DFF 2012

Attending last year's edition of the Disposable Film Festival (DFF) proved to be a delightful eye-opening experience. Without a doubt, it was the deciding factor in my purchasing an iPhone. Once I knew what could be done with it, I was eager to start playing. If DFF got an old codger like me motivated, imagine how it inspires young media makers?! Playfulness is the spirit presiding over DFF, which provides its annual forum of the year's best "disposable" films, free workshops to advance the disposable genre, and festive parties to socialize with the cast and crew. In the spirit of collaboration and egalitarian access, DFF deserves being dubbed by Moviemaker magazine as "one of the coolest film festivals."

Recounting territory covered by my conversation with DFF festival co-founder and Director Carlton Evans, DFF was created in 2007 to celebrate the artistic potential of disposable video—short films made on non-professional devices such as cell phones, pocket cameras and handycams, webcams, and other readily available video capture devices. DFF hosts traditional theater and outdoor "Bike-In" screenings, competitions, filmmaking workshops and other events to showcase the best work within the disposable genre. DFF premieres each year in San Francisco before traveling to cities across the country and internationally.

The fifth edition of DFF will be held March 22-March 25, 2012. In addition to screenings of films made on everything from cell phones to web cams, this year's festival offers panel discussions and workshops with topics such as knowing your music/video licensing rights and social action and disposable filmmaking. There will also be a competitive shorts program, guest speakers, multimedia performances and plenty of after parties. A "Geek" event will showcase the latest and greatest gadgets, accessories, sites and apps for the disposable filmmaker. DFF Travels will screen the year's best travel video submissions.

"The number and quality of entries this year surpassed anything we've seen before," said festival co-founder and Director Carlton Evans. "People across the globe are finding themselves empowered through new inexpensive video technologies. And they're using them to tell their stories."

"We're absolutely bursting at the seams with new programs and screenings based on the collection of interesting trends we are seeing in the submissions and other amazing disposable film online," said Associate Director Katie Gillum.

The year's festival opens on the heels of a year filled with new partnerships and exciting events. Highlights included a "Best of the Fest" screening at Slamdance, a partnership with Practice Fusion and health-related film contest, a co-presentation of user-generated feature-length documentary Life In A Day [covered by Evening Class correspondent Dominic Mercurio], Bike-Ins and international screenings.

DFF 2012 kicks off with its Competitive Shorts Night at its sophomore premiere at the famous Castro Theater, March 22 at 8:00 PM. All films will be rated by an expert panel of judges [including, yours truly], and fans can vote for their favorites during the Audience Choice Award.

Among the workshops offered this year are those for youth hosted by TILT whose mission it is to teach young people—who are typically underrepresented and misrepresented in media—the fundamentals of movie-making and media literacy through hands on training in video production.

Guest speakers at DFF 2012 include iPhone animator Sascha Ciezata and Ted Hope who's produced such blockbuster films as Towelhead, Adventureland and The Savages.

The festival will wrap with two educational panels. Lights, Camera, Social Action! will focus on advocacy and Disposable Filmmaker 101 will show fans how to prep, shoot, edit and share a disposable film. Here's all the festival details:

Thursday, March 22: 8:00PM
Opening Night at The Castro
The Castro Theater: 429 Castro St.
TICKETS: Buy now: $14 RSVP: Facebook

Join DFF for the fifth annual opening night screening of the year's best disposable short films in the lavish Castro Theater. Yes, the organist will be there! Opening night has sold out every year, so grab your tickets before they sell out. They would love to save you a seat. Afterparty at The Lookout.

Following the premiere, DFF has a weekend full of events that are free to anyone who's curious and creative. But space is very limited, so RSVP to save your spot before the events fill up.

Friday, March 23: 5:00PM
Know Your Rights
Hotel Rex: 562 Sutter St. RSVP: Eventbrite

How do you legally use music and footage from other sources? At this panel on music/video licensing, discover what is available and how to decide how others use your work. Free!

Friday, March 23: 7:00PM
Insight from Ted Hope
Hotel Rex: 562 Sutter St. RSVP: Eventbrite

How do great films get made? Get insight from Ted Hope, America's leading independent producer, who will be speaking about what makes a project great both in terms of artistic innovation and financial viability. Free!

Saturday, March 24: 11:30AM
Mobile Filmmaking
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building)

Learn the ins and outs of producing media using mobile devices. This workshop is for ages 13 to 20. Free!

Saturday, March 24: 2:30PM
Young People Make Films
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building)

An engaging panel discussion with young media producers and media organizations. Free!

Saturday, March 24: 4:00PM
Meet Sascha Ciezata
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite

iPhone animator Sascha Ciezata became an instant internet success. He received acclaim from such greats as David Lynch until an obscure group removed his film from the internet. We'll be screening this banned classic and speaking with the filmmaker, as well as screening some of his other incredible work. Free!

Saturday, March 24: 8pm
DFF Rocks!
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite

A night of the best disposable music videos and tunes by DJ Matt Haze. Free! Brought to you by Vimeo Music Store. This event is open to partiers 21 and over only.

Sunday, March 25: 12:00 noon
Lights, Camera, Social Action!
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite

A panel on disposable film and change: activists, educators, and non-profits discuss how disposable film is spurring social change. Free!

Sunday, March 25: 2:00PM
Disposable Film 101
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite

Learn the tips and tricks of disposable storytelling, shooting, editing, and distribution from Vimeo Video School's Dan Hayek! Free!

