With any one film or any individual filmmaker, Glimsdal assesses the response in different territories to predict how the market may swing in the following years. When she’s not in back-to-back meetings at film festivals, selling off the TrustNordisk catalogue to distributors worldwide, she’s tracking which movies sell to what audiences in which places. She’s a Sales Manager at a film sales agency in Copenhagen called TrustNordisk, where she’s worked for the past seven years. I’m a big fan of another Norwegian, Silje Glimsdal, who analyzes market trends professionally. Catering to a guideline or standard of quality is not a winning strategy, but in the case of my filmmaker friend, divorcing yourself entirely from what’s new and trending to avoid creative corruption, is an extreme reaction that’s probably equally destructive. “If you know how to write a novel then it’s not a novel, it’s something else,” Knausgaard says. The danger, I guess, is turning into market trend monsters or flooding Sundance with submissions that are groomed to be, perceivably, Sundance films. ” Instead, My Struggle is celebrated today as a revelation.įilmmakers are nowadays advised to “know your audience,” to think about marketability and distribution strategies as early as possible, to be familiar with festival trends, to scope out the best chances for the film’s survival. Having deviated from some prescribed literary trend, Knausgaard estimated his pages to be “worthless, that there’s no point writing. “And there was a certain way of thinking what quality is, and I still think that’s quality,” he says, “hardcore modernist writing.” But his six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle, defies that standard of quality, according to critics, writers, editors and millions of readers devouring the 3,600 pages “like crack,” as Zadie Smith puts it. “I was raised as a writer in the ’80s and ’90s,” says Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in an Intelligence Squared podcast. But the director’s resistance to new festival favorites is not a personal judgment on their quality, he insists, but a self-imposed caution against consuming what’s trendy. Also, a little sneaky, to excuse himself from typical film festival banter, dodging the obligatory ego-stroking or untimely bad-mouthing that everyone else endures. Sort of pretentious, I think, not to support the work of his peers. He doesn’t like to watch many contemporary films, he explains, because he’d rather be influenced only by the classic greats. I’m talking to a young director at a film festival who hasn’t seen any movies in the festival’s program, except several in the retrospective slate.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |