User:Tertulius/sandbox/Guerrilla filmmaking

Guerrilla filmmaking refers to low or no budget independent films made with small or even skeleton crews, light production equipments and, in most cases, with props from whatever is available. Scenes are often quickly shot in private or public places with no previous warning or permission. Guerrilla filmmaking is usually practiced by independent filmmakers who can't afford comfortable budgets or build expensive sets. "Mainstream" film studios tend to avoid guerrilla filmmaking tactics underestimating the importance or interest of this genre or, if they feel threatened or injured by any reason, making clear that transgressors take the risk of being punished by law since such practices may affect their reputation with negative PR exposure.

"Hollywood cinema" may be seen as a wide blend of film genres resulting, among others, from, «(…) those popular narrative formulas like the Western, musical and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts (…)» , so constituting a film genre itself. On a different way, "guerrilla cinema" may be defined non only as a filmmaking technique but also as the result of aesthetic formulas and ethic principles that generate much less expensive films with no less historical importance or artistic qualities, also being a genre itself in opposition to mainstream cinema.

"Guerrilla filmmaking is driven by passion with whatever means at hand" (Yukon Film Commission, Manager Mark Hill).

Guerrilla films
May be the first guerrilla film ever made is Children of Hiroshima (1952), a docufiction by Japanese director Kaneto Shindo.

Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), 1955, a guerrilla film by Indian director Satyajit Ray is the first from The Apu Trilogy, followed by Aparajito (The Unvanquished), 1956, and Apur Sansar, (The World of Apu), (1959), all produced on very low budgets. Basically made with Ray’s savings, most featuring local amateur actors, Song of the Little Road is one of the films which pioneered the Parallel Cinema movement that opposed to American and Indian mainstreams. It was awarded the Best Human Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 and achieved great success in the US, 1958, running for eight months at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse in New York. Basil Wright considered it "a new and incontrovertible work of art". Making no commercial films, Satyajit Ray is seen by many as one of the greatest world film directors. Akira Kurosawa said about him: «Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.» He holds the record for the most number of Golden Bear nominations with seven films. In 1992, the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll ranked Ray at No. 7 in its list of "Top 10 Directors".

On the Bowery is a 1956 low budget docufiction film by Lionel Rogosin, the first American director to win the Best Documentary award at the Venice Film Festival. On The Bowery was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film was shot with a bulky 35mm camera on a tripod just a few years before hand held 16mm cameras were adapted to lightweight sound-recording equipments. Martin Scorcese referred to the film in these terms: «A milestone in American cinema. On The Bowery is very special to me. Rogosin’s film is so true to my memories of that place and of that time…It’s a rare achievement». On The Bowery is characterized by an «observational style that would come to be known as cinéma vérité (term coined by Jean Rouch) (…). At the same time Rogosin’s film is grounded in the techniques and rhetoric of classic Hollywood.»

Une simple histoire (A Simple Story), 1958, is the first film by French director Marcel Hanoun, winner of Eurovision First Price in Cannes, 1959. This film fascinates Jean-Luc Godard, who decides to support him financially in future. Contemporary to the Nouvelle Vague, Hanoun will make many other experimental films encompassing advanced research in shooting and editing, such as desynchronizing image and sound and so creating films with a strong poetic charge, most of them being metafilms. Soon he will be marginalized both by industry and critics and declared as a cursed filmmaker. He is considered by Jonas Mekas as the greatest French filmmaker after Robert Bresson.

Moi, un noir, (Me, a Black, translated as I, a Negro) is a 1958 French ethnofiction directed by Jean Rouch and a seminal film in the field of Visual Anthropology. The film, shot with a minimal crew and a quite low budget, was received to much acclaim and is heralded as influential in launching the French New Wave movement. Jean-Luc Godard ranked Moi, un Noir as his fourth favorite film of all time and argued that the film had reached "unprecedented levels of truth captured on film" in a March 1959 edition of the magazine Arts.