Sunday, March 25: 5:00PM
DFF Geek
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite

Discover the latest and greatest gadgets, accessories, sites and apps for the disposable filmmaker at this one of a kind indie expo. Presented by BoomGrip, a steadycam for your mobile device with dozens of hacks and uses. Free!

Sunday, March 25: 7:00PM
DFF Travels
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite

Not your uncle's travel slide show! Come celebrate closing night with a selection of the year's best travel videos, presented by AirBnB. Wine courtesy of Avalon Winery. This event is open to partiers 21 and over only. Free!

DFF—Dominic Mercurio Contemplates Life In A Day

"The only real important filmmakers at the moment are the thousand and thousand YouTube providers."—Heddy Honigmann, in a Facebook entry dated Wednesday, March 12, 2011.

The Disposable Film Festival (DFF) and YouTube co-presented a special free screening of Oscar®-winning film director Kevin Macdonald's Life In A Day at the Sundance Kabuki Theater, San Francisco on Wednesday, July 20, 2011. Life In A Day (produced by Ridley Scott) is a user-generated feature-length documentary, shot on a single day—July 24, 2010—that enlisted the global community to capture a moment of their lives on camera. Culled from over 80,000 videos to YouTube, the 90-minute feature pulls together deeply personal, powerful films from contributors from Australia to Zambia, from the heart of bustling major cities to the furthest and most remote reaches of the earth. Life In A Day director Kevin McDonald and editor Joe Walker were available for a Q&A following the screening.

DFF Executive Director Carlton Evans said, "It's an absolute pleasure and an honor to be a part of this event. The DFF hopes that more projects like this will bring everyday artists' work to the silver screen." Added festival Associate Director Katie Gillum, "Life In A Day is a testament to the capability and power of disposable filmmaking. The film could not have been produced without widespread access to disposable media like cell phones or digital cameras and without the freedom and flexibility they afford."

The Evening Class thanks Dominic Mercurio for offering his perspective on the event.

* * *

Are you alive? Then see this film. Many films explore the human experience, but Kevin Macdonald's Life In A Day dives into the deep end of humanity's essence. This ambitious project asked the YouTube community to upload videos of their day on July 24, 2010. The experiment resulted in over 4,500 hours of footage submitted from 140 countries around the world. The staggering amount of footage was funneled down into a 95-minute visual time capsule of one day in our lives as humans, documented by ourselves. The concept is old, the execution is undeniably innovative, and the result is astounding.

What makes the film stand out is its brilliant use of our society's penchant for over-sharing. Social media has reached a crescendo and YouTube has been the one stop shop to find just about anything you could ever want to see, captured on video. Life In A Day masterfully pieces together a candid look at ourselves. Tapping into the direct line that YouTube creates from a single person to the rest of the world, Macdonald has removed one of the stigmatas of documentary filmmaking—the film crew—thereby underscoring the frequent argument that documentaries cannot objectively see the truth as long as there are people behind the camera imposing their editorial perspective on a subject situation. By empowering everyday subjects with cameras, documentary's thin pretense of objectivity capsizes and a subjectified portrait of real people from around the world emerges.

The film itself is essentially a feature-length YouTube video, complete with visuals ranging from camera phone to professional cinematography, and ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes. Moments are sequentially experienced as the channel flips from one country to the next through editing whose pace resembles the average internet users online experience, cribbed as it is by internet attention deficit disorder. Some say the average attention span of an internet user is a mere three minutes, so congratulations on getting this far in this article.

Trying to describe the film to someone who has not yet seen it is a difficult task. Singling out individual clips that struck me as powerful and poignant probably won't comport with the clips that resonate with others, but the variety of clips dropping you in the middle of hundreds of countries and situations ensures that there is something in this film for everyone. The film's celebratory vibe throughout its duration keeps it consistently fascinating and entertaining. While there is no real narrative arc to speak of, I would say it still tells a story. It's the story that we each live every day, though this one particular day is thoroughly documented.

Commencing at midnight (relative of course to where in the world you are), Life In A Day observes morning routines of people around the globe, carries on through the day, and eventually returns to midnight. With that bare bones cyclic structure in place, Life In A Day finds plenty of wiggle room to explore common themes: touching on love, death, happiness, wonder, growing up, possessions, technology, fear, and hope.

What becomes clear early on in the film is just how similar life can be around the world. It's easy to believe that an individual life is unlike anyone else's, but watching Life in a Day focuses less on difference and capitalizes on similarity. This isn't to demean our individual lives, but to bracket them within an omnipresent sense that "we are all one." The film solicits an identification with other people from other parts of the world.

The unique emotional punch of Life In A Day depends on what the viewer considers unique. By graciously providing a thrilling look at the world at a level only achievable through the tools of information in 2010, Life In A Day gives what the viewer, in turn, is willing to give. Allowing one's mind to wander through one's own experiences to explore how they relate to what the film provides can be a rewarding experience of connectivity. If films are meant to be hyper-reality, it could be argued that Life In A Day is simply reality, unprecedented for being unadorned and honest. It's hard to shake the feeling of communitas that the film inspires. Undoubtedly, when the lights come up in the theater, you'll hope to catch the eyes of fellow audience members to determine whether or not they feel the same.

Cross-published on Twitch.

DFF 2011: AND THE WINNERS ARE....

