July/August 2003

From American Splendor’s first shots, you know you are watching something unusual: It’s Halloween, 1950, and the neighborhood runts are trick-or-treating, all done up as their favorite superheroes—except for one rebellious runt, who has stubbornly donned his street clothes. “I’m Harvey Pekar,” he tells a curious neighbor. “I ain’t no superhero, lady.

The label “experimental” has been troubling me for a while now. For too many people, the word only conjures up the films of Brakhage, Mekas, Anger, etc. So much so that the very term has calcified within the minds of hipsters and film aficionados alike—ending the canon in the seventies.

The Federal Communications Commission has voted to loosen media ownership laws, allowing one company to own television stations that reach forty-five percent of the American viewing audience (up from thirty-five percent). The new rules also permit cross-media ownership. Now, one corporation can own both a television station and a newspaper in the same market.

Chrissie Iles is the curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been curating for twenty-three years. Before joining the Whitney in 1997, she was head of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Her Whitney exhibit, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, is currently touring Europe.

Indianapolis is a city best known for its Motor Speedway and the Indy 500. But the “Racing Capital of the World” is also home to a growing film and art scene. It’s true, there is more than corn in Indiana.

A new breed of tool has recently appeared on the DV filmmaking landscape. Unfortunately, these new devices do not share a common name and are known by various manufacturers as DV Direct to Edit Disk Recorder, Video Disk Unit, or Direct to Disk Recorder (DDR) which is how I will refer to them in this article.

Almost every film that is released these days has its own website. Filmmak-ers, distributors, and studios have all learned the promotional value of the web when it comes to getting their films out into the world. One can go to a film’s site and view trailers, read the credits, the reviews, and experience the “hype.” But independent films are not Harry Potter 1, 2, or 3.

The past few years have seen significant advances in the tools for creating visual effects with desktop computers. Yet these tools cost at least a few hundred dollars and can quickly move into the thousands with the addition of plug-ins and ancillary tools.

What is Facets?
Facets Multi-Media is an arts organization based in Chicago, Illinois. We also have the world’s largest and most unique collection of foreign, classic American, independent, experimental, documentary, cult, fine arts, and children’s videos and DVD’s. The Facets collection represents over fifty thousand individual titles.