Despite the press it garnered Brendan Prost’s file Choch opened poorly.
Are we giving locals a reason to leave?
The premiere of Brendan Prost’s new movie Choch should have been packed.
After all with the day (Saturday) the time (5 p.m.) the location (Uptown Stage and Screen) and the ticket price ($5) all carefully chosen to maximize attendance there was no reason the screening of the local DIY filmmaker’s third feature film shouldn’t have been successful.
The night was a complete flop and financially crushing.
“Thirty-five paid admissions was astonishing to me with the amount of press we got the amount of notice we gave people and the quality of the film” Prost reflects. “I was blown away. I was really floored.”
Unfortunately for directors and cinephiles in Calgary the experience that Prost encountered on May 14 isn’t anomalous. The phenomenon of the “absent audience” in English-Canadian cinema which was an issue first raised in 1978 by famed film critic Peter Harcourt continues to relegate local movies to triple-digit cable channels and sale bins at dusty rental stores.
It’s not for a lack of trying. In 2010 260 film television and creative productions were facilitated in the city by Calgary Economic Development. But as with the rest of the anglophone provinces Hollywood blockbusters continue to seduce audiences away from native productions such as Choch .
“When you go to see a big commercial movie you really have no idea how it affects their bottom line” Prost says. “An independent film really lives and dies based on whether or not people come tell other people and do stupid things like sharing the link to our website on their Facebook.”
Such dependency significantly guides the creative vision of the auteur director. Jonathan Joffe the director of the soon-to-be-released local film Burlesque Assassins says that the absent audience has influenced how he has made movies.
“Everything has some kind of angle to appeal to the audience” he says. “You have to shoot with your audience in mind otherwise there’s no point in making the film.”
Of all the films screened in English Canada every year only about one per cent are domestic products. George Melnyk a film studies professor at the University of Calgary estimates that 90 per cent of those are only shown in art house cinemas.
The professor an author of several books about Canadian movies says that the local audience tends to be absent for even that one per cent of showings as a result of there not being a marketplace for local films. Because of the historic dominance of Hollywood cinema in Canada and the fact that the country didn’t develop its own feature film industry until the 1970s Melnyk suggests that local cinema only appeals to a select few.
“Either you play the Hollywood game and try to be like a Hollywood film or you produce art house cinema for a minority” he says.
But that condition is hindered by a severe lack of funding which is a widely recognized problem.
Although Prost made Choch with a miniscule budget of $1300 saved from working at IKEA and selling DVDs of his previous feature Generation Why local directors attempting to break into multiplexes simply can’t compete with $200-million films. As Melnyk points out American producers will put half of their budgets towards promotion whereas local projects will be lucky to commit 10 per cent of a $300000 production to marketing.
And at $12 a ticket viewers will tend to watch what they’ve heard about meaning that Avatar and Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon will win out almost every time.
But the fact that we see local and national movies through mediums other than the multiplex may not be a negative trait says Charles Acland a professor of communication studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
In a chapter he wrote about the issue in A Passion for Identity: Canadian Studies for the 21st Century he contended that absent audiences are not even absent but view films with an “expo mentality” at special venues such as film festivals.
“People see way more Canadian movies on TV than in the cinema” Acland says. “We might think of that as some sign of a lack of development of our cinema culture but we should realize that it’s a part of how we understand it.”
Ramin Eshraghi-Yazdi the creative director at Nur Films and recent silver medallist in the Fast Forward Weekly Best of Calgary poll suggests that Calgarians are missing out on experiencing their city by not consistently going to the cinema. He cites Paris and New York as examples of cities whose citizens maintain a tradition of inspiring themselves with the creative works of other people living and working in the city.
“A lot of Calgarians don’t realize how cool their city is so they’re just not practised at it. They don’t know that it’s something they can add to their lifestyle.”
Change may be in the air though. Eshraghi-Yazdi points toward Sled Island Chad VanGaalen and Dragon Fli Empire as examples of how Calgarians have begun to get behind local musicians. He suggests that if a large enough demand is placed upon local filmmakers for world-class cinema then the vicious cycle of a lack of audience and funding may be broken.
But creating a larger demand requires audiences to ensure that films like Choch don’t suffer from sub-50 person turnouts which Prost’s film did in three out of four Calgary screenings.
“People really have to be aware of how significant their actions are if they care about their arts and culture and want to see it do well” Prost says. “It can’t be a sentiment. It has to be an action.”