Thrush by Gabriel Bisset-Smith won the Grand Prize at the 2011 Disposable Film Festival (DFF), cleverly narrating a relationship from start to finish through sequences of photographs. It reminded me of when Jack Kerouac wrote that a day would come when he and his friends would look at their photos in albums and recognize their "sad and ragged lives forever."

Thrush from Disposable Film Festival on Vimeo.

The Audience Choice Award went to Theo Putzu's Paper Memories, wherein photos once again served a narrative of memory. But in this short film photographs also become the doors to an alternate future that resolves the sadness of the past.

Paper Memories from Disposable Film Festival on Vimeo.

For the remaining winners, check out the DFF website. Videos courtesy of Vimeo.

Cross-published on Twitch.

THE DISPOSABLE & THE DISCONTINUOUS: The Evening Class Interview With Stephen Parr

Stephen Parr is an archivist, imagemaker and writer as well as the director of Oddball Film + Video, a stock footage company based in San Francisco whose main business is licensing unusual stock footage to producers of feature films, documentaries, commercials, broadcast television, music videos, as well as web and new media productions. He is also hands down one of my favorite personalities in the San Francisco cinema scene. Every time I walk away from having a conversation with Stephen, I'm thinking, "Damn, I wish I'd recorded that!" So imagine my delight when Stephen accepted my invitation to lunch, recommended Chinese barbecue at Lung Shan on Mission, and agreed to let me record his take on the disposable and the discontinuous while we munched on tea-smoked eel and kung pao corned beef. [Photos of Stephen Parr courtesy of Anthony Kurtz, with Hardy Wilson assisting.]

* * *

Michael Guillén: Stephen, you have frequently expressed in the past your love for 16mm film, but you've also indicated to me your receptivity to new media. In fact, Oddball Film + Video is hosting a seminar and workshop on using inexpensive cameras to promote social action as part of the 4th annual Disposable Film Festival (DFF). Can you speak to your embrace of both film and new media?

Stephen Parr: It all has to do with how you perceive the world and how you perceive images and your reality. I shot a lot of Super8 when I was a kid. Then when I started going to school, I started doing more work with video because it was immediate and I really liked the immediacy of it. So I come from a background of video art and new media where people were actually even building and making their own equipment, like their own video synthesizers.

But really I'm more interested in content than format. I'm interested in learning how to do nonlinear programming that hits a lot of people on a lot of levels. That's what my real interest is. The technology is just the means to an end. I embrace any useful technology.

Guillén: So you're not a technical purist?

Parr: No. I like film very much because of its tactile quality and I love the way it's projected and I love the concept of people sitting in a room sharing an experience. That's something that's really important. Also, I like film because it is the longest-lasting medium invented. There isn't any other visual medium invented that lasts as long as film. People can talk about whatever medium they want, but there's nothing that's been around 100 years like film. At Oddball, we have reels that are 60-70 years old and we play them all the time. But any medium that allows people more control over their art is useful. With digital media you can make an image for one penny or nothing. You can record over and over.

Guillén: When you say you're learning to create nonlinear programming, what do you mean by that?

Parr: Most people like to think of a film as a way to tell a story. In the early days of cinema a lot of people told stories, a lot of people re-enacted myths, and a lot of people created abstract images. But a linear way of looking at things is only one way of looking at things and I suspect things are a lot more nonlinear than people think.

Guillén: So a nonlinear film is not as concerned with narrative continuity? Which approaches the subject of viewing films discontinuously.

Parr: What do you mean by "discontinuous"? Do you mean watching more than one thing at once?

Guillén: That's one way I think of it, yes. Though I'm also harkening back to how "discontinuous viewing" was a term used to legitimize criticism of channel surfing, back when television was accused of diminishing attention spans. It's now being dusted off and used again to criticize the viewing habits of internet cinephiles accustomed to watching YouTube and Facebook content.

Parr: I have mixed feelings on this. There's a difference between having a short attention span and being focused on a variety of stimuli. Most people that I see who use a lot of new media appear as though they do have a shortened attention span. Let me try to explain why I think that. Just because a cell phone is available, why is it when someone's out that they need to check their phone on a minute-by-minute basis? Or just because a camera is available, why would you want to take pictures everywhere you go? It makes me curious about what the media has convinced us we should do. If you can do something, why should you do it?

If someone tells me they're going to meet me at 10:00, I don't want to be interrupted from what I'm doing five times within the hour about when they're going to arrive; I just want to see them at 10:00, y'know? I don't want to spend my time talking about what I'm going to do. I just want to do it.

Guillén: This is reminding me of a conversation I recently had with a new intern where he was upset with me that I don't carry my cell phone. "How am I supposed to let you know if I can't make it on time?" he asked. I told him to just be at the agreed-upon place at the agreed-upon hour and no issue. "But what if something comes up?" he persisted. Which touched upon a pet peeve of mine: that spontaneity is often self-serving. My motto: make a plan and stick to it. You say you're going to meet me someplace somewhere then meet me there at the appointed time. If you don't arrive, I'll figure something came up and I'll find out about it later. It surprised me how much this seemed to agitate him.

Parr: Cell phones only benefit those who are changing plans on their cell phones. For instance, the phone was ringing at my Mom's house and she didn't answer it and I said, "Mom, your phone's ringing" and she said, "Yeah, I know." I said, "Well, aren't you going to get it?" She said, "No." I said, "Why?" She said, "Because I don't want to." And then she said, "Y'know, I didn't get the phone for other people; I got it for myself." And then there's those people who call you and you're talking and then they say, "Hey, can I put you on hold?" I have one friend who says, "No! Call me later."

