Low Budget

About this blog: low-budget authenticity

About this Blog

Unlike my other works, this one is not accompanied by any commitment to ongoing updates or constantly being witty, hip, and amusing. This topic is somewhat academic. Though I’m writing it with a sense of fun, I am still trying to get deep at something I first encountered when my ex-wife was studying film. I was tasked with helping her understand a lot of the theorists, and I got deeper into the whole project than I imagined I would.

I began exploring, thinking about, and uncovering ideas about “authenticity” in film. At first I thought the authentic was merely the sense of reality the viewer achieved with a well-told story. In that case the problem would merely be the combination of viewer’s willingness to suspend disbelief, and the craft of the film-maker in hiding the smoke and mirrors. However, this belief did not hold up on close analysis. Through study, through watching of many films, and through discussion with many people about what they sought, I realized that the thirst for authentic could be slaked in a variety of ways. Some of these are directly contradictory to the premise that the viewer must be totally within the story. For instance, Jackie Chan has been known to show two different landings to the same fall. Why? To show his fans that he is really doing those amazing stunts. Tony Jaa recently accompanied his press tour with live stunts to show that he didn’t even use wires.

I have read about the importance of physical reality underlying differing genre’s such as martial arts, musicals, and pornography. Then I’ve encountered a fetishistic approach to the medium itself. In the same way some people worship old-fashioned LPs and vacuum tubes, some fight for film over digital, clay-mation over CGI, and live actors over animation. On the other hand, we worship low-budget movies shot under difficult conditions over those slick “Hollywood” numbers.

So this Blog exists to help me put together all these pieces. It’s like potential energy. It can be heat, chemical, electrical, nuclear, or mechanical. You can convert it from one form to another. It can even come from it’s apparent opposite, matter. I’m not so bold as to think I can create a grand unifying theory. But I do hope to illuminate those apparently different things and see them as they relate to each other.
-daniel h. jeffers

posted by dan @ 3/21/2005 12:26:00 PM