The Home Movie Aesthetic
And why I espouse it with full and open heart...
When cinema looks like a home movie, it is often derisively dismissed for looking like one. I wear the aesthetic with pride. I follow the muse, but, so far, they haven’t strayed me from a path of consumer grade video equipment, blasted out colors, glitchy artifacting, janky editing, palsied camerawork, threadbare sets, phony props, community theater acting, messy mis en scene, and autodidactic direction. Why is that? Why do I shoot myself in the foot, drastically limiting a potential audience by using such grating methods?
Firstly, I don’t care. I do not subsist on the income I make from my movies. That means I can do anything I want as I am not beholden to a fan base for my living. I don’t need one and frankly I don’t really want one. Entertainment is important but there are enough filmmakers out there entertaining a wide audience. I’d rather shock, confuse, befuddle, offend, challenge, cast spells, create psychic reverberations cracking through the pervasive veil of hypocrisy and tomfoolery of civilization. The end game is confronting the buy in. For most, that is not a pretty thing. It is not entertaining. For me, it is the mission.
Movies, sadly, are mostly an opiate. Producers cast the widest net possible for maximum profit, thereby neutering any potential for thought, provocation, education, or self realization. Like everything in this world, it’s about money. I wholeheartedly espouse the home movie aesthetic as rejection of the conventions of the cinema of entertainment. This work has nothing to do with that world, nor its intentions.
yes!! "confronting the buy in" is where it ALL happens. love ya, Bob.