Guillén: All this addresses the addictive allure of mobile devices and their impact on social behavior.

Parr: There's no doubt about it.

Guillén: We don't even need to talk about how this has impacted audience behavior in movie houses. But I do want to tease out this quality of the addictive allure of new media, both portable and social. My question is: what is the addiction really about? I do think people want to tell stories. I do think they want to talk about their lives and share information. I do think they want to communicate with others but they haven't learned how to do it in any other more meaningful direct way, and—because they haven't—I suspect it feeds a frustration and dissatisfaction that reveals itself in compulsive habits obsessed with hand-held devices. That's why I'm especially pleased by the free panels DFF is offering participants this year, two at Oddball alone, which are trying to propose creative alternatives to mobile devices. I'm particularly intrigued by the workshop on how to use mobile devices to further social causes.

The other day on Facebook I read a comment by documentarian Heddy Honigmann that stuck with me. She said that the only important filmmakers working today are the thousands and thousands of YouTube providers.

Parr: YouTube is a de facto archive for the world. We know that. Let me give you an example of what I'm hoping to get at with the upcoming DFF workshops. I just did a show in Bangalore, this place called Jaaga, which is a three-story building made with palette-rack shelving. It's an open-air place where they hold workshops on how to work with their laptops and create electronic devices, very youth-oriented, very immediate, high concept low tech, how to make low tech stuff that works. Actually, one of the main guys who runs Jaaga is from San Francisco. He just went over to India and started creating these spaces where people could work and create.

One of the things I would like to touch on is: people can handle more than one medium at a time. They can handle poetry and music. They can handle film and live music. They can handle a lot of different media at a time; but, are they focused? The whole point is about being focused. When they're walking down the street, why are people not listening to the world? To paraphrase John Cage: "Every sound is music." But instead, people walk down the street completely plugged in to digital media where the signal is actually being compressed so that you're not really getting high fidelity sound. Then on top of that they're either on their phone or watching consumer-oriented media that plays back from their phone. People have become alarmingly mediated. In my experience, such people don't know how to interact socially.

Guillén: That's reminding me of my friend Sergio de la Mora, an associate professor at UC Davis, who recently complained to me that walking across campus is no longer fun because nobody says hi to each other anymore; they're all too busy with their private phone conversations.

Parr: Also, there's some really strong work being provided online; but, a lot of what people record is narcissistic; it's all about them. It's not about other people. It's not about people coming closer to other people. Most social media at its core, at its base, is a substitute for human interaction. Many artists will tell you that words aren't enough. Many people will tell you that image on a film isn't enough. My point is that there are so many levels of intimacy. We've gone from being in person, being on the telephone, to being on email, to being texted, to doing the Twitter thing. When you look at people who are truly creative on Twitter—someone like David Lynch, let's say—you'll find he's following something like 30 people while 12,000 people are following him. He's not following 500 people. He doesn't have time. How do you create art and socially interact at the same time?

Guillén: They say no entourage is good for an artist.

Parr: Another example: somebody will remix something that's completely meaningless. I've said this before and I'll say it again: the meaningless and the trivial coexist with the meaningful and the vital. So a guy on YouTube will make a radio out of cheese and it will work and he'll get 500,000,000 hits.

Guillén: [Laughs] I want to see that radio!! Send me the link!

Parr: But then some guy in Argentina will set up his camera and do something beautiful and poetic and he'll get 25 people to look at what he does.

Guillén: I relate. [Laughs.]

Parr: So what does that mean? Well, it means that—to a large extent—people are quite distracted by the technology around them. They're flailing. I don't think people have an understanding of how you truly utilize the technology that's there. We're really at a stage of infancy for most technology.

For instance, there's no real etiquette for cell phone use. It used to be that if you wanted to make a call in a restaurant, you'd use the public telephone. And where would they put the phone? Back there by the bathrooms. You know why? Because they didn't want people to be disturbed if they wanted to carry on a private conversation. We've lost that age of privacy and now everyone wants to share themselves with everyone else; but, if you think about it, there's certain things that should be private. There's no real ground rules anymore. I've been in India in the middle of a puja, a sacred ritual, where people get on their phone. I've seen people in restaurants talking on their phones while the waiter is trying to get their order. I've seen guys where people are about to get on an elevator and they ward them off saying, "Could you take the next one down? This is a private call." So they're taking their space and making it your space and they're taking your space and making it their space.

All these issues revolve around public and private space and the fact that a lot of people think that—if more people see their work—the work will be better. For instance, when I program and screen films I don't worry about the size of the audience. To paraphrase Jonas Mekas: the better the film, the smaller the audience. If you're going to make a generalization, that's probably not so bad. Sometimes I'll have a program and someone will say, "There should be more people here...."

Guillén: But it is what it is.

Parr: It is what it is!

Guillén: You're reminding me of CinemaScope editor Mark Peranson when he said the most interesting film is the one that no one else has seen. So the cinephilic challenge is to find a film that few people have seen and write about it: that's interesting!

You're also reminding me of something Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: "In short, we live in a transitional period where enormous paradigmatic shifts should be engendering new concepts, new terms, and new kinds of analysis, evaluation, and measurement, not to mention new kinds of political and social formations, as well as new forms of etiquette. But in most cases they aren't doing any of those things." ("Film Writing on the Web: Some Personal Reflections", included in his collection Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, but originally published in the March 2007 issue of Film Quarterly 60:3.)