French director François Truffaut is considered by some historians to have used guerrilla filmmaking techniques for the first time in film history when he shot The 400 Blows (1959). Truffaut is the founder of the author theory, at a time when, in several countries, several directors were opening new horizons to filmmaking. However, he was preceded by Rogosin, Ray, Amoun, Rouch, who, wishing to make art movies, were guided by ethical imperatives that led them to confront the power of Hollywood making art with little money. Children of Hiroshima and Naked Island (1960), both by Kaneto Shindo, are examples of this trend. Come Back, Africa, by Rogosin, «a rare specimens in film history of docufiction and political film in one», is contemporary to The 400 Blows. Cinema vérité, truth in film, cheap docufiction or narrative film low budget productions would be common practices from the early fifties on. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), directed by Melvin Van Peebles, self-financed, with an extra loan from Bill Cosby, shot over a period of twenty nine days, tells the story of a poor African American man on his flight from the white authority. Van Peebles performs himself all of the stunts he needs, including several explicit sex scenes and contracting gonorrhea. Feeling it is dangerous to make a film without the support of the union, he and a few crew members decide to work armed on location. Intending that the film be as good as those from major studios, he decides to put in practice a fast-paced montage and frequent jump-cuts, novel features for an American movie at the time. He composes the film music score himself. And so Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song brakes conventions, with its visual style and content. Released at first only in two theaters on April 23, 1971, controversial at various levels, the film would turn into a success grossing over $15,000,000 at the box office.

In the late fifties, when the Dziga Vertov Group is founded by Jean-Luc Godard in releasing La Chinoise, outstanding French directors start making political guerrilla films. One of the leaders of this movement is Chris Marker, together with film teachers from the IDHEC. Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam), 1967, is a collective film again the Vietnam War signed by Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, Jean Rouch, Ruy Guerra and René Vautier. Most of these groups will disappear in the seventies, but Chris Marker, keeping the spirit of those daring warriors, makes Le Fonds de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat), 1977, which tells about dramatic and revolutionary fights during the events of May 1968 and in Japan, Africa and Chile. Although perishable, these movements would inspire others in different parts of the world.

Independent director Robert Kramer   former student of philosophy and Eastern Europe at the Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania,  has always dedicated to political cinema. He is the founder and prime mover of the Newsreel movement Directed, written and photographed by Kramer, Route One USA, 1989, a "four and a quarter hour epic about nothing less than America today" is a landmark in Kramer's career like it is in American documentary film history. Others less relevant films like Milestones, 1975, but with no less importance, had been shot earlier. Milestones unveils America in the seventies. Then, in 1975, he leaves his country with a 16mm camera in hand and no money in his pocket to capture the dramatic effects of Henry Kissinger intervention in Portugal during the Carnation Revolution, that liberated the country from over forty years of fascism (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal), 1977. To help Kramer make this film, Portuguese peers such as Alberto Seixas Santos, Solveig Nordlund and Ricardo Costa, who had suffered in their lives and work from long years of repression, to help making clear intentionally blurred facts, mainly abroad, do all they can, giving Kramer scrap film stock, personal and technical support. Two years later, when his film Guns, premiered at the New York Film Festival, Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that «its director is one of the most exciting filmmakers we have and it's incredible that he can find financing only in France». Robert Kramer would stay there until his premature dead. Kramer makes more than one film in Portugal at the same time as German Thomas Harlan shoots Torre Bela, a touching striking documentary on a savage occupation of a rich landowner's abandoned house and farm by impoverished peasants. Thomas is the son of Veit Harlan, film director as well, a close alley of Joseph Goebbels. Robert and Thomas will soon work together on the film Wundkanal (1984). The process of this collaboration will be documented in Robert's Notre Nazi (1984). Both films will premiere at the Venice Film Festival, 1984, and at the Berlin International Film Festival, 1985, leading to renewed scandals. One day, once for all, Kramer wrote: «We want to make films that unnerve, that shake assumptions, that threaten, that do not soft-sell, but hopefully (an impossible ideal) explode like grenades in people's faces, or open minds up like a good can opener».

