Humming with Malraux-like intellectual energy, Alejandro Adams' new essay "Preliminary Notes on Web-hosted Cinema" sets out to identify some tendencies of this newborn cinematic form and "elucidate the potential of a Web-hosted cinema to facilitate great art." But despite the essay's considerable mass, its scope is fairly narrow: sprawling havens of digital cinema such as ifilm and Atom Films are conspicuously absent, as are almost all non-commercial online DV festivals. What kind of "Web-hosted cinema" is left to discuss? At the outset, Adams identifies his central prejudice, and throughout the essay he adamantly appeals to the maverick sensibilities of visual artists.
"Because they fall within the paradigmatic scheme of mainstream movie theaters and traditional film festivals, microcinemas and video festivals are not fundamentally an alternative cinema. The most fundamentally alternative cinema is that found on the Web sites of individuals and production entities, wherein can be witnessed for the first time an effortless display of the outrageous power of the individual or small group to produce a movie and show it to a physically boundless audience without submitting the work for the dubious approval of a selection committee--without, in fact, performing a qualifying ritual of any kind."
More provocative than Adams' two preceding BRAINTRUSTdv essays, "Preliminary Notes on Web-hosted Cinema" strives to defend, in case after case, the bargain-basement production values of amateur movies on the Internet, finally taking shape as "a blunt apologia of impoverished filmmaking."
Read the essay at ?url? http://www.braintrustdv.com/essays/web-hosted.html?/url?