Parr: There's no money in developing an aesthetic. That's the bottom line. There's no interest from someone who makes a product to develop an aesthetic around the product on how to use it if it doesn't benefit the bottom line. Take Facebook as an example. Let's say I go in and open up a store—we'll use that metaphor—and I let people come in and we sell things to each other. What you do is get all their information and then you sell things to them while they're selling things to other people. You have no inventory. You have no product. The product is other people selling things to other people.

Television brought the viewer to the advertiser; it delivered an advertiser to the viewer. That's what television is. It's supported by advertising. They're giving you a product. But what product do you get with Facebook? Other people. To me, it's a brilliant concept: you're selling other people to other people. Then you're taking their information and putting it into a box. "Oh, you like dogs? Well, you can be with the 'I like dogs' people. You like film? Great!" I mean, who doesn't like film? Who doesn't like dogs? How do you match peoples' interests? It's a cynical and sad way. What they say in Asia is that boredom is the sign of aristocracy. If you have a lot of money, you're not going to be on Facebook all day.

Guillén: No, it's just for us poor people who have nothing else to do.

Parr: It gives you an artificial feeling of control.

Guillén: To get back to our two main words—disposability and discontinuous—let's take a look at what's disposable. We were talking about linearity and nonlinearity. Speaking in the domain of history, linearity has an accumulative quality. The continuous and the historical record involve a process of accumulation. That's the weight of history. To throw off that weight is the redeeming value of disposability. It lessens the load of what has come before in order to accumulate anew. It comments on what can be jettisoned.

One of the specific reasons I wanted to talk to you is because of your involvement with found footage and your nonlinear programming that consistently rescues and recontextualizes footage arguably intended to be disposable. You use commercials, educational films, even home movies, to construct your programs. Can you speak to your creative reappropriation of the disposable?

Parr: Well, no one knows what's disposable and what isn't. I base my whole art on things that other people have thrown away and don't think have any value. Most of what people think is valuable, isn't. Is gold really valuable? My gut sense is that most of the gold we see is being used for decorative purposes.

Our culture filters very little. A lot comes at people. I'll show some old campy drug film and people in the audience will say it's really funny and I'll tell them that the only reason they think it's funny is because it's 30 years old. You might as well laugh at yourself right now. It will probably be a lot funnier now than it will be in 30 years. Some people will say, "Oh, that was a really great film!" but it's not. It never was and it never will be. We just think it is because, in time, we look at what we have now. There's a certain linearity to time that—when you look back at something at the context it was in—it looks ludicrous. To me, it looks dumb when someone keeps looking at their cell phone. It's like a horse with blinders on. If you're spending more time looking at your phone than you are looking at the world around you, then you're kind of saying that the world around you is not really that valuable. It's just a place where you move through to get what you want.

In Asian culture if they have a picture of a fish in an aquarium, the native sensibility is that the fish belongs at the bottom of the sea. Western philosophy thinks that's wrong. They think the fish belongs with other fish. Western culture doesn't really see things as a whole. Our culture is driven by needs. It's really a "me" culture in a lot of ways. Whatever can get me what I want. Imagine that you could have a phone that had every application on it that you could ever want.

Guillén: Why would I want to imagine that? I find that horrifying. The other day I was shopping in Safeway and noticed a magazine called Apps. That was its full content; nothing but applications. And I'm thinking, "Film magazines are going out of print while a magazine called Apps is flying off the shelves? Really?"


Parr: But that's what I'm saying: the whole concept of applications is geared towards consumption. In general, they say the iPad is a consuming device. It's made to consume. It's not made to produce anything. It's not like a laptop. Maybe you're creating and sharing pictures, but you're really consuming more than you're creating. That's something to think about. It's not so much how you're consuming but what you're consuming, how much you're consuming, and why?

Guillén: Let's return to your comment that disposability is your art. Can you expand on how you're working with these disposable items to create your art?

Parr: Everything has a life span according to our culture. Myself, I don't really believe in "genre-fying" everything, as if everything is a genre. Literally every week there's a different film festival in San Francisco: animation, film noir, independent, horror, sex. In one sense that's wonderful but I don't think those things necessarily work within the cultural framework we have right now. For example, I just did a program in Bangalore where people responded just as well if not better than they responded here in the United States. It's all about visual iconography, style.

Disposability is part of that awareness that developed in the '60s with environmental culture. At that time there was a lot of talk about planned obsolescence. People like Rachel Carson talked about the creation of objects that were being made just to be disposed. Nowadays especially people make products and no one expects them to last. If you buy a cell phone, you don't expect it to last for more than two years, which is not really a good way to look at things. So when I talk about disposability, I mean it metaphorically. As a metaphor, disposability can encompass a lot of different ideas. It can encompass the fact: what were these people thinking when they made all these commercials? Were they thinking that anyone would ever look back at them? Probably not. A lot of times people would make home movies but who did they think was really going to watch them? Their audience was very limited.

A lot of times people make big-budget films—something like Avatar—whose aim is to last for 10,000 years. And yet James Cameron is using ideas that are totally timeworn ideas, beside the fact that it's a horrible script. Avatar has immediately dated itself in a very strange way because Cameron repeated all the same things that everybody else has been trying to do for 30-40 years, which is 3-D. He used state-of-the-art effects but he used the same story. So the strange thing is that—even though something is purporting to be new—it may last a week or it may last 100 years.

