Microcinema

A Look Into Microcinema

by Perry Mark Stratychuk

The continuing move to drive all content into the world-wide web use is the standard of a much broader movement often called the Microcinema movement.  Microcinema in promises a communal cinema experience, making, showing films with virtually no stars, and limited or no budgets. 

Due to very low or no overhead whatsoever, and a markedly different or absent business model. Microcinemas are capable of bringing truly underground, risk-taking producetions to the viewing audience, whether on a large LCD projector or a LCD cel phone screen, regardless of commercial viability. But still, they receive little or no local press and certainly no national coverage.

As important as the original film co-ops and art-houses were in the development of independent film, particularly during the 60's and 70's, there is still no comprehensive collection of microcinema sources available. Only on web-sites like www.FreeMovieMakingGuide.com and a handful of others.

Microcinema International has a database of programs, and several other webrings and lists are crawled everyday. There is now more emphasis on exhibition-based events, web-based platforms, education and digital and physical distribution, than on creating microcinema content that the general viewer would want to watch. 

Mobile TV, video on demand, pod-casting, and mobile telephony are also used to reach new audiences around the world. "The medium is the message," as Marshall McLuhan once said.

The Blackchair Collection and Microcinema International DVD, has a catalogue of international DVD titles distributed into retail, wholesale, online, and institutional sales systems around the globe. The more recent Salvador Dali Documentary is exclusively available from Microcinema DVD. 

What the microcinema genre lacks in content variety glamor, is made up for in its soon to be tapped potential for community building, such as a casual social event.Youtube and other online video sites such as Metacafe, Vimeo and Viddler, et al provide now quite common experiences to watch independent film on more websites than ever imagined just a few years ago.

In his Film Encyclopedia, Ephraim Katz defines an art house as "a theater specializing in the exhibition of quality films, either classic revivals or new films of limited box-office appeal " In this new context of microcinema appeal to the mainstream, "of limited box-office appeal" is quite striking, if not, perhaps, inaccurate. In the "little" films that gain wider acceptance, something has still been lost from the original art-house experience. 

The sense of adventure and discovery has waned even more as films of broader appeal attract audiences less interested in film art and more interested in art trendiness. Second, with the continuing growth of home-entertainment systems, the living room threatens to rival smaller theatrical experiences, with the additional attraction of the private, customized experience that has become more and more affordable. 

One-night theaters have spread across a wide range of communities and take up residence not only in actual movie theaters, but also in alternative spaces like tractor trailers, cafes, bars, church basements, health clubs and of course our own home basements. We come because we crave a new moviemaking experience, of any sort, or simply like the attraction of novelty as in the early days of theater and vaudeville, even if we end up watching our old flat panel TV screen.

Originally published as "Microcinema Under My Skin" in 2013