A No-Budget Production

In Houston, you can sit in the pews of the 75-year-old former Church of Christ, and watch eclectic screenings of short experimental videos and films purchased at yard sales.

Last summer, a theater in an old Los Angeles bank showed three-minute video “confessions” about living in the city, all of which were shot by the confessors in the bank’s vault.

And on Seattle’s Lake Union, aboard the rusting and immobile Kalakala ferry, vintage 1935, you can see anything from stop-motion animation to a rarely seen montage of a Jimi Hendrix concert.

This is the underground world of the so-called microcinemas, where screenings of alternative works on video, 16-millimeter film, and Super-8 take place in coffeehouses, bars, basements, warehouses and just about any place in which you can fit a projector, a screen and some chairs. The work is usually short (sometimes only a few minutes) and often unpolished, the concessions are minimal, the tickets cheap. Operated on shoestring budgets and with a do-it-yourself spirit, the productions more often resemble a kind of latter-day cabaret than cinema--audience members drink beer, come and go as they please, and chat among themselves.

But in such a casual atmosphere, there’s still a distinct enthusiasm for and attentiveness to even the rawest of work--a sign, perhaps, of a certain hunger, particularly in younger people, for films that aren’t formulaic, that express something more personal, honest or quirky than what you could see at the local cineplex or even at an independent film festival like Sundance. Often embracing a grungy, anti-establishment ethos, the microcinema movement may not appeal to a broad swath of the filmgoing public, but it’s flourishing in its own way.

Recently, for example, a screening was held at the El Pueblo Gallery on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles. Sponsored by a Los Angeles-based microcinema company called Access(o), the Aug. 18 event, titled “Finding Family Stories,” a typically wide-ranging program of films that included shorts by students from Roosevelt High School in East L.A., a surreal Norwegian love story, and a half-hour drama about a troubled teenage girl by local screenwriter and director Jacob Estes.

Maija Beeton, a co-founder of Access(o), half-jokingly suggests that she wants to showcase “America’s most poignant home videos,” but gets more serious when she talks about finding what she calls “unique regional expressions.” So many commercial films, she says, have been culturally watered down so they can play overseas without confusing audiences.

“A lot of the very fascinating aspects of our heterogeneous American culture are actually kind of taken out of those films,” Beeton says, “and so the films represent really simplified portraits.” Access(o)’s recent screening, in fact, demonstrated the group’s efforts to bring together a rich mix of experiences, not only in the films, but with the support. The event was part of a melting-pot collaboration of the Japanese American National Museum, the Chinese American Museum, and the California African American Museum.

Those missing cultural pieces also interest James Encinas, a longtime theater, television and film actor, and co-founder of Access(o).

Encinas envisions establishing Access(o) franchises in various cities, with regional curators showing films that come from their communities and are important to the residents.

Encinas, who moved to the U.S. from Bolivia when he was 8, stresses the importance of hearing from people who are not served by mainstream films: “It’s very important for me to make relationships with these communities, like East L.A. and Compton, that have a rich mix of cultures and that I’m sure are going to sprout really interesting work.... In the world we live in, we have gotten so removed from community and dialogue. If [microcinema] can bring that back, it’s a very powerful tool. Not only is microcinema bringing audience members together from various walks of life, it’s often putting together into a single hourlong show the work of filmmakers with widely different styles, intentions and experience.”

Underground film isn’t new, of course. One could argue that it’s been happening for a century now, since the Lumiere brothers first showed their everyday scenes of Parisian life, and continuing in cramped uncommercial spaces in the decades that followed, with something of a heyday in the 1960s. But there are several factors that make today’s microcinema movement different--and likely to stick around.

* Low cost and ease of use: Digital video cameras and tools for editing and post-production have not only become relatively inexpensive, they’ve also made the creation of films easier in terms of technical know-how. Projection equipment got a lot cheaper and simpler to use too.

“There’s an overflow out there,” says Joel Bachar, a microcinema promoter and distributor, and a curator of Independent Exposure, a series of monthly screenings at Seattle’s Vital 5 Productions. “It’s got to flow to somewhere. Television isn’t buying a lot of this, and Hollywood isn’t. Festivals play it, but then what?”

* The Internet: The Web is the second big factor in the increasing number of microcinemas. Commercial Web sites such as Atomfilms.com and iFilm.com have brought more attention to short work, and the microcinemas sometimes simultaneously broadcast films online as they’re shown in the theater. (Many also provide an online archive of past shows.)

But the real force of the Internet is its instant communication, which has helped create a worldwide underground film community. Over e-mail and on Web sites, there is a constant microcinema buzz: Curators such as Bachar promote their festivals and venues, arrange for exchanges of videos, recommend artists, and give advice to others who want to set up microcinemas in their cities. Bachar, who is developing his own microcinema.com as a resource, has been able to distribute his Independent Exposure shows in 27 countries, thanks in large part to the Internet.

* Self-expression: There’s a belief among many that the affordable and portable video camera has become the essential modern tool for individual expressions of art, politics and personal histories--and that the presentation of these works (also affordable) is acting as a kind of democratic force, bringing to light underrepresented points of view

Microcinema comes in all forms, both in its artistic content and how it is presented. Andrea Grover, curator of Aurora Picture Show (the cinema in the Houston church), organizes shows around a single theme, for example, but likes to mix and match the old and the new.

For a program called “Lovers, Fighters and Wild Bull Riders,” she showed a 1930s silent film of Buck Jones doing rope tricks, experimental contemporary work and recently declassified Department of Energy films of nuclear explosions. Because the programs are so unpredictable, there’s a heightened sense of anticipation, even risk, in microcinemas.

A series of films that Access(o) mounted last summer included such polar opposites as animation by fifth-graders from urban schools and a documentary about performers in the San Fernando porn industry.

The microcinema shows also play a lot with context. A “Halloweird” night at Bachar’s Independent Exposure featured, among other works, scatological (and often hilarious) animation from Sweden, locally staged silliness a la “The Tonight Show,” and a four-minute purely abstract work.

“Maybe a film standing alone doesn’t work so well,” Bachar says, “but in the context of a program it will work. The films sort of bounce off of each other.”

With so much video being shot and sent around, it does take time for the curators of these venues to make selections. Bachar, whose 5-year-old Independent Exposure is one of the more well-known screenings, says he receives about 200 videos a month but shows only about 20% of them. Like other curators, Carrie Dashow, of Video Lounge in New York City, gives serious consideration to every tape she gets, taking notes about certain strong points. She will screen work “that I’m not in love with, but that I think someone else will really like.”

Some venues have scouts in different parts of the country watching out for work at microcinema festivals or other cinemas, and others use guest curators. Often, a filmmaker will establish an ongoing relationship with a particular microcinema because the space has a certain ambience, or the curator’s preferences are a good match, or simply because it’s local and the only show of its kind in town.

Grover says that Aurora Picture Show has been lucky in establishing a good reputation, in just two years, among some of the top names in underground film who have had their films shown at museums and other venues, such as experimental video artists Craig Baldwin and Tony Oursler. It’s a reputation due in part, Grover thinks, to the built-in reverence the old church gives to the work.

Hooking up with a curator who frequently exchanges tapes gets a filmmaker’s work shown at a lot of places. Mark O’Connell, an artist in Seattle who also has become a recognizable name on the microcinema circuit, started showing his experimental “moving collages” at Independent Exposure and has since appeared in nearly every show. Because Bachar distributes the Independent Exposure shows around the world, Bachar has been essentially acting as an agent for O’Connell as well as other filmmakers.

“Artists are lousy self-promoters,” O’Connell says. “When you have something interesting and creative happening, you have to have somebody like Joel to show up on the scene for it to get to the next step.”

Like any burgeoning movement, microcinema is not without those who believe that money can be made. The exchange of videos--a practice that’s been growing as microcinemas discover each other through the Internet--has so far been mostly free and without any exclusive contracts. Dashow of Video Lounge is typical of many curators when she claims to be simply an event organizer, a facilitator: “I don’t feel any kind of ownership. We’re just following all the tapes through and organizing the space,” she says.

But that may start to change. Most venues today survive on donations, sponsorships, grants and a lot of goodwill. Some, such as the Aurora Picture Show, are nonprofit. Concession sales usually go to the associated bar or cafe (if there is one), and admission is typically about $5. So, with spaces that hold only a few hundred people (or less), no one’s getting rich. Bachar has had some financial success with programs commissioned by arts groups or by individuals who want to throw a private party with video, and he believes this is “a revenue stream with a lot of potential.”

But there are some, including Bachar and the founders of Access(o), who think a sound business model exists in the controlled distribution of tapes. Shiron Bell, a refugee from Wall Street who has helped shape Access(o)’s plans, sees Access(o) eventually acting as an umbrella organization, helping set up microcinema franchises in other cities and then distributing films. Access(o) would get a distribution fee, and profits from ticket sales and concessions could be divided between the theater and the filmmaker.

Bell has confidence that a filmmaker could make a living under such a model. “Maybe it’s not like the Hollywood system where you get a three-picture deal and you’re a multimillionaire,” he says. “It’s more like you can make $40,000 to $50,000 a year just making movies. It’d be a system much like how a lot of bands tour--you’d make the movie and you’d take a month and tour to some of these venues. Maybe you’d sell DVDs there. And then you’d go back and make another movie.”

There may also be profits in larger events, such as the well-attended rave-like show that Video Lounge staged outdoors in Brooklyn two summers ago, in which musicians accompanied video art for an audience that paid to get on the grounds.The lure of money, though, is not what seems to motivate microcinema’s filmmakers and curators. There’s just not enough of it flowing yet, and the possibilities are too remote. Instead what seems to drive many of them is an indefatigable, power-to-the-people desire to present work that would never otherwise see the light of a projector.

Perhaps the epitome of perseverance in the microcinema world is the team of Milos Kukuric and Aleksandar Gubas in Belgrade, who have kept their LoFiVideo microcinema running despite Yugoslavian unrest, the loss of their space after a police raid and NATO bombing.

There are some, of course, who consider these small venues steppingstones to Hollywood or television, but most see them as contributing something entirely new to the arts--a social kind of cinema that can excite, provoke and question without relying on tested mainstream formulas. Encinas, who last year directed a film on the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, wants that discovery to include many new voices.

“I don’t know if these little venues are going to create stars or propel people into the commercial medium,” he says, “but I think they will give a lot of people an opportunity to make films and get better.... It’s going to give accessibility to people to be able to tell their stories.” *