Stake Land (Jim Mickle, 2010)
In 1863, sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was working on a sculpture of the head of a man called Bibi. The studio Rodin had rented was cold, much colder than he was used to, and the sculpture froze, cracked, and the entire back of the head fell off. At first the artist was horrified, but he decided against resculpting, and exhibited the piece as Man With a Broken Nose (1864). Later in life, Rodin had to transport a large number of sculptures for an exhibition. In transit, every sculpture was broken, destroyed. Instead of despair, Rodin welcomed the accident, and found that there was more for him to find in a fragment than in a finished piece. That a fragment contained just as much, if not more, than a complete piece. This interest in the fragment, in the broken piece, in embracing the element of chance that occurs during production, is something germane to the later work of Rodin. Freed up from having to hide the medium, and the craft, Rodin's later work inspired sculpture to move away from the Neo-Classical and into the realm of Modernity.
I often feel that Rodin's approach to sculpture is something that should be made more welcome in film. Cinema is a young medium, but all the same there is very little difference between the basic structure of The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) and Avatar (James Cameron, 2010). Not just in terms of narrative, I'm also referring to modes of production: how a film is made and put together. You don't have to start a new scene with an establishing shot, there's no law dictating this necessity, but film-makers often do. There's no real reason why your Producer can't multi-task, and also be the Locations Manager either, and there's absolutely no reason that you need a lot of money to make a film, but there's a very general tendency for films to be financed and made and pieced together in the same way, because... well, that's just the thing. There's no convincing end to that sentence.
The mode of production of cinema is the Emperor's New Clothes. It is insane and makes no sense whatsoever. But we all go along with it. In fact we endorse it. At the time of writing, the top three films in the UK are (in order) Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011), Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh, 2011), and The Hangover Part II (Todd Phillips, 2011). The combined (estimated) budgets of these three films is $380,000,000. There's no capitalist conspiracy behind the reason these films are top of the heap. We have chosen to see them. But there is an argument to make for the possibility that our choices are somewhat dictated by our awareness of these films, as well as our expectations of what we believe a film should look like.
A low-budget film-maker could quite conceivably combine Rodin's concept of the fragment with a new mode of production. Consider the possibility of a sculpted hand, gnarled and layered with weathered skin and titled Endurance. This one piece works as a synecdoche for completing a narrative and back story which is not present in the piece itself. A film-maker could considerably free themselves up from outdated modes of production by working with a very tight, close-up camera. Enabling them to work on misdirection, on only having to dress one scene, but dressing it extremely well, in the same manner as the sculpted hand. By doing this the film-maker would be able to represent an apocalypse, while only showing the viewer a very small piece of it. In addition, the multiple roles exacted by members of the crew could allow everyone to really work together on the same film, instead of a number of different departments concentrating only on their individual piece of the puzzle, without ever catching a glimpse of the whole.
However, could a film like this ever be accepted in a milieu that understands ever increasing budgets to be the norm? Well, that's a good question. People often point toward something like The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) or Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) as an example of the possibilities open to low-budgets, but these films make their low-budgets (which are an estimated $75,000 combined) explicit by revealing the medium, namely small, hand-held video cameras. Essentially, they don't have to look like normal films. They have an aesthetic sensibility of ugliness, for want of a better word. So, what if one were to present a 'normal' looking film on an extremely low-budget employing alternate means of production and focusing on the fragment instead of the whole, used as both an aesthetic sensibility of beauty as well as a budgetary restriction? Would that film be accepted by people, even if it were noticeably above average? I'd like to think so, but it would be worth considering the fact that Rodin's Man With a Broken Nose was repeatedly rejected for eighteen years before it was accepted and exhibited at the salon in 1882. The establishment, and public taste, are reliably slow to change.