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Two Dollar Movie: Introduction
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This writing game began at the Dutch magazine De Filmkrant,
which kindly offered to celebrate the 100th column of World Wide Angle, my series that has been running since October
2007 (issue 292). I invited 60 friends and associates in the worlds of film,
art and literature to compose a short text: describing some unusual, wondrous,
perhaps entirely unknown movie stumbled upon somewhere – on sale, in a market,
in a discarded box, on a forgotten shelf, in another country … and bought for a
tiny price (upper limit of two dollars or Euros or whichever national
denomination was appropriate). Not every respondent followed the rules exactly
but that, too, is part of the game. What matters as much as any particular title
unearthed, or the incidental formation of particular little ‘genres’ of
commonality across the 60 entries, is the imperative to tell the tale, to give
an account, of this encounter of an
individual spectator with an individual film.
The elements
of surprise and strangeness are crucial to this project of encounter. We live
in a time when, thanks especially to the Internet, ‘consensus canons’ invade
every corner of film culture, from commercial releases to ‘niche cults’, from
film festival fare to academic curricula. It is getting harder to find room to
manoeuvre outside these endless cultural prescriptions, and the ‘peer pressure’
they inevitably bring down on our shoulders. So many critics and programmers
new to the scene – no matter how naturally radical their sensibility or wild
their taste – are consumed by the demand to know what their comrades and
mentors already know, and to contribute to the formation of an agreed-on,
evolving canon. (This much was evident in the many responses for and against the
recent, pointless ‘BBC Culture’ poll of the 21st century’s best
films so far.) The ethos of discovery,
so central to the drive and history of cinephilia – a
discovery sometimes, it’s true, accompanied by weird forms of myopia, such as
the case of one famous, European festival-guru who frequently claims to have
‘discovered’ Chinese cinema, a feat which presumably the Chinese people
themselves had never previously managed! – this ethos is on the tip of being
snuffed out altogether today, when an increasing number of festivals exhibit a
decreasing circle of ‘must see’ World Cinema titles. Is there anything left to
discover? Of course there is: in every country, every ‘market’, every period of
the past, every pocket of culture. We need to become
curious, again, about what we don’t know and haven’t seen or yet heard about in
any way, shape or form. And we desperately need to individuate our work, our
research, our knowledge, and finally ourselves, in and through this search.
There is
something both nostalgic and provocative in this idea of discovering a
little-known, unsung or completely obscure film. In these days of streaming,
downloading and torrents, the idea of actually fossicking for and buying a DVD
or VHS in this manner may already be an obsolete notion, a thing of the past.
But it is a fundamentally different experience for a cinephile to discover a film when she or he is not consciously choosing to watch something they already know about. Rather, the Two Dollar Movie project is a reflection
on what it means to take a chance on something we cannot predict, that we may
never have heard of before … and to see where that blind chance takes us.
Eight
extracts from the project appeared, in Dutch translation, as Two Euro Movie in De Filmkrant, issue 391 (September/October
2016, pp. 50-53), and on the magazine’s website. This LOLA version is complete and
unexpurgated; whenever somebody provided an image, we have used that, too. We
thank everyone who contributed, and especially Dana Linssen for setting the ball rolling.
Adrian Martin, October 2016
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© Adrian Martin, October 2016. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |