Both a huge party and something of a petri dish of American independent creativity, SXSW is steadily becoming an invaluable stop on the festival circuit. The Austin festival is also the forerunner of a whole slew of American festivals that are proud to be far from New York and LA, and more importantly, far from Park City. So it’s no surprise that the festival would break even more ground in the decentralization of the independent film experience. This year, SXSW and IFC have teamed to offer five films on-demand via IFC Festival Direct, allowing viewers at home to see festival premieres on the same day the play for Austin audiences.
For a midwesterner such as myself, this is tremendously good news. The elephant in the room when talking about any artwork is always access. Who is it for, and who can actually see it? For many, entering the current discussion surrounding independent film is simply an economic impossibility. SXSW is very friendly toward the average-Joe or Jane attendee, especially compared to many other festivals, but a plane ticket and a pass are still a serious expense. It would be easy for the festival organizers to pay lip service to the idea of creating an event for more than just the elite, and then do nothing about it. Instead, they deserve a tremendous amount of credit for actively attempting to engage people who want to attend the festival, but can’t.
That said, the “festival at home” experience is far from flawless. Despite the fact that I’m pretty close to the ideal candidate for this type of thing, I don’t have the right kind of cable package required to see on-demand movies. I’ve often considered anteing up for better cable just for IFC, but for the most part a high-speed internet connection and Netflix subscription keep me occupied, and they are a big enough chunk of my monthly budget. So while audiences can technically watch these festival films anywhere, there’s still a large barrier to access, and it still comes down to cost. So I spent the weekend calling up friends, interviewing them about what kind of cable they have, then sheepishly asking if I could invite myself over to watch a few movies. Luckily, I have gracious friends.
Joe Swanberg has a new web series called The Stagg Party, which premiered this past Monday on IFC.com. It’s a documentary series about commercial photographer Ellen Stagg, who also appears briefly in Swanberg’s latest feature, Nights and Weekends. The show is very much NSFW, as it focuses on Stagg’s erotic photography work and features a lot of nudity. Therefore, it’s taken a few days for me to get a clip suitable for sharing here. Fortunately the upcoming third episode, from which the clip is taken, concentrates more on Stagg’s family than on her photo shoots. Here she chats with her brother, Jared, about how they first met.
The series in general, and this clip in particular, is especially interesting to me, because I’ve known the Staggs for almost 15 years, and it’s kind of funny to see some family photos here that I’ve definitely seen before. It’s terrific that Ellen has become the subject of a series by Swanberg, whose previous web series Butterknifewas presented by Spout.com. While I’ve been familiar with Ellen’s erotica photography for a long time, I’m actually learning a lot about the origins and the process of the work through this candid and humorously intimate series.
For the first two episodes, which I must remind you are NOT SAFE FOR WORK, check out the Stagg Party page at IFC, and stay tuned for Episode 3, which debuts on Monday. Also, be sure and visit Ellen Stagg’s sexy photo blog, Stagg Street — again, when you’re NOT AT WORK. Unless you work with Sasha Grey.
With Mary Bronstein’s Yeastdebuting on DailyMotion tonight, and Joe Swanberg’s Nights and Weekends opening this weekend at the IFC Center, the two SXSW 2008 premieres starring Greta Gerwig will suddenly become available to a non-festival audience simultaneously. When I heard this was going to happen, I dug up some of the press Gerwig has garnered over the past year, most of it pegged to her appearance in the Duplass brothers’ Baghead. I quickly noticed a trend: Gerwig has been covered exhaustively by male writers who a) have a tendency to label her an “ingenue” or an “‘it’ girl“, and b) devote much column space to the question of whether or not Gerwig’s main talent is playing herself.
Certainly, the great success of Hannah Takes the Stairs, the highly improvised project on which the pixie-cute actress collaborated with Swanberg and friends, is that it parts of it seem so lacking in cinematic artifice, they can play as glimpses into lives in progress. But if Hannah seems real enough to reach through the screen and touch, Gerwig’s title character is too exasperating to make that a particularly attractive proposition (or maybe not: almost like a classic femme fatale, it’s hard to deny her appeal even as she’s leaving you for your best friend). So when in Baghead, she plays a pixie-cute actress collaborating with friends on a highly improvised project––who drinks too much, takes little convincing to remove her top, and ultimately ends up with the funny, schlubby nerd––it seems too coincidental to be fiction, and apparently too cute to resist.
Gerwig hasn’t resisted the suggestion that the roles she plays grow out of who she is, but Nights and Yeast add two disparate but fully realized characters to her repertoire. Yeast is, for some, an endurance exercise; for me, it’s a comedy, and on the contrary, it’s the comparatively gentle but fundamentally flawed Nights and Weekends (on which Gerwig is billed as co-writer/director alongside Swanberg, and co-producer alongside Swanberg, Anish Savjani and Dia Sokol) which tries patience. If the latter shows Gerwig pushing a character way beyond adorable, it often feels like an exhausting exercise for all involved. It’s her work as Yeast’s only semi-relatable comic relief that throws up a middle finger at the ingenue concept, literally.
After the jump, you’ll find the final episode of Joe Swanberg’s webseries Butterknife, starring Mary Bronstein, Ronnie Bronstein and Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound). Above, you’ll find the penultimate episode, which premiered on butterknife.spout.com last week, but in the haze of SXSW, failed to make it to the blog. Also after the jump, you’ll find a full episode guide, with a bit of where-are-they-now info on Butterknife’s illustrious stars and guest stars. To comment on the episodes, check out the Butterknife discussion page at Spout.com.
Butterknife creator Joe Swanberg returns to SXSW with his fourth feature in as many years, Nights and Weekends. This one is co-written, co-directed and co-stars Greta Gerwig, of Hannah Takes the Stairs and Baghead fame, and it was shot by Matthias Grunsky, the man behind the camera on both of Andrew Bujalski’s features. Check out the trailer above, and Greta’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody below.
Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.
Nights and Weekends is When Harry Meets Sally meets DIE HARD without the cuteness or the explosions. It is a collaboration between Joe Swanberg and myself, with Kent Osborne, Lynn Shelton, Jay Duplass, and Elizabeth Donius in the mix. That synopsis leaves out just about everything.
Do you have a day job/a non-filmmaking occupation that raises money for your filmmaking efforts? Tell us about it.
My non-filmmaking jobs have been tutoring kids for the SATs, being a club kid, catering, babysitting, and looking for change under my couch.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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