–actually, several coincidentallies–a selection of Wouters’ work was screened just today in Den Haag, organized by a cinema club called Cinetoko. Cinetoko is a collaborative effort between Motoko, a motion and video design studio, and <>TAG, an art/tech/culture catalyst of some kind. It happens at the Zeebelt Theater, which is safely to the west of any Google Map camo or StreetView complications. [via manystuff thanks andy]

Putting The Fun In Fundraising–With Facebook!

Hah, Michael Govan’s kickback public engagement in LACMA’s decision to suspend its film program surprised me, but not as much as seeing the museum basically organizing its own netroots opposition.
Now, barely ten days into the LACMA Film Program Deathwatch, The LA Times hears from a vacationing Govan that “potential donors have stepped up, interested in helping underwrite the series.” the whole crisis starts to feel like a manufactured fundraising stunt.
The Times has all the pieces of the story, but can’t seem to put them together.
Govan had the film program on a three-year sink-or-swim timeline, which runs out now. The museum president said continued funding of the film department has been “an issue” in budget discussions for seven years, which means the board has been interested enough to keep the department around, but that the status quo hasn’t been sexy enough to attract dedicated funding.
By floating the idea of killing–sorry, “suspending”–the program, the museum is able to gauge the public’s interest. On the off chance that no one cared, the tough budget decision would be that much easier to justify. Meanwhile, an outcry–the louder the better–would bring attention to the program, and would transform a mundane $5 million ask for operating funds into an exciting chance to save and expand a vital, beloved film program. The naming rights of which can be had for–how much would you like, Michael? “I’d love to see $10 million.”
LACMA’s Govan says donors step forward for film program [latimes]
Previously: On LACMA killing its film program to save it