Several years ago, I was asked to write an essay on why I should be allowed to participate in The Underappreciated Filmmaker’s Festival. This was put on for people who had been making films for over 25 years but had yet to be accepted at any festival. The following is a shortened version of that essay.
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There’s no question that I'm an Underappreciated Moviemaker. But why stop there? Not just Unappreciated but Neglected, Ignored, sometimes Mocked, Insulted, Scorned. My movies have been accused of not being real. And what's strange about it is I've consistently tried to "sell out." I've tried to make movies which I felt would be entertaining and compelling for the public.
I make narrative films that usually cost me every cent I have. I'd have to be crazy to make a film knowing it was doomed. Each time I set about making a film I was convinced that the movie I was planning would be a "hit," meaning whoever got to see it would find it interesting and it had a chance to "live." But that's not the way it's turned out. Let me list a few events from my "film career.”
—Actors wanting their names off my movie La Grosse Commission because they were afraid it was damaging their careers. (The expression "La Grosse Commission" means both "shit" and "The Big Job".)
—A journalist making fun of my movie (he never saw it) in Liberation—a well-known French newspaper—La Grosse Commission was chosen as one of the worst film titles in 2012. When I wrote the author of the article to explain my intentions in having chosen that title and to invite him to a screening I received no response.
—The Liberation article led to the "star" of the film telling me that I’d deceived him when I gave him the major role. That the film was a total failure, and he regretted doing it.
—Hearing from an inside source (the niece of the festival’s president) that the judging committee of the Cannes Film Festival openly ridiculed my film during its pre-selection screening (it wasn't selected for the festival).
—A cinema professor standing up during the debate after a projection of Still Life with Oranges and saying, "A film like this should not have been made!"
Maybe you're thinking since all these different people didn't like my films they must be bad!
But these "critiques" (except the last, which I will deal with below) make fun of the titles, of the lack of success, even of the later embarrassment of having been in the film, of everything but the content. I worked as hard to make these films with the highest possible degree of developed content that I could come up with.
One example. Why did I choose to make a film (La Grosse Commission) using excrement as a theme? Besides the almost unlimited literary references which inspired me (Céline, Proust, Rabelais, Thomas Mann, Jonathan Swift, Chuang Tzu, Freud) I wanted to reference the biological reality of the body without recourse to sexuality. Why? Because I feel that almost always, when sexuality comes up, thought flies out the window, and excrement had a greater chance of maintaining intellectual distance and a greater chance of its underlying representation of biology being understood as a philosophical theme.
Let me define what I think an Independent Filmmaker is: It’s someone who makes films which express his or her own ideas, not aligning themselves with the ideas of some social group. In opposition to the Independent Filmmaker I put the "Commercial Filmmaker" on both the high (big budget) and low (small budget) level. Against all received wisdom let me say: money isn’t an issue; it's a question of intent.
A common reaction to my films is a bigger budget would make the films "better.” They’d more closely resemble "Hollywood" or commercial films. This is incorrect. Perhaps if I had had more money, I would’ve put in dolly shots, or a crane shot, or had a make-up artist and more expensive props but the film itself would still probably be unsatisfying to most viewers. The soul of my films isn't commercial. I didn't set out to make a Hollywood-style film and then fail because of lack of funds. I presented a series of ideas and did it to my satisfaction with limited funds.
My films wouldn’t have met with success, even with more money, because they’re fundamentally different than commercial films.
The Commercial Filmmaker may be someone who makes Hollywood films or TV shows, others may be filmmakers who cater to the art crowd, or the festival crowd as represented by one of its many genres; gay & lesbian, "strange films," black, Asian, Christian, Jewish, Taoist, etc. Look at a festival list sometime for a curious mirror of recognized society.
What am I saying? That I lump all these films together? High- and low-budget? That I find these types of films suspect, usually without any artistic or human value? That they misrepresent human reality? That's exactly what I’m saying. They’re statements of conformity.
I believe that the artist, if his or her work is of any value, must be an individual. Whether gay, straight, asexual, male, female, black, white, Chinese, Eskimo, old, young, tall, short and regardless of religious affiliation, the work of an artist is to discover themselves and not to express, or rather re-express or reinforce, the received stereotypes belonging to some known category.
If it’s the job of the moviemaker to represent false ideas of people, create false manipulative situations and reinforce false social stereotypes, I’d agree with the self-proclaimed professor who said my film Still Life with Oranges never should’ve been made.