AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS #1: Due to problems uploading to our server, some of you may have missed Tuesday’s column. It’s linked here, and it has to do with Paul Allen’s architectural monumentalism. Read it, then come back to this page.
TO OUR READERS #2: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
I’M WRITING THIS a little over a week in advance, due to the potential circumstances listed above. As of this writing date, this year’s Seattle International Film Festival is four days old, and I haven’t been to it yet.
I have been out, mind you–hanging with chums, going to alt-country music shows and non-SIFF movies, seeing U District Street Fair bands risking short-circuits by playing their guitars and amps in the late-May rain.
Last year I went to nine SIFF films. Some years I’ve been to as many as 15; some none at all. I know, you all just assumed I had a full series pass every year, but no.
Mind you, I love foreign and/or true indie films. The best ones tell great stories with great characters, while de- and re-constructing the language of audio-visual communication (the language we’re all used to receiving, and an increasing number of us are learning to speak).
But I’ve never been an all-out SIFF “film orgy” obsessive.
But I still love to observe those who are. While the universe of film has utterly changed several times over the past quarter century, the hardcore SIFF fan base remains as it ever was (albeit slightly older in its average age).
The traditional SIFF target audience: professional, educated, practical, sensible, of middle-class origin but upper-middle-class present circumstances. Likes to see her/himself as an “arts” lover, but is simply less intrigued by live theater, dance, etc. than by film.
And it’s easy to understand why.
The highbrow performing arts are the sorts of stuff someone who didn’t come from an affluent or intellectual background would grow up familiar with, except thru sometimes dreary culture-in-the-schools programs.
But film’s different. It can be enjoyed as the more challenging, more socially acceptable version of “the movies”–something even the daughters and sons of G.I. Bill parents had grown up loving.
The two Canadians who started SIFF knew this was their target market. Over the years, they carefully nurtured this audience with an ever-larger melange of serious art-film, midnight-style fun film, bloated-budget Hollywood product, classic Hollywood oldies, other countries’ commercial-entertainment movies, films for women, films for gays, those emerging Miramax-formula “indie” U.S. films, and every year’s new B-movie trend (slackers, hip violence, AIDS musicals, etc.); all served up with healthy portions of hoopla and hype.
(Even the local TV newscasts, which abandoned arts coverage several years ago, still cover SIFF, at least when there’s a Hollywood celebrity visiting it.)
While filmmaking in Seattle has had its fits and starts, the curation and attendance of SIFF have done as much as any actual film to reveal the tastes and character of the pre-Microsoft Seattle. SIFF, like the city it grew up in, is (or was) often predictably bourgeois and monocultural, interested in other lands principally as sources of exotic Other-ness–but also sincerely receptive to new ideas and experiences (as long as they’re at least mildly entertaining and not too noisy), and proud to proclaim itself a crossroads of the world.
Other film festivals may have more celebs, more prestige, more deal-making action, or more industry clout. But SIFF’s got more total films, and in so many different flavors.
And it’s all because the “film orgy” hardcore audience likes it that way.
TOMORROW: Life dies again.
IN OTHER NEWS: For the first time, the Indy 500 had two women. They quickly crashed into one another. But before you go “so much for gender solidarity,” note that the crash was caused by a third driver.
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