At the opening press conference for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, a reporter asked Spike Lee to explain what having two of his films in the festival (Passing Strange, Kobe Doin' Work) meant for him. He responded by simply saying, "Film needs a venue." On the surface, that seems like an obvious thing to say, but the reality is that many films, old and new, still sit on the shelf. Moving images need to be seen in a place, running through a projector and projected on a screen, on a television with a DVD or digital service, or, as I’ll discuss, somewhere online. I could almost see the noted director thinking a moment after he uttered these remarks, perhaps realizing the audience members would like more on the topic. He then expanded on the idea, explaining that young people, especially graduates of film schools, desperately need a venue in order to share their work. It's the nature of the art.

Venues. As I looked around the room at the other members of the press, watched and listened to the speakers (including Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, Uma Thurman, Rich Lehrfeld from sponsor American Express, festival organizers and participating filmmakers), I thought about this particular venue. A beautiful auditorium with comfortable red seats on nicely raked semi-circular rows, the room still fits the classic model of a Greek theater. There was no deus ex machina, but instead, a nice projection system for screening films. I'm sure the invention of the motion picture would have shocked most citizens of ancient Athens. This specific auditorium, the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, is within the modernist complex of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a nice setting, I thought, for Spike’s remarks. Film students, the kind he was talking about, would be lucky to have their work screened here.

The other venues of the Tribeca Film Festival encompass the varieties within the history of film reception - from the Ziegfeld Theatre, a movie palace screening Woody Allen's Whatever Works on opening night, to the SVA Theater, another nicely-outfitted venue within an educational institution, to the AMC Village VII, a multiplex. Also, the Tribeca Drive-in, actually a sit-down affair on the plaza of the World Financial Center, speaks to the popularity of outdoor venues of a mobile culture in the post-war era.

So, as you're reading this on a site that offers video-on-demand, what kind of venue is this? First, I would like to profess my conviction that the online world, the place of the computer screen where we increasingly watch moving images, is a venue, just not a traditional one. As I have been screening many of the Reframe films through video on demand within this website, I've come to appreciate and enjoy the experience. Where sitting in the auditorium and watching a film in company of others brings the pleasure of the shared experience, watching a film online on a much smaller screen (I have a Mac Book), especially with headphones that cut out ambient sound, offers an intimacy and pleasure that has surprised me. I know people sometimes crowd around a computer and watch a VOD or DVD, and that’s fun, too, but I've grown to like my one-on-one experience with the artists I’ve been discovering through Reframe. While struggling to describe the experience, I feel a heightened personal reaction to what I see online, and perhaps I’m even a less self-conscious in this venue about holding my emotions in check.   

During the festival, I look forward to discovering new voices in filmmaking, but I'll also spend time introducing you to comparable, related works on this site. I would also like to explore further how we experience and understand films through all sorts of screens, big and small.

 

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