Beyond the Multiplex

IFC's new model will get an even more interesting test in 2008, since the company has abruptly become the go-to U.S. distributor for almost every festival-certified art film. Sehring's upcoming slate includes Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Flight of the Red Balloon," Catherine Breillat's "The Last Mistress," Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park," Jacques Rivette's "The Duchess of Langeais," Guy Maddin's "My Winnipeg" and many more.

"Right now, the VOD platform is the best one out there for this kind of film," Sehring says. "I know I'd much rather watch a movie on my home entertainment system than on a computer screen. I disagree with the common wisdom that the marketplace is overcrowded. I think there are a lot of great movies that have to find their audience, and that audience can be found all over the country. New York and Los Angeles will always be unique as venues for moviegoing, but those are not the only places where film lovers live."

As far as what we'll be doing five years from now, I wish I knew," Sehring continues. "If people are buying brand names, we think the IFC brand is a very strong one for people who want to see good movies. Speaking frankly, I'm not necessarily saying that this model is going to work a year or two from now. But I do know that the traditional model for specialty distribution is broken."

Christine Vachon says she appreciates the necessity of distributing and marketing art-house movies in an entirely new way, but wonders whether IFC's day-and-date releases generate too low a media profile and disappear from public consciousness too rapidly. "I couldn't believe how good 'This Is England' was, from beginning to end," she says, "and it got universally terrific reviews -- and then got completely overlooked at award season."

Still, Vachon adds that her production company, Killer Films, is becoming less focused on making films exclusively for theatrical release. "We're trying to shift with the times," she says. "We had a great experience making 'Mrs. Harris,' which was a movie for HBO. You have to look at how our consumption of media is changing: I watch TV shows on my iPod Nano now, and then there's the YouTube universe and the whole notion of making things for cellphones. It's not up to us to decide what a movie is or how people watch it." For an entire generation of younger viewers, she adds, watching movies on some version of the small screen has long been the primary mode, and going to a movie theater is a rare and special event.

Predicting the end of moviegoing is like predicting the end of the oil business -- people keep doing it, and they keep on being wrong. So I'm not predicting any such thing, and I'm not even saying that strange and adventurous little movies won't keep playing in theaters into the indefinite future. But this time, cinephiles, the writing is on the wall. If 2006 was the year when the indie-film marketplace decisively split into the haves and the have-nots, 2007 looks to me like the year when the artier and more ambitious fringes of that marketplace began to visibly evaporate.

Joel Bachar founded Microcinema International, his small San Francisco distribution company, in the mid-'90s on the premise of screening experimental films, documentaries and cutting-edge animation -- material no mainstream distributor would touch -- for live audiences in nontraditional venues. He still holds those screenings, but says, "We've definitely seen a downturn, both in my film series in San Francisco and all across the country. It's getting harder and harder to convince people to come out."

Microcinema is essentially a home-video distributor now; you might even say Bachar's concept has abandoned the public sphere and moved to the high-end HD monitors in people's living rooms. (One of Microcinema's niches, actually, is ambient video for plasma screens, intended as background visuals or a "video fireplace.") Bachar's next move, he says, will be nailing down a channel for the digital distribution of his videos, perhaps through a social-networking site. "We know we can't stick with DVD distribution forever; the point is to stay open to all possibilities." Whether online distribution actually creates a new audience for challenging material, however, remains anybody's guess.

He concludes: "You know what? The theatrical experience? Usually it's crappy anyway, because people are talking around you and it's uncomfortable or whatever. And I just don't think people care about it anymore. I think we have a new audience and their attention span is different. It might be a cliché, but I really think it's true. There's this social-networking mentality; they're Twittering, they're blogging. There's more commitment to, you know, the experiential moment, and not much commitment to longer moments."

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