How Not to Get Into a Film Festival
I often get asked why I shot most of my early films in black and white. It's a fairly straightforward question, but for some reason, whenever it comes up during a Q&A, I get that deer-in-the-headlights look. I fumble for an answer. In the moment, my answers tend to lean toward the practical. I simply say, "I like black and white," like an idiot. Or that it's less forgiving than color, or at least I've always thought so. Back when I shot on film, shooting in color meant worrying about tungsten light, color temperature, and all sorts of other technical considerations. Or something like that. It seemed to kill the immediacy, the spontaneity. With black and white, I could shoot on the go, sometimes in less-than-ideal lighting conditions, and still come away with something interesting.
Or I explain that the first films I encountered as a film student were largely silent films, early cinema, Soviet cinema, and Italian Neorealism, followed later by Third Cinema. Many of those films were photographed in black and white, and they certainly influenced how I approached filmmaking. All of that is true. But none of it really explains why I initially chose to shoot in black and white. The actual explanation may not necessarily make me look particularly good. It began as a somewhat juvenile, reactionary gesture that gradually developed into something resembling an actual political position. Or at least that's how I like to think of it now.
It was my first film production class at Long Beach State, sometime around 1996. I was excited about it. I arrived early, found a seat, and watched as the instructor wrote a list on the blackboard. When he stepped away to brush the chalk dust from his hands onto his pleated trousers, I could finally read what he'd written.
Ten Things You Should Do If You Want Your Film Accepted Into a Film Festival.
Or something along those lines.
Number one on the list: Don't shoot in black and white!!!
Naturally, I decided to shoot everything in black and white that very day. That was my personality back then. To be perfectly honest, it probably still is. I can be a little reactionary at times. Perhaps most of the time. But I remember being genuinely annoyed by that list. Here I was, excited to learn about filmmaking, and one of the first things I encountered was a set of instructions about how to make something acceptable to a film festival. It wasn't about art. It wasn't about cinema. At least that wasn't how I understood it at the time. It was about capital. About positioning yourself and your work as a product. About making something that could be accepted, circulated, and potentially sold.
What the instructor was essentially telling us, or at least what I understood him to be saying, was that if we shot our films in black and white, they would be less commercially viable. And I remember thinking, who gets to decide that? The answer seemed fairly obvious to me. People who wanted to make money. At the time, I also associated black-and-white filmmaking with limited financial resources. As I understood it, shooting in color was more expensive. If you were shooting in black and white, perhaps it was because you couldn't afford to shoot in color. You were working with what you had.
And apparently, according to this list, that meant your film might not even be considered. You could make something worthwhile, something meaningful, but because it didn't meet certain commercial expectations, it might remain invisible.
That bothered me.
It led me to think about the economics of filmmaking, which inevitably led me to the politics of filmmaking. Who gets to decide what constitutes a legitimate film? Who gets to make films in the first place? And perhaps more importantly, who gets to decide whose lives and experiences are worthy of representation?
None of this particularly aligned with my politics.
I should say that I still remember the instructor's name, and with the benefit of hindsight, I understand what he was trying to teach us. I would eventually come to appreciate him and much of what I learned in that class. In fact, many of the practical lessons about film production would prove invaluable when I made my thesis film and other projects in the years that followed. He was teaching us how the industry worked. I simply wasn't particularly interested in becoming part of that industry.
This was the mid-to-late 1990s, when film festivals occupied a somewhat different place in the imagination of aspiring filmmakers. There was this prevailing belief that getting into the right festival, particularly one of the major ones, might somehow change your life. Hollywood would come calling. You could become the next Robert Rodriguez or the people behind Swingers. There was an entire mythology surrounding independent filmmaking, one in which artistic success and commercial recognition seemed almost interchangeable. I wasn't particularly interested in that world. Or perhaps, more accurately, I didn't want to make films according to its expectations.
Of course, there was nothing inherently political about black-and-white photography. Hollywood had produced countless black-and-white films, and some of the most politically significant films ever made were photographed in color. Black and white had occupied contradictory positions throughout the history of cinema and photography. It had been the language of Hollywood glamour, commercial photography, institutional authority, documentary evidence, and radical filmmaking. But that wasn't really the point. For me, in 1996, black and white came to represent something else. It was for the working class. For the marginalized. For the disenfranchised.
And that was the side I wanted to be on.
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I didn't come into filmmaking with the usual cinematic influences. Those came later. My earliest influences were largely literary and academic. Mike Davis, Richard Rodriguez, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. But I also had some visual influences. The year before that production class, I stumbled upon The Americans by Robert Frank at the Long Beach State library.
I would often skip class back then and spend my time reading whatever interested me or wandering through the library, hoping to stumble upon something worth reading or looking at. I assume I was somewhere in the photography section when I came across Frank's book. I remember sitting on the cold floor, flipping through its pages. Quickly at first. Then I remember moving toward one of the comfortable chairs and taking another look. Eventually, I checked it out and took it home with me.
To say it left an indelible mark on me doesn't quite do it justice. Through Frank, I would later discover another great American photographer, Walker Evans, who had been an important influence on Frank himself.
But, as usual, I digress.
What struck me about Frank's photographs was their apparent disregard for conventional photographic beauty. The unconventional framing, the grain, the blur, the seemingly imperfect compositions. They challenged prevailing expectations of what a successful photograph was supposed to look like. And, in all honesty, they would become perhaps the single greatest influence on my own visual style. Or lack of visual style. But it wasn't simply how Frank photographed his subjects. It was also who he chose to photograph.
