In Houston, you can sit in the pews of the 75-year-old former Church of Christ, and watch eclectic screenings of short experimental videos and films purchased at yard sales.
Last summer, a theater in an old Los Angeles bank showed three-minute video "confessions" about living in the city, all of which were shot by the confessors in the bank's vault.
And on Seattle's Lake Union, aboard the rusting and immobile Kalakala ferry, vintage 1935, you can see anything from stop-motion animation to a rarely seen montage of a Jimi Hendrix concert.
This is the underground world of the so-called microcinemas, where screenings of alternative works on video, 16-millimeter film, and Super-8 take place in coffeehouses, bars, basements, warehouses and just about any place in which you can fit a projector, a screen and some chairs. The work is usually short (sometimes only a few minutes) and often unpolished, the concessions are minimal, the tickets cheap. Operated on shoestring budgets and with a do-it-yourself spirit, the productions more often resemble a kind of latter-day cabaret than cinema--audience members drink beer, come and go as they please, and chat among themselves.
But in such a casual atmosphere, there's still a distinct enthusiasm for and attentiveness to even the rawest of work--a sign, perhaps, of a certain hunger, particularly in younger people, for films that aren't formulaic, that express something more personal, honest or quirky than what you could see at the local cineplex or even at an independent film festival like Sundance. Often embracing a grungy, anti-establishment ethos, the microcinema movement may not appeal to a broad swath of the filmgoing public, but it's flourishing in its own way.
Recently, for example, a screening was held at the El Pueblo Gallery on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles. Sponsored by a Los Angeles-based microcinema company called Access(o), the Aug. 18 event, titled "Finding Family Stories," a typically wide-ranging program of films that included shorts by students from Roosevelt High School in East L.A., a surreal Norwegian love story, and a half-hour drama about a troubled teenage girl by local screenwriter and director Jacob Estes.
Maija Beeton, a co-founder of Access(o), half-jokingly suggests that she wants to showcase "America's most poignant home videos," but gets more serious when she talks about finding what she calls "unique regional expressions." So many commercial films, she says, have been culturally watered down so they can play overseas without confusing audiences.
"A lot of the very fascinating aspects of our heterogeneous American culture are actually kind of taken out of those films," Beeton says, "and so the films represent really simplified portraits." Access(o)'s recent screening, in fact, demonstrated the group's efforts to bring together a rich mix of experiences, not only in the films, but with the support. The event was part of a melting-pot collaboration of the Japanese American National Museum, the Chinese American Museum, and the California African American Museum.
Those missing cultural pieces also interest James Encinas, a longtime theater, television and film actor, and co-founder of Access(o).
Encinas envisions establishing Access(o) franchises in various cities, with regional curators showing films that come from their communities and are important to the residents.
Encinas, who moved to the U.S. from Bolivia when he was 8, stresses the importance of hearing from people who are not served by mainstream films: "It's very important for me to make relationships with these communities, like East L.A. and Compton, that have a rich mix of cultures and that I'm sure are going to sprout really interesting work.... In the world we live in, we have gotten so removed from community and dialogue. If [microcinema] can bring that back, it's a very powerful tool. Not only is microcinema bringing audience members together from various walks of life, it's often putting together into a single hourlong show the work of filmmakers with widely different styles, intentions and experience."
Underground film isn't new, of course. One could argue that it's been happening for a century now, since the Lumiere brothers first showed their everyday scenes of Parisian life, and continuing in cramped uncommercial spaces in the decades that followed, with something of a heyday in the 1960s. But there are several factors that make today's microcinema movement different--and likely to stick around.
* Low cost and ease of use: Digital video cameras and tools for editing and post-production have not only become relatively inexpensive, they've also made the creation of films easier in terms of technical know-how. Projection equipment got a lot cheaper and simpler to use too.