I'm interested in the viability of a lot of things besides portable mediums. For instance, if you've made an art installation using a floppy disk, how do you reinstall a system like that?

Guillén: You're basically talking about the imprecision of memory and its potential obsolescence. Case in point: I had a major hard drive crash this past summer and I lost every piece of writing I'd written since I was 12 years old because there was no way to get to it. The drives were outdated so there was no way to transfer the data to a new computer, short of paying big bucks to recover the hard drive, which wasn't guaranteed. And the irony was that I had faithfully been transporting this data from computer to computer over the years and, wham, suddenly it was gone.

Parr: There's only two kinds of people that work with computers: people who have lost data and people who are going to lose data. It touches everybody. The thing about disposable mediums or any medium that has this planned obsolescence built into it is that—when you buy it—you have to think, "What do I want this to do? And how long do I want it to do that?" Right now in our culture there isn't anybody who isn't an archivist. If you have a cell phone with a camera on it, you're an archivist. Because you're going to spend the rest of your life migrating that data. It used to be that you'd take a picture, print it, put it in a box and then sit on it for 50 years. Now you take a picture and you have to move it from one phone to the next and—when you stop doing that—you lose the picture. So now you're dealing with a much more fragile medium.

It's strange because people say, "Everything's in The Cloud" but who lives in the clouds? I'm being a little rhetorical here, but The Cloud is not a place where people who are focused go. I mean, I might feel a little bit better if someone said, "It's down in Hell."

A lot of new media is predicated on the fact that the distribution system is more important than the content creation system. For instance, I have a warehouse full of film but it's only useful to my clients if it's digitized. That's why an alternate arm of Oddball is to take the opportunity to screen films from the archives, to show people the fact that the material is there to be seen and shared by them in the way it was created; but, I'm not opposed to other mediums using that footage at the same time. I've done events where I've incorporated film, video, live performers, music and I'm fine with all of it. Generally, most digital recording—with the exception of high-end stuff—is somewhat inferior to analog recording. Film is almost always superior to digital media. That's why I like it.

My situation, the way I run my business, is that I used to be able to buy a film, transfer it to a videotape, make a copy, and that copy could sit on the shelf for 20 years. Fine. The film itself is going to be there and last 100-200 years. But nowadays, you have to digitize a film, then you have to make two copies, then you have to make a viewing copy and back that up too, and then every 2-5 years whatever "they" decide is the latest medium—maybe Steve Jobs dies and so Quicktime dies—you have to transfer it all. So you're always going to be transferring data and moving data. You have to build that into making your work so that anybody now who's making work should also be thinking about how to archive it.

We're at a point where people think they have control over the medium but the medium has much more control. Look at who's controlling the landscape: Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft. Do you really feel that those people are going to make clear, aesthetic decisions about what's best for the way that you want to create your work? For instance, if you shoot 5000 pictures and upload them into iPhoto, it will take you forever to get them out of iPhoto because they want you to live in their world. That's the whole thing about being an artist—making your sickness be everybody else's sickness; making your vision something that other people go see—and when you're in a confined space like that, then you have to play by those rules. On Facebook you know where the guy's picture is, you know what he does, you know where his wall is; but, in the early days of the internet, you could get on line and not know what a web page was going to look like. It could be upside down. It could be all black with white lettering. It could be anything. The only people who do that now are high concept artists and branding companies. Everybody else just wants to get their stuff out there. That's one of the problems. People are more interested in having people see the work than they are in having it last longer or taking the time to do it in a way that's really inventive.

Guillén: You've made a good argument against disposability. Is there anything you can say in favor of it?

Parr: Well, the word disposable—at least in terms of the Disposable Film Festival—is a really good catchphrase and it works well. It's meant to be in jest. It's playful and I like it. I tend to use words like "portable." I co-curated the Savannah Portable Media Festival. We liked the idea of disposable as something that's made as a one-off but it's actually being used to create art. You can create art with really cheap things; that is, theoretically, if it's actually art and not totally garbage. But even if it's garbage, perhaps that's good too because the portable media is doing its job: it's cheap and it's quick. I think the idea of portability, the idea of something that's low cost, the idea of accessibility, and the idea that something is so common—that's one of the reasons that I started collecting films: they're very common—the whole concept of disposability, the whole concept of portability, all those things, are very useful.

I was in India a few years ago and I had a cheap camera but I got great photos. When I shoot, I try to shoot with something really small because I'm allowed to get into places where a lot of people aren't allowed to go with big intimidating pieces of equipment. And I like things that have a low learning curve. I don't think it's a benefit that I know how to take a film, transfer it to video, digitize it, put it to two hard drives, make a Quicktime, log it, put it in Metadata, and FTP it to my client. I don't think that's a very useful thing to learn other than the fact that that's how I make my living, okay? I think it would be much more useful to take a film, put it on a projector, and have it come out a digital clip. That's way useful because that gets it to people really quick. When I look at the creative process, the thing that gets me from A to Z the quickest wins. I want to spend my time thinking about something creative. I don't want to think about why this doesn't render properly. That's for some tech guy who designed the software to figure out.

Certain kinds of social media are overhyped, even though they serve a useful purpose. But portable media—something you use to record something?—it's always much more valuable. It has a different value. And some portable media advances social activism. For example, there's a group in New York called Witness. They give portable media to people in third world countries to document human rights abuses. There's a guy from Singapore who I met at the Orphans Film Symposium in New York a couple of years ago and his work—he documented a lot of protests in Singapore, which is a pretty right wing country—has been confiscated. He doesn't have it anymore. It only exists on YouTube. The thing to remember is that people did not start a revolution because of Twitter, no matter how much their branding experts would want you to believe. Facebook didn't start a cultural revolution. People started it by talking to each other. People need to credit technology only insofar as what they do with it.

Cross-published on Twitch.

THE DISPOSABLE & THE DISCONTINUOUS: 2011 DFF—The Evening Class Interview With Carlton Evans

"The only real important filmmakers at the moment are the thousand and thousand YouTube providers."—Heddy Honigmann, in a Facebook entry dated Wednesday, March 12, 2011.

With my preview entry of the 2011 Disposable Film Festival (DFF), I've launched a series of entries that will explore what is "disposable" and "discontinuous" in Bay Area cine-events, exploring the proposition that these new forms of exhibition are changing the face of film culture not only locally but, arguably, globally. Continuing my coverage of DFF, I had an opportunity to catch up with DFF's Co-Founder and Festival Director Carlton Evans to tease out some of his thoughts.

Carlton Evans studied art history and film theory at Stanford University and earned his Ph.D exploring New York's cultural environment during the sixties. He then went on to do TV work at KQED and became involved in film production and, in fact, produced two films that were at Sundance this year, including Tiffany Shlain's Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence (2011). Along with helming DFF, since Sundance he has started producing a new feature film, collaborating as co-writer with Matthew Lessner (The Woods), who will direct.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Thank you for taking the time today, Carlton. I'm intrigued by your festival and I'm sorry I haven't been on board before now; but, it sounds like you're really amping it up this year with your premiere at the Castro Theatre.

Carlton Evans: Yeah, it's really exciting. It's our first year at the Castro, which is bigger than any of the places we've premiered before. We started out at ATA in January 2008 and have been opening at the Roxie the last couple of years.

Guillén: Has the shift to the Castro been necessitated because your audience has grown?

Evans: Yeah. The past two years we sold out double screenings at the Roxie so we felt we were ready for the Castro. So far things are great. It looks like we're going to be selling out the Castro as well for opening night.

Guillén: It's my understanding you co-founded this festival with Eric Slatkin?

Evans: That's right.

Guillén: The term "disposable film" is an interesting one for me. I Googled it and came up with little and it isn't even on Wikipedia yet, so there you go. Where did the term "disposable film" come from?

Evans: The term came up for Eric and me at our first meeting. He was showing me a camera that he had just discovered that was a $20 one-time-use digital video camera. Basically, you shoot 20 minutes of footage, take it back to the drug store and they process it onto a DVD for you. Essentially it's a disposable camera that shoots digital footage. It seemed to us that this was going to completely change the way people had access to video making. Sure enough, over the next year or so, digital video cameras started showing up in every cell phone, and they became more and more ubiquitous, to the point where a lot of cell phones now—like iPhone 4—shoot absolutely gorgeous footage and rival the DSLRs. So we wanted to create a forum where we could push the boundaries of this kind of work. We figured that—if people were making films on these kinds of things—that there should be some kind of venue that would celebrate and help raise the standard of the work being made. 2008 was our first public event and we're going into our fourth season.

Guillén: I'm intrigued by how you have reclaimed and recontextualized the term "disposable" and that—like recent discussions on "discontinuous film viewing"—you've taken the term and flipped it around to give it a positive connotation.

Evans: The way we think about it, there's some amount of irony in the term because, obviously, the work that's being made on these inexpensive devices is far from disposable; it's enduring film work. It's having a major impact on—not only online video platforms—but also the film industry. I'm not sure if you've heard of this film Life In A Day (2011)?

Guillén: I have not.

Evans: It's a film that YouTube made with Ridley Scott directed by Kevin MacDonald (Last King of Scotland). They solicited footage from the YouTube community. They asked people to shoot their lives for one day last Summer and then the footage was cut into a feature-length film. This was a film whose story would never have been told without the use of these inexpensive cameras, which are now literally everywhere.

Guillén: Fascinating. I'll have to check that out. Let's take a look at DFF's program lineup this year. Along with the Castro opening night premiere, you're doing a tribute to filmmaker Christopher P. McManus. Can you talk about his work and why you've included it in your festival this year?

Evans: Absolutely. Christopher McManus is an artist based in Philadelphia and he has been using these inexpensive cameras to make films and has created an amazing following for himself. He's shown his video works at the Tate London and all over the United States and basically has been able to do that simply because of the accessibility of the equipment he uses.

We first saw his work when he submitted a film last year in the shorts program and it was a big, popular film with our audiences so we decided this year to show the body of his work and have him come and be in conversation with Vimeo's Andrea Allen, who will be hosting the program.

Guillén: I'm likewise intrigued by this interactive media event you've arranged with Pomplamoose.

Evans: We're very excited about that too. Pomplamoose, as you probably know, is this band that made a name for themselves by editing their own music videos. They've had so much attention now; something like 52,000,000 views on YouTube. They've become complete YouTube superstars! They very rarely perform live. We're very lucky to have them join us. They're going to lead a music video workshop, then we'll show some of their work, and then they'll do a live performance, which people will be able to shoot and afterwards—using the techniques they've learned from the workshop—cut into a music video that they can then post online so we can find it later.

Guillén: That sounds like nothing but fun! I imagine tickets for that are going fast?

Evans: Yeah, we're expecting that to sell out.

Guillén: Can you speak to this trend that's being termed "discontinuous viewing" of the youthful preference for shorter pieces of footage? A preference that has developed, some say, from the practice of surfing on internet sites like YouTube?

Evans: There have been various formulas. YouTube, for example, is not a very old phenomenon, as I'm sure you know. It's been around since 2005 when it originally launched, 2006 maybe, so we're really only talking about five years that we've had video content on line. It's hard to imagine now the internet without video.

A couple of years ago, the common belief was that 30 seconds to a minute was about the longest video you could have on line that people would pay attention to; but, what's happening now as the technology advances, YouTube and Vimeo can show a video that's a lot longer than they used to be able to show in the past. People are getting used to watching longer videos on line because they've become used to downloading longer feature-length films, watching TV episodes on Hulu, so I think people have adapted to watching longer format video on line. That's not really the problem.

The problem is that—if you're a disposable film maker—how do you make something with your inexpensive camera that's going to keep people's attention for longer than a minute-and-a-half or so? In the past, most of the film's we've shown have had a 10-minute maximum, though most of the films we've shown have been in the range of 2-3 minutes. This year there are 2 or 3 films in the program that are well over 6-7 minutes and they're completely able to hold an audience's attention. So I think what's starting to happen is that we're moving out of an experimental phase where we thought, "Okay, I have an inexpensive camera. I can do whatever I want with it. I can put it up in an air balloon. I can tie it to my skateboard. I can tape it to the wheel of my car. I can do all these experiments to see what this shot looks like." Those were fascinating experiments; but, people are now using these devices to tell stories in a new way. A new vocabulary is emerging.

If you're using a webcam, it instantly speaks with an intimate, confessional tone. People are using that in strategic ways. Or if you have a cell phone, you can capture glorious footage for documentaries that couldn't have been captured otherwise. With the emergence of DSLRs in the last couple of years, you can get incredibly beautiful saturated footage and make a feature length film for the relatively inexpensive price of $1,000. The question then becomes how can you use all this equipment in ways that will tell a compelling story differently than the usual Hollywood formulas? This year we're really starting to see that shift. This has all been a long-winded answer to your question; but, the real trick is to engage and keep people's attention through innovative storytelling.

Guillén: I don't consider your answer long-winded at all; I think it's an exciting answer. What you're saying is that the Disposable Film Festival is advocating not only democratized access to these new technologies but a sophisticated application of them, plus a forum for the best to rise to the top.

Evans: Yes, absolutely.

Guillén: As a further commitment to that maturation, DFF is offering several free panels to the public to promote their mission statement. Can you talk a bit about those panels?

Evans: Yeah, sure. Friday evening we're having an industry panel of film professionals: "How to Become A Disposable DePalma". The idea is that we've had several local festival filmmakers go on to much bigger festivals like Sundance, Cannes and SXSW where they've received more attention for their films. What we're trying to do with DFF is help more filmmakers take that next step. You've posted your film online on YouTube or Vimeo and you've received positive comments from those communities, now what do you do? If you have a good film on your hands, how can you take it to the next level so you can reach a broader audience, enter into the film industry in some sense, and potentially even develop revenue for yourself? Friday night's panel will be an information panel to help filmmakers who are striving to turn filmmaking into a career by giving them tips and tricks. It's a panel that essentially will be forwarding information that DFF has already been doing in some ways for filmmakers.

The next panel is on Sunday at Oddball and it's on using inexpensive cameras to promote social action: "Lights. Camera. Social Action!" We're hosting a panel with professional activists who use film media and can speak to the value of using film media for their causes. That panel will then move into a workshop where people who are interested in creating advocacy films will be taught how to do them. There's a certain perception that the way to get people interested in a cause is to provide a lot of information about the cause, to provide all the facts about why, say, greenhouse gases are contributing to global warming, etc., etc.; but, in fact, that's not the case. What's proven to be the thing that draws people in the most is the personal story. So this panel will focus on teaching filmmakers how to tell that personal story to advance a social cause.

Guillén: Both panels sound great and I hope to attend them both. Of course, I admire DFF's focus on all the new media technologies and how you're physically interweaving them into the festival's social and interactive platform. The publicity for the festival on such social media as Facebook has been fantastic in how you've created separate pages for specific events. This might be a bit too obvious, but can you speak to the value of promoting and publicizing the festival through such social media as Facebook and Twitter?

Evans: It's all part of the same thing and it's one of the things that's wonderful about this moment in culture. People are making these videos with inexpensive equipment and then posting them on Facebook and interacting that way. It's just part of their reality. The amazing thing we discovered in that first year that we got out there was that people come to one of our events and after they leave they're inspired to make their own videos. It's a wonderful thing that the people who are making these films and the people who are watching them at our festival are one and the same people. There's an amazing fluidity between the filmmakers and the audience. In some ways some of the marketing strategies that we're using are not so much marketing as it is just recognizing these communities that are out there and tapping into them through Facebook, Twitter and other online social media. We're doing that because these people are exactly the people who are making and watching these videos and they're doing it constantly. It just seems natural. The whole thing comes together in this beautiful way that speaks against a fractured culture.

Cross-published on Twitch.