Kramer's decision to shoot in Portugal after making Milestones is caused by daily headlines that invade international press and by alarming broadcasts referring to Portugal in the course of the surprising “bloodless” Carnation Revolution (April 74 through November 76). Significantly, the situation here is similar to what happened during Salvador Allende's leadership in Chile three years before. ARD and CBS are the most attentive observers of the risks that the neoliberal emerging policy at that time would face in Cold War: Portugal, despite being a small country, was the stage where threatening events (fact or fiction) were played. It was mainly feared the contamination of such upheaval to Europe through weakened fascist Spain and the implantation of a Soviet bulwark in highly strategic NATO territories. Something quite different was feared in Portugal: with the unconditional liberation of the Portuguese colonies in Africa, specially Angola and Mozambique, a rich 'terrain vague' would be left free to the greed of the superpowers that ruled the world. Many Portuguese, mainly intellectuals and artists, feeling uneasy in such imbroglio, ingenuously dreaming of a fair outcome for their country problems, confused, raise their voices to avoid disaster. Many young filmmakers make all they can to denounce nonsense, to show that the supposed dark side of the moon is the brighter, to explain common people they must act instead of shrugging, waving their arms across the borders to be seen and eared abroad. Funds are now easily raised because democracy commands. A lot of political films are produced on low budgets. For a pair of years, Portugal will be the country with the largest production of guerrilla films in the world. In two years, in such little poor country, four guerrilla fictions and twelve documentary features are made, all denouncing unfair realities and vicious understandings. (For more detail, see “cinema militante” at the Portuguese Wikipedia)

Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It (1986) is a guerrilla film on a budget of $175,000 which made $7,137,502 at the US box office. This highly stylized film, Spike Lee's first feature, received much acclaim, a good reason for him to write a book entitled Spike Lee's Gotta Have It: Inside Guerrilla Filmmaking. Shot in twelve days in Brooklyn during the summer of 1985, the film would be a turning point for the neighborhood inhabited by a cosmopolitan community of successful African Americans, drawing national and international attention to a flood of emerging artists and musicians. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival (Award of the Youth for The Best Foreign Film) and won the New Generation Award (Los Angeles Film Critics Awards) in 1986.

New Queer Cinema (films by gay and lesbian independent filmmakers, chiefly in North America and England) is another trend of guerrilla filmmaking. US director Gregg Araki (Los Angeles), filmmaker listed in this category, shot his first two films, Three Bewildered People in the Night (1987) and The Long Weekend (O' Despair) (1989) using a spring-wound Bolex camera and scrap film stock, on a budget of $5,000 each. These films were the beginning of a regular career. Akari has been ranked as «One of the angriest, most unconventional, and relentlessly intriguing voices in independent cinema».

Robert Rodriguez, "the one-man film crew" who made his first feature (El Mariachi) in 1992, has soon begun directing films that reached considerable mainstream success. El Mariachi, an action film shot in in Spanish for around $7,000 with money partially raised by volunteering in medical research studies, won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992. Originally intended for the home-video market, it was distributed by Columbia Pictures. Rodriguez described his experiences with this film in his book Rebel Without a Crew. A friend and collaborator with the US independent director Quentin Tarantino, he decided to make DVD releases showing aspiring filmmakers how to make profitable movies using inexpensive tactics. Supporter of digital filmmaking, he has been introduced to the practice by director George Lucas, who personally invited him to use digital cameras at Lucas' headquarters.