In Trolley, New Orleans, he makes visible the racial and social hierarchies of American life without needing an explanatory caption.
In Bar, Las Vegas, Nevada, a man stands near a jukebox, illuminated by its light, while another source of light enters from outside. It's an ordinary moment, but Frank transforms it into something mysterious and strangely beautiful.
In Elevator, Miami Beach, a young elevator operator stands in the foreground, seemingly bored or lost in thought, while the older, more affluent hotel guests around her become blurred figures entering and leaving the frame.
And in Young Puerto Ricans, Lower East Side, New York City, 1955, three Puerto Rican drag queens smile and pose on a Manhattan sidewalk. People who might otherwise have remained invisible become the subjects of Frank's attention. For a young artist who wasn't entirely sure what he was doing, or even what he wanted to do, these photographs were quite profound. I had ideas, certainly. But I hadn't yet figured out how to translate them into images. Frank seemed to be showing me that the world I knew, the people I encountered, the ordinary places I passed through every day, could be worthy subjects in themselves. His photographs weren't necessarily political declarations, but they were deeply political in what they revealed about American life.
The Americans was, in many ways, an examination of what America looked like and whose America was being represented. And perhaps that was what interested me most. Frank's photographs suggested that one could look at the world differently, without necessarily adhering to conventional ideas of beauty, composition, or technical perfection. I would eventually discover other photographers whose work reinforced these ideas, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide. Their photographs connected me to another tradition of representing ordinary people, social environments, and experiences that commercial imagery often overlooked.
Looking back, I realize that Frank had already begun shaping my understanding of photography before I ever encountered that list in my production class. Perhaps the instructor's advice simply gave me something to push against. What began as an attraction to black and white as a visual language gradually became something else. A way of looking at the world. Frank planted that first seed in me. The realization that you didn't have to travel somewhere extraordinary, invent an elaborate story, or possess expensive equipment to make meaningful images.
You could simply photograph the world around you.
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And it wasn't just about black and white. I encountered similar attitudes toward cameras, lenses, and equipment. People would tell you that you needed a particular camera, a particular lens, a particular kind of production value if you wanted to be taken seriously. Usually, it was the expensive one. You needed this. You needed that. You couldn't do this. You shouldn't do that. I rejected much of it. Partly because I couldn't afford those things. Partly because I didn't believe that having access to expensive equipment made someone a better filmmaker. And partly because I resented the idea that someone else could establish the conditions under which I was allowed to make art.
A relatively inexpensive camera, available light, imperfect exposure, grain, a small crew, or an unconventional narrative structure could all become part of a film's visual and expressive language. They didn't automatically make a film better, but neither did they make it less legitimate. My instructor was attempting to teach me how to succeed within an existing system. I was beginning to question why that system should determine what success looked like in the first place. He was teaching me how to make a film that could get into a festival. I wanted to make a film regardless of whether a festival wanted it or not.
Neither position necessarily invalidated the other. In fact, the irony is that I eventually used much of the production knowledge he taught me to make films that resisted some of the commercial expectations he was explaining. I didn't necessarily choose black and white because I had already developed some sophisticated theory of working-class representation. I chose it, at least in part, because someone told me not to. Only afterward did I begin constructing an intellectual, aesthetic, and political framework around that decision. Or perhaps I was already moving in that direction and simply needed someone to tell me I couldn't.
Either way, what began as an act of youthful defiance eventually became a rejection of the assumption that the market should determine artistic legitimacy. I suppose, ultimately, I was rejecting the idea that filmmaking required permission, whether that permission came from an institution, a festival programmer, or the price of a particular piece of equipment.
Beyond the influences, the education, and the references, there remains the individual artist making the choices. And so I'm jotting this down now, hoping that the next time someone asks me why I shot my films in black and white, I'll actually remember why. And so I'm jotting this down now, hoping that the next time someone asks me why I shot my films in black and white, I'll actually remember why.
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Addendum
There's something else worth mentioning about Robert Frank's The Americans.
When the book was first published in France in 1958, and subsequently in the United States in 1959, it was met with considerable resistance. Frank had struggled to find an American publisher, and when the book finally appeared, some critics were openly hostile toward both its subject matter and its unconventional photographic style. The photographs were criticized for their grain, blur, imperfect exposures, and disregard for traditional composition. Popular Photography was particularly unforgiving, dismissing the work for what it considered technical sloppiness. Others objected to Frank's unflattering portrait of American life, accusing him of being anti-American.
Today, The Americans is widely regarded as one of the most influential photography books of the twentieth century. I find that history particularly interesting when I think back to my first film production class. Here was a photographer whose work had been dismissed, at least in part, because it failed to conform to prevailing expectations of what a photograph should look like. And nearly forty years later, I was sitting in a classroom being told that shooting in black and white might make my films commercially undesirable.
Of course, the circumstances were different, and I'm certainly not comparing my work to Frank's. But the underlying question seemed remarkably similar. Who gets to establish the standards by which an image is judged? And what happens to the work, and the people represented in it, when those standards are determined by commercial expectations? I suppose there's a certain irony in all this. The book that helped teach me to question those expectations had once been dismissed for refusing to satisfy them. And by the time I discovered it, it was sitting on a shelf in a university library, waiting for someone like me to stumble upon it.