PERMISSION CULTURE - PRESS ‘ESCAPE’

Direct access to audience holds the potential for a dramatic shift both on what we choose to make as filmmakers and, potentially, what our audiences expect to receive. I wrote this article for the Documentary Filmmakers Group here in the UK about how we should use our opportunity to bypass gatekeepers to audience to also think about the content we’re creating. It’s not enough to just access our audiences directly if all we’re making is more of the same thing that we’d've had to have made before. The article focusses on the UK primary broadcasting channels and the influence they’ve had on creativity in this country, but the argument can apply to many situations where till now there have been gatekeepers to audience:

PERMISSION CULTURE - PRESS ‘ESCAPE’

The tectonic plates of the film industry are shifting and it’s not a good time to just stand still and close your eyes. If you do, the next time you open them you might find you’ve ended up on the wrong side of town whilst standing still on the same spot.

If you snooze, as a filmmaker, you’re almost definitely going to lose.

As Filmmakers, We’ve Been Submissive

Till now, as independent filmmakers (especially of non-fiction), there have always been gatekeepers between us and our audience. In the UK, they’ve been the primary broadcasting channels. For anything we made to have stood a chance of getting any decent kind of viewership - in essence, to have had any voice at all - a handful of commissioning editors and the whims of their tastes (or the format du jour of those channels) would have to have given their approval. Not only did they have veto over what gets seen, but ultimately - what gets made. And till now we’ve been left with the conundrum of making what they want us to make if we’re going to stand a chance of obtaining audience, or making what we want to make and resigning ourselves to the idea of relative obscurity.

Ultimately, this has made us ‘independent’ filmmakers passive, subservient. And what’s more, it’s totally dictated what audiences expect to see. The entire process has been mediated, and rather than being free to express ourselves, as filmmakers we have become a permission culture waiting for the acceptance of the powerful few.

And this has had a very deep effect. It means they’ve been in control of how and what we create and how we think about film in general - as a culture. We’ve been deferring our creative thought processes to those in power. But now the internet era has arrived, and this paradigm is contra to everything that the web is about.

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