Every year, the new crop of films at the Sundance Festival stirs up questions about the nature, and the future, of independent filmmaking. And every year for the last three, I've brought along a group of students from Eckerd College to see firsthand what all the hype is about — and maybe, just maybe, to appreciate a world of film beyond mainstream cinema.
The Sundance Festival takes place during the last 10 days of Eckerd College's January Term, during which students take only one course. Some groups study the origins of philosophy in Greece, or explore the nature of leadership by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, or experience firsthand the wonders of ecology in the Galapagos Islands. So why not a course on American independent film culminating in a trip to Sundance? We spend two weeks on campus, covering the history of independent film in America, roughly from the era of Easy Riders to the rise to prominence of Sundance with the appearance of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs. Then we fly to the festival, where we can schmooze with stars and wannabes, wait in long lines, and watch a lot of great movies.
This is the third time I've run the course, and I am increasingly struck by how different my reactions to films are from those of most of my students. I've gotten over being surprised when several of them say, after a screening of Stranger than Paradise, that it was far too long and incredibly boring. I've become resigned to the fact that a few only come to Sundance to ski, and consider watching films with subtitles or unconventional narratives to be a tedious form of homework. I readily understood when several walked out of the Sundance "Frontier" screening of Pine Flats, an intriguing experimental meditation on rural childhood and the nature of cinema that consists of 12 subtle static takes, lasting about 10 minutes each, of subjects such as a young girl seated on the grass reading a book (the audience cheered when after about three minutes she turned the page), or of two young women laughing and playing on a tree swing.
Still, since my original training is in philosophy, I find it hard to allow student reactions to stand unscrutinized. Like Socrates in the Athenian marketplace, I prod them with questions: "What didn't you like about it?", "Why did that bother you?", "So you think that …?", all with the ultimate aim of bringing them to the realization that their initial reaction to the film was absurd or incoherent, or at the very least unexamined.
Of course, if you want absurd, you just have to look around Park City during Sundance: thousands of people crowding into a small Utah mountain town to stand outside in the cold for hours — and for what? Small, quirky, first-time independent features with subjects ranging from the implications of a disgusting act involving a young woman and a dog (Bobcat Goldthwait's surprisingly tender low-budget comedy Stay) to a hyperkinetic Beastie Boys concert video (incorporating vast amounts of audience-shot footage, and called, appropriately enough, Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That!). But the draw for dedicated filmgoers is no mystery: even if the film is atrocious, there is something inconceivably exciting about being packed in a room full of cinephiles, hearing from the director and the stars, and participating in the dynamic process that can be the beginning of a stunning new career (as with Reservoir Dogs in 1991) or the first look at an unanticipated box office sensation (as with Blair Witch, in 1999), or the revelation that festival programmers are human too and sometimes pick flops. Even the long waits in lines can be fun. One student got an internship with Sony as a result of someone she bumped into in a line at the gigantic Eccles Center.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of Sundance is just how open people are to conversation. Everyone gets packed into the free shuttles that cycle through the theatrical venues in town, and nobody really looks good since they are all dressed up for winter, and almost anyone is willing to talk about who they have seen, what their connection is to the film industry, and what the buzz is about must-see movies. The only really rude people I've encountered are tourists from Salt Lake City, who move in volatile herds along Main Street to catch a glimpse of Paris Hilton as she emerges from a chartered party at the local nightclub Harry-Os. Not that there is anything wrong with being starstruck. I was excited for my student Brian, who got a picture with his arm around Jessica Biel, and shared the enthusiasm of Amy when she got a hug from Patrick Fugitt, the almost famous star of this year's suicide romance Wristcutters: A Love Story. I am myself not entirely immune. I was giddy for about an hour when I bumped into Neil Young, and we exchanged nods; and having conversations with Forrest Whittaker, Darren Aronofsky and Naomi Watts made my month.
What intrigued me about the lineup of competition films this year was the appearance of a deliberate effort by the programmers not to be as impressed by stars as in past years. Of course there were "Premiere" films with big names, with the "signature" Sundance message: Every family is messed up and everyone is an oddball but we should love them for it. The prime example this year is Sundance's biggest deal winner, Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell (as a suicidal homosexual Proust scholar) and Greg Kinnear (as a failed self-help guru on the nine steps to being a winner), that was picked up for $10.5 million by Fox Searchlight.
Still, there were several films by newcomers this year, shot for low budgets using high-definition digital video. The film that won both the grand jury prize and the audience prize for feature film, Quinceañera, is a small film without any stars, about the coming-of-age of a young Latina in L.A.'s Echo Park. The problem, with this and many of the other small films this year, is that they tend not to be innovative or visionary in any other way than being distinctively local. The people and perspectives are fresh compared with standard Hollywood fare, but what they want is just to be accepted like everyone else and their stories are told in merely competent conventional ways. Several students told me they felt at times during the festival they were watching made-for-television movies, melodramas appropriate for the Lifetime or Oxygen networks, but out of place at a festival this large with this much hype.
As always, some of the most exciting features of the festival were the documentaries. This Film is Not Yet Rated is an NC-17 rated Michael Moore-esque doc that challenges the objectivity of the MPAA ratings, with filmmaker Kirby Dick going so far as to hire private detectives to uncover the identity of the so-called "average concerned parents" that allegedly make up the board. At the very least, the film provoked an interesting discussion between myself and my students about ratings and censorship. The big winner in the documentary category, which also won both the grand jury and audience awards, was God Grew Tired of Us, a wonderful documentary about the "Lost Boys of Sudan" and the emigration of several to the United States. What is remarkable about the film is its ability to exploit the intrinsic humor of a few boys entering a situation they are totally unprepared for, but to do so without in any way condescending. Equally powerful was Thin, a film that addresses the experience of a few women undergoing treatment for eating disorders; the intimacy that the filmmakers were able to achieve with the young women in their clinic was astonishing, recalling early works by pioneering documentarians such as the Maysles Brothers, and having nothing in common with the exploitation-smell of "Reality TV."
One of the notable features of Sundance, at least since the appearance of The Blair Witch Project, has been the prominence of low-budget independent horror. This time around, my students and I were generally underwhelmed by films like Moonshine, a poorly written, cheaply made relationship film with a vampire backdrop; we tended to agree about Subject Two, an only somewhat effective reinterpretation of the Frankenstein story, full of silly usage of medical jargon that would have worked on the Sci-Fi Channel late at night but seemed out of place at Sundance. They were all horrified (but not scared) by the arthouse porn film Destricted, which contained a series of bizarrely erotic shorts by young filmmakers such as Gasper Noe (Irreversible), Larry Clark (kids) and artist/badboy/father of Björk's child Mathew Barney (Cremaster I-V).
Easily the most frightening film at Sundance this year was the last film we saw, at a midnight screening the night before we came home. It was also one of my favorites of the festival, the first film in a long time to keep me tense throughout and jumping in my seat: British filmmaker Neil Marshall's (Dog Soldiers) smart and sexy subterranean horror flick The Descent. My student Mike came to me after the film. He appeared cautious, and I wondered what might be worrying him. Without betraying anything, he asked, warily, "What did you think of that movie?" I told him I loved it, and he broke into a grin. "That was so awesome, I can't wait to bring my friends when it comes out in theaters!" It is comforting to know that even given sharp differences in aesthetic sensibilities, a genuinely funny or truly terrifying film still has the power to bring us together, laughing and quivering in our seats.
Nathan Andersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Program Coordinator of the International Cinema series at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg.
This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2006.