Godless Darren Aronofsky (we cite his own words ), celebrated US filmmaker, had to make his God, and his God is narrative film. Moreover, assuming that «the way to the heart is through the body» (the actor's body), submits art to entertainment. He is certainly right with such assumption, which has been proven by modern neuroscience (mind and body are just one). Having grown up within a Jewish family, Aronofsky is given to biblical stories. Biblical stories inspire him to make surreal and disturbing films «well known for their often violent subject matter». Almost all generate serious controversy. Aronofsky does not bother with it at all. Serious controversy helps make good money: The Wrestler, Black Swan, Noah. Aronofsky's successful career is highlighted, among other significant awards, with a Gold Lion at the Venice Film Festival, 2008, for The Wrestler and, at the San Francisco Film Critics Circle Awards, 2010, for Black Swan (Best Director). In fact, success is an ancient deity who often knocks at Aronofsky's door. That happens for the first time when his first movie is released: Pi (1998). Pi makes on a relatively low budget of $60,000 and proves to be a financial success at the box office ($3.2 million gross in the U.S.) despite only a limited release to theaters. At first, Aronofsky raises money for the project by selling $100 shares in the film to family and friends. Then, he will be able to pay them all back with a $50 profit per-share when the film is sold to Artisan Entertainment. With Pi, Aronofsky is awarded as the Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival, 1998. π (Pi) is a mysterious letter that, ever since, has intrigued mathematicians and philosophers. Pi Is a psychological thriller whose obsessive protagonist, like in most of Aronofsky's films, pursuits ideals that lead him «to severely self-destructive behavior», believing on a certain day, during his intellectual ruminations, that Pi implies an equivalent to Torah, a string of numbers that form a code sent by God. God is severely questioned in Aronofsky's films. Aronofsky's film architecture is an elaborated and complex craft conditioned by strict rules. As he is an honest man, feels he must leave a legate of those unquestionable principles to beginners, and that's what he does.

Bookwars (2000), is a biopic documentary by young New York film student Jason Rosette. Out of film school, with no money in his pocket and no food on his table, he has no other choice than selling his books on the streets. Soon he realizes that he’d fit right in with people who set up tables covered with appealing literature on frantic Manhattan sidewalks. He understands that most of them are smart and cultivated guys attempting to make a living. That would be a nice theme to make a movie. He is lucky and finds the right producer, Camerado, an incipient company that will soon make significant progress thanks to Rosette's film success. A variety of inexpensive borrowed small format cameras are used for production. No permits are secured (or sought) for an ultra-low-budget documentary, funded through the sale of used books at a book stand during shooting and thanks to a small grant from the Playboy Foundation. The film goes on to win the best documentary award at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival and is nominated for a IFP Gotham Award. Since 2005, after leaving the US, Rosette will be living and working in Southeast Asia, where he regularly directs and produces independent historical, social and political films.

Rejecting mainstream cinema, searching for alternative and more dignifying forms of expression in terms of cinematic truth, art and human condition, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami releases Ten, a 2002 micro budget «minimal» docufiction feature. He uses two mini DV cameras attached to the dashboard of a car to register in ten scenes and seven days the portraits of a taxi driver woman (Mania Akbari), a jilted bride, and of various passengers like her young son and sister, a hitchhiking prostitute, along the streets of Teheran. This film, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival that same year, will be acclaimed by many critics and large audiences around the world.

Mists (Brumas) directed and produced by Portuguese filmmaker Ricardo Costa – shot August/September 2001, premiered at 60th Venice Film Festival, 2003, and released in New York at the Quad Cinema in 2011 –, is a radical example of this practice. Mists is the first film from a sequel autobiographic trilogy (Faraways), followed by Drifts (2014). Both may be classified as no budget films, such as almost all Ricardo Costa’s films, filmed with insignificant budgets and minimal crews. Before Faraways trilogy, he shot a documentary tetralogy (1979/early eighties) and two other docufictions: Changing Tides (1976) and Bread and Wine (1981). Curiously, Costa's docufictions resemble in significant respects those by Kiarostami.

Sweet looking US actor Edward Burns is also a film writer and director. Giving reason to disadvantaged authors, like those who survive facing Disney, he makes Looking For Kitty (2004),   writing, directing, and starring a low budget comedy drama «shot with a hand held $3,000 digital Panasonic AG-DVX100 camera with a Mini35 adapter». His entire budget is $200,000. The film is shot in New York City with a tiny crew and without standard permits, like guerrilla filmmakers do. Feeling happy, Burns discusses this unusual filmmaking process in the director's commentary on the Looking For Kitty DVD release.

