Cinema today belongs to independent filmmaker who has something to tell and the ability to do it. The quality standard of images that a smartphone or any latest generation video recording tool can produce is more than sufficient for a cinematic projection.
Cinema is now a democratic art
just like writing, painting or oral narration can be. The artistic success of a film is found only in the hands of independent filmmaker, no longer in those of economic or political power. The commercial success of the film depends only on the narrator’s ability to engage the audience. Cinema has become democratic and free.
Cinema can be a craft or an industrial process. Years and years of estimates, bureaucratic forms, ministerial circulars, international agreements, contacts with television executives have ruined the creative spontaneity and urgency to tell typical of cinema.
No art has been annihilated and humiliated by the market as much as cinema and it is time for audiences to look beyond these industrial artifacts, giving up big shows and stars to feed on cinema as an individual expression.
A film can be made in infinite ways
Narrative, experimental, poetic, documentary. It can be a diary of life, the story of an experience, a collection of images … The independent filmmaker is naked in front of the audience and his true character is his ability as a storyteller. The director is a storyteller for an audience of free men.
Independent cinema is not comparable to the cinema we are used to seeing in theaters, just as circus is not comparable to video installation: they are two distinct things. Few have understood the true essence and potential of an independent, artisanal, personal cinema.
The critics don’t talk about it or if they talk about it they seem convinced “that something is missing”, that it is a minor cinema of minor directors waiting for celebrities and big budgets. It is not so. Independent cinema is just another product, another type of show: to be looked at with different eyes, to be enjoyed in different ways.
Even some indie directors seem not to have understood it, they really seem to be waiting to “break through” in the cinema of the “stars”: they try to imitate and re-propose, with limited means, the stories and stereotypes of mainstream cinema. Thus giving reason to those who snub independent cinema, perceiving it as a bad copy of cinema with a capital c.
Fabio Del Greco
