The Heck with Hollywood

A BITTERSWEET DOCUMENTARY ABOUT the difficult art of film making. We meet three independent film makers struggling to finish their projects in the backyard of the dream factory.
Comment:
DESPITE THE GENERAL BELIEF THAT it's a contemporary phenomenon, the film has since its birth been eagerly occupied with studying itself, self-reflectively. This has been expressed in a number of films about films, often with the philosophical pretext of making a statement about the film as medium: everything from Buster Keaton's mocking penetration of the illusionistic mechanisms in film in Sherlock Junior, 1924, to Billy Wilder's tragic description of decaying Hollywood glamour in Sunset Boulevard, 1950, or Brian de Palma's joke with the hegemony of the male gaze in Body Double, 1985.
Even documentaries have had their own meta-film tradition with philosophical pretenses, that is, films documenting films in different ways while making clear their point of view. One example is Dziga Vertov's legendary The Man with the Camera, 1929, a work about both it's own creation and about the filmic eye's superior ability of describing the ''complex dialectics of reality''.
Doug Block's documentary The Heck with Hollylpood is in the context a quite unique production. Partly because of its balanced, sometimes even distanced tendency to the film as medium, partly because it portrays the relatively unknown American film, consisting of independent productions, that's film made outside the frameworks of the great film companies, as it is slightly falsely called, Hollywood. The American independents have during the last decade had both some audience and artistic successes, for example Sam Raimi's horror film Evil Dead, the brothers Coen's Texas thriller Blood Simple or Spike Lees Godard pastiche She's Gotta Have It.
Block however, follows three lesser known film makers and their films - Ted Lichtenheld with Personal Foul, Jennifer fox with Beirut: The Last Movie and Gerry Cook with Only A Buck. We're confronted with the film makers' intentions, difficult to realize, their descriptions of a complicated production process and their problematic contacts with possible distributors. Universal Picture's buyer, Sam Kitt, exclaims after a screening of Personal Foul: ''If I see another film about coming of age in rural America, I'm going to puke. ''
Block's portrait shows the unbelievable enthusiasm characterising these young directors, apparently faced with unsurmountable obstacles. The main focus are the various economic strategies a film of one's own demands from its maker. This is also the greatest pedagogical value of Block's film - to show that film as artform to such a great extent is dependent on money and that it, because of that, needs an audience. This bitter, but basic truth, has so far escaped too many. _
ERIK HEDLING

Medverkande
Documentary: Producent
Doug Block: Manus
Doug Block: Foto
Doug Block: Musik
Dick Solberg: Talat språk
English