US documentary independent director and producer Robert Greenwald initiates his intense activist career as guerrilla filmmaker in 2004 with the feature-length films Uncovered: The War on Iraq and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism Other films like Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, 2006,  Rethink Afghanistan, 2009, Unmanned: America's Drone Wars, 2013, will illustrate the prominent role he plays denouncing questionable actions and dubious affairs of the US policies in the world, particularly those concerning oil interests in the Middle East. The rightness of his approaches and courage is widely recognized by relevant media, even by those that do not align with left-wing tendencies, recognizing «they inspire hundreds of thousands of people to take action and forced pressing issues into the mainstream media».

Paranormal Activity (2007) first film directed by Israeli American Oren Peli, someone «afraid of ghosts his whole life», was filmed in his own house on a budget of just $15,000, most of which he said was spent on "a camera and new furniture". It went on to make a revenue of $153,469,744. The commercial success of this first film caused the production of a series, together with Paramount and DreamWorks, of five prequel films under the same title,  directed by Pell and others. Based on return on investment, the series made strong profits. This show how noble classic drama ingredients may be used in entertainment movies just to make money.

Silence, ça tue ! (Silence, We Are Shooting), Belgium, 2008, is a mockumentary directed and starring Chris Lamot aka Ljo Menzow. «In Brussels, Chris Lamot is fed up with trying to get a film made via the Belgian process of film funding and organizes a film crew to shoot a ‘live’ movie. He obtains a black market handgun. He and his crew go to meet a producer but, when the producer admits he lost the script that Chris sent him, Chris pulls the gun. Fleeing, the producer falls down the stairwell and kills himself. As they make plans to dispose of the body, Chris eliminates members of the film crew and others who get in his way». LaMont, independent writer, director, producer and film teacher, among other schools, at Arizona State University, co-founder of the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival, a peaceful citizen, would no longer take the risk of being accused of murder making things like this.

Onan, 2009, is a Tamil/English language feature film, directed by Shyam Madhavan Sarada. The film, produced for a budget of less than $7,000 by Wannabe Studios, who manage an online network for independent filmmakers, is considered to be "India's first full-length guerrilla feature film" (Pather Panchali forgotten), thanks to the collaboration among independent filmmakers and film lovers from seven countries. It premiered at the Global Cinema Festival on October 11, 2009, as part of the 'Vista India' section.

Escape From Tomorrow, 2013, made for a little under a million dollars by writer-director Randy Moore attracted a lot of attention at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Largely filmed at Walt Disney World and Disneyland without permits, its fantasy-horror story of a man having an apparent breakdown on the last day of a family vacation, it depicts the park in a negative fashion. It was unclear whether the film would receive a wider release after the festival due to the likely legal challenges from Disney. It is now clear the film was simultaneous set for limited release to theaters and wide iTunes on-demand, which happened on October 11, 2013. This shows how classic ingredients may be used for other purposes than pure mass entertainment.

Clark: A gonzomentary, 2013, by US director Daniel D.W., is a gonzo journalism-styled mockumentary about an amateur filmmaker documenting a Philadelphian eccentric artist and his creative process. The guerrilla-style techniques implemented were used as part of the story itself, to represent the amateur production within the story. It was shot with a budget of less than $3,000 with a Canon XL2 and a Panasonic AG-DVX100. The director opted out of using a steadicam purposefully to achieve more shakiness. It was awarded Outstanding Lead Actor (comedy or mockumentary) by the 2013 LA Web Series Festival and deemed "a gonzomentary truly realized" by Mark Bell of FilmThreat

Technology
Instead of film cameras, many filmmakers have been using digital shooting technologies and home computer editing systems such as Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer and Premiere, useful and positive factors to guerrilla filmmaking. Digital is a cheap and easy form of making low budgets films. Many guerrilla filmmakers are now using professional quality digital cheap equipment allowing them to set up efficient quick shots and good sound recordings.