IND/EX
This week, the Film Festival Alliance and Art House Convergence launched the first IND/EX conference in Chicago, bringing together non-profit and independent cinema operators and film festival leaders to discuss the state of the industry, organizational best practices, and to build community and connection for institutions across the country. Reports from friends and colleagues in attendance (I couldn’t go1) expressed a sense of joy, optimism, and excitement among delegates who have not been able to connect at a conference since the former iteration of the Art House Convergence (which used to be held in Utah in January just prior to the Sundance Film Festival) ended the annual conference around five years ago. It has been incredibly heartening to see so many familiar faces participating in what looks from my (albeit distant) vantage point to be a wildly successful IND/EX conference. Congrats to all who worked so hard to make it happen.
Outside of the non-profit community that IND/EX serves, and despite the overwhelming concern and pessimism in a for-profit, corporate film exhibition space (first decimated by the COVID pandemic, then dragged backward by the refusal of the studios to settle the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes which created a months long shut down of film production, followed by heavy cost-cutting and contraction in film production), there has been positive news for cinema in the past couple of weeks— Sony making a big bet on theatrical exhibition by acquiring Alamo Drafthouse was a signal that building your identity around a celebratory theatrical experience is highly valuable, and A24 receiving a big investment this week is a clear bet on that company’s brand, library, and vision for a thriving generation of film lovers.
If you, like me, have been paying close attention to what is being reported about the difficulties, shifts, and downturns in the film festival and cinema community— the growing shortage of independent films being produced for theatrical, the cannibalization of theatrical revenue by the orchestrated collapse of streaming windows, the absence of creative marketing for and awareness of lower budget films in our culture, a contraction in arts funding, private giving, and corporate sponsorship (the pillars of American non-profit funding), all of the concerns about contracting film production, and a post COVID recovery that continues to impact all of the arts — you’d be justified in being deeply concerned that the non-profit film sector as a whole is facing a significant crisis. We have seen closures, contractions, staff resignations, and leadership changes across festivals of all sizes, foreign and domestic, pointing to an urgent need for the reinforcement of our community and its valuable contributions to our collective, international, cinema-driven culture.
And so, IND/EX marks a much-needed first step in the re-building of a shared sense of purpose, but as a culture and community, we should be planning for a broader fight— As someone who, for a decade, programmed and then lead a film festival in Florida, the announcement that the Governor of that state would be removing all support for the arts from the state’s budget serves as a bellwether of what is to come for all of us if we do not come together to advocate not just to keep the small amount of support our industry currently receives, but for the deeper investment it deserves. I look forward to continuing to connect with colleagues to build a plan for a sustainable future for our non-profit film exhibition and festival community.
Late Converts
This year, I have been reading the work of Norwegian novelist/playwright/poet and Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse, reading all of his works of fiction available in English2 , a project that I completed earlier this month when I finished his novella “A Shining”. I love his books, all of which feel related to one another, with similar themes running beneath the surface of shifting tones and plots. One of the defining features of Fosse’s work for me is his relationship to his faith, and the shape that faith has taken in his work when, late in his life, he converted to Christianity. Fosse’s spiritual search is paralleled in his language and stories, where his characters, often living in almost monastic isolation, contemplate larger questions about their lives and memories and experiences against the growing sense of a powerful illuminating “spirit” that gives its essence to their self-reflection.
Fosse never foists faith upon the reader or uses it to define purpose or meaning; his is a non-evangelical belief, a private process that often unconsciously gives shape to action and experience. In this way, Fosse’s manifestation of belief is a form of humanism, one with which I felt a deep connection despite being a nonbeliever. In his work, I found myself understanding faith for the first time, not in spite of its inherent contradictory logic, but instead as an emotional presence that creates a framework for processing experience. This framework defines Fosse’s masterpiece “Septology” and was, for me, a key to not only understanding the book’s meaning and symbols, but also a way of tracking the development of Fosse’s integration of his humanistic approach to belief in his work, the heart of his evolution as an artist over the course of these books.
As I made my way through his fiction, I was reminded of the music of Arvo Pärt, another artist whose work I love who, in the middle of his career as a leading contemporary composer, stopped working to explore his own faith and re-emerged transformed as an artist by the experience. Pärt wrote “Credo” in 1968 and experienced a creative crisis, producing very little work for the next eight years as he studied early music and converted to Orthodox Christianity3. In 1976, Pärt began working again, utilizing a musical technique he called tintinnabuli4 which allowed him to compose music that harmonically brings two musical lines together into a singular expression of an idea. Since 1976, Pärt has created some of the most gorgeous music of our time, driven by his own exploration of his faith and a search for the divine qualities of traditional religious music in the context of contemporary composition. But again, whatever Pärt may believe on a spiritual level, his music connects with an emotional complexity and empathetic exploration of humanity that I find to be incredibly beautiful.
Both Pärt and Fosse share an understanding of meaning as a form of “light” that emanates from works of art, and that shared idea, which I found only after I linked their works in my own experience of them, seems to me to be proof that they have both found something, a shared force that resonates throughout their work.
Pärt says:
“When I am searching for answers – in my life, my music, my work… In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises – and everything that is unimportant falls away… I could compare my music to white light which contains all colors. Only a prism can divide the colors and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”
Fosse writes “Septology”, as the protagonist Asle contemplates his abstract painting of a St. Andrew’s cross:
“These pictures lodged inside me, yes…they’re almost all connected to something bad that I remember, the light is linked to the darkness, yes, that’s how it is… God’s darkness, yes, that nothingness, yes, it shines, yes, it’s from God’s darkness that the light comes, the invisible light, I think and I think that this is all just something I’ve thought up, yes, obviously, I think and I think that at the same time this light is like a fog, because a fog can shine too, yes, if it’s a good picture then there’s something like a shining darkness or a shining fog either in it, in the picture, or coming from the picture, yes, that’s what it’s like, I think, and without this light, yes, then it’s a bad picture, but actually there’s no light you can see”
I won’t even bother bringing up my profound love for the films of the famously Catholic Robert Bresson, whose works tackled many of the same complex intersections of divinity, humanity, emotion, and faith in similar, deeply humanist ways, because we would be here all day.
Anyway, all of this has me wondering what I am responding to in these works, what exactly it is about them that I love, that moves me so deeply, and I think, first and foremost, I am responding to the honesty of their inquiry. In Pärt and Fosse, I find two artists asking heartfelt questions about the complex relationship between belief, art, and life, without a hint of cynicism. Their approach is so antithetical to the contemporary cultural experience of careerism, money, politics, hypocrisy, and disingenuous narcissism that it creates an almost cocoon-like feeling of an embrace— I am not sure I could trust any artists more than I do these two. Also, both artists forge an almost unbelievable emotional and structural complexity out of simplicity, and that process, which itself requires a humbling of the self to the power of the creative form, is like a shaft of light in the darkness, a manifestation of a greater self that I, personally, am striving for— to become someone who listens to the world with an honest, open mind, allows for human contradiction and complexity, and transforms pain and struggle into understanding and grace.
As I get older, I have absolutely no inclination to become faithful or seek a spiritual understanding of my own humanist framework, but I do find it incredibly moving to discover my own desire for an honest and compassionate world reflected in the works of these artists. Life is busy and complicated and noisy and distracting, but inside me, these works of art glow and hum, bringing me tremendous joy in the communion between my life and the beauty of these profound, honest, serious, and deeply moving works.
Instead of an answer, I am finding new questions to ask, and I feel so lucky to be communing with artists whose work continues to guide me through the inexpressible, unified wholeness of the unknowable.
The Record Of Every Summer
The British power pop/ psychedelic/ post punk/ new wave/ chamber pop ensemble XTC are, to my thinking, one of the most under appreciated bands of my generation. We don’t have the time and space to convey the full story of the band5, but needless to say that over the course of over three decades of making incredible records and not touring6, XTC made brilliant, genre-hopping music that demands listening almost twenty years after the band dissolved itself. All of this is a long way of saying that I love them.
In 1986, facing waning popularity and the possibility of being dropped by their label, the band went into the studio with Todd Rundgren to record the album Skylarking, an absolute masterpiece. The story of making the album is very much worth a read because, as is often the case with great records, the process was very difficult. The result, though, is, in my opinion, the greatest “summer” album of all time.
Now, I know that the Beach Boys exist and that there are countless amazing works that directly address the popular conception of summer — sunglasses, convertibles, the beach, grilling, bathing suits, etc etc. Skylarking addresses none of these tropes. At all. But, as the kids say today, it is “100% a vibe” filled with songwriting so brilliant, so unforgettable that the entire season seems to exist as a feeling, a sensation, an almost intangible experience of imagination running wild and free. There are rainstorms of tears, bonfires of sacrifice, the cycles of change, and a sense of wonder that feels like looking up at all of the possibility found in a clear night sky. As the original (and NSFW) album art7 suggests, there is also a mood of abundance and fecundity in these songs, a verdant energy that suggests the “green ray” of summer light8.
Skylarking is not just a summer album, it’s the album for every summer. Like any great work, it is timeless and can endure countless listens—if you have never had a chance to give it a spin, I hope you’ll find a moment this summer when you can settle in and give a thoughtful listen. And then? Go back and dive in with all of the great albums of XTC— they deserve it!
…because, of course, my non-profit cinema The Clairidge is hosting a mini film festival called the Montclair Film Summer Showcase. So, we missed the non-profit cinema and festival conference because our non-profit cinema is hosting festival. You can’t make it up…
They are: “Boathouse”(1989), “Melancholy I & II (1995-96), “Morning & Evening” (2000), “Aliss At The Fire” (2004), “Trilogy” (2014), “Scenes From A Childhood” (Various years, collected in English in 2018), “Septology” (2022), “A Shining” (2023). I did not read them in sequence of publication.
Pärt is one of the most recorded composers in the world, so exploring the history of his work can be very overwhelming, but there is a wonderful collection of Pärt’s music that allows you to look at the dates of the compositions and mark this massive shift in his work. Here is a link for the Apple Music version of this collection, called “Arvo Pärt: 75 Year Celebration Collection” that features many of his major works from his pre- and post- conversion eras.
Too much to explain here… click that link to learn more!
Well worth a read, I promise…
The band played the first show of the US leg of their “English Settlement” tour on April 3, 1982 in San Diego, CA. They then cancelled the rest of their tour. They never toured or played live again.
Wikipedia says: “The original sleeve design was to depict close-up shots of human pubic regions with flowers fitted into the hairs, female on the front and male on the back. Photo sessions were held, but record shops informed the label that they would not carry the album with that artwork, and so the idea was discarded.”
Skylarking and Éric Rohmer’s “Le Rayon Vert” (aka “The Green Ray” aka “Summer”) were released two months apart in 1986. #Spooky
A few years back, there was an XTC cover band here in Toronto called Ten Feet Tall. I saw them play two or three times and they were fantastic. I hope they resurface.