The Sundance Film Festival, which opens on Thursday, will feature its usual mixture of thoughtful documentaries, introspective dramas, and lots of big-budget actors in small-budget films. While many of the films will be enjoyable, the unpleasant truth is that not all of them will be good. Indeed, some will be lousy, for reasons including self-indulgence, the casting of stars in inappropriate roles, and, most of all, lack of originality.
According to Manohla Dargis, of the Times, this suggests that too many indie films are being made. “I have a little favor to ask of the people cutting the checks,” she writes. “Stop buying so many movies. Or at least take a moment and consider whether flooding theaters with titles is good for movies and moviegoers alike.… It’s hard to see how American independent cinema can sustain itself if it continues to focus on consumption rather than curation.”
It is tempting to think that fewer films would mean fewer duds, but accepting this logic would be to misunderstand contemporary media markets and a film festival’s role in them. Dargis is wrong: making lots of films to yield a few hits is not dangerous to independent film but exactly how independent film sustains itself—and ultimately how it improves Hollywood.
Sundance screens some bombs, but also, reliably, a number of excellent films, every year, films that are both creatively satisfying and well worth the distributor’s investment. Some of the hits are not that surprising because of the talent involved, but many come completely out of left field, such as “Fruitvale Station,” last year, and the “The Queen of Versailles,” the year before. Even more important are films that, by their nature, disrupt and redefine the genre of film, like “The Blair Witch Project,” “Memento,” “Clerks,” “Bottle Rocket,” and “Pi.” Manohla Dargis knows this as well as anyone, because she has reviewed many such films.
The trick is that no one knows which films are going to be excellent or genre-bending before they are made, or even before they are screened. Curation goes only so far, which is what makes film festivals interesting; a festival is really just a big crowd-based curation process with parties thrown in. Aside from the presence or the lack of a recognizable star, which is an unreliable indicator of quality, one Sundance film writeup looks like any other. Last year’s writeup for “Fruitvale Station” claimed that it was a “soulful account of the real-life event that horrified the nation … offering a barometer reading on the state of humanity in American society today.” Those words could describe an entire week of Sundance screenings.
It’s easy to look back at a year of films and say that only the good films should have been made, but that’s like saying that venture capitalists should fund only the Twitters and Googles and not bother with anyone else. It just doesn’t work that way.
To fortify her argument, Dargis points out that many of the best films of 2013 were released by studios or affiliates. But just where does studio talent actually come from? When you look carefully, many of the Hollywood directors who make great films or TV shows got started with long-shot films at Sundance or other film festivals. A short and incomplete list from Sundance alone includes Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky, Kevin Smith, Kelly Reichardt, Lisa Cholodenko, Noah Baumbach, Nicole Holofcener, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, Greg Mottola, Richard Linklater, Todd Haynes, and Jim Jarmusch. Who among these remains undiscovered in a world of “fewer films”?
The larger question is: Who exactly gets hurt if too many movies are made? If making films weren’t challenging and fun for the people involved, they wouldn’t do it. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote decades ago, we live in an affluent society, with plenty of surplus cash, much of which ends up in the arts. More art means more bad art, too, but so what? Although it may pain a festival audience to sit through yet another version of “Little Miss Sunshine,” basically everyone’s having an enjoyable time. The average film might start with an exciting idea, turn out to be not that great, and fail to gain much attention or interest. Big deal. That kind of failure is also the fate of most novels, art shows, movie scripts, academic papers, and books written by film critics. It may sound strange, but visible failures are the sign of a fertile cultural industry.
Ultimately, the only real victims are film reviewers like Dargis, whose job is complicated and made tiresome by the duty of watching so many films. (The problem of too many films, she says, is “distracting the entertainment media.”) This leads to a suggestion for the Times’ critics: namely, that the paper’s ambition of reviewing every film that is “released” in New York City theatres is folly and entirely too twentieth-century. (The Times reviewed nearly nine hundred films in 2013.) The significance of a release is eroding in every media market—film is just the latest. Just as book-review sections long ago gave up on trying to keep track of every book published, it is pointless to review every film released, especially when the real life of most films happens on the small screen anyhow.
It is easy to be nostalgic for an imagined golden age. For film critics, that’s usually the period from the late nineteen-sixties to the early nineteen-eighties, when studios briefly decided to devote their resources to making a limited number of great films, as opposed to, say, “Live Free or Die Hard.” Since that time, the risk aversion of the studios has opened more opportunities for entrepreneurial filmmaking that makes use of a startup model. Every film is actually a tiny corporation, and most fail, leaving just a few success stories. But the winners win big, making a cultural impact and a decent return on investment, and that, along with the plain fun of it all, is what justifies all those checks.
