In these days of economic uncertainty, we've brought you many a blog post about how the sudden unavailability of cash infusions will impact the independent film industry.  It's difficult verging on impossible to get any kind of consensus (fewer film festivals will be bad news because it will mean fewer chances for a movie to break out/fewer film festivals will be good news because it will sift the wheat from the chaff; independent film is dead because there's not enough money to take a chance on anything but a sure thing/independent film will thrive because it will become truly independent again and not rely on studio money and mass marketing), and contrarianism is the rule of the day.

Want proof?  Take a look at this post from the excellent Poverty Jet Set blog, in which the question is posed:  how important is an audience to the success of an film, anyway?  Inspired by the lamentations of Project Pedal over their inability to draw millions of online viewers to clips from their upcoming documentary feature For Thousands of Miles, it seems like an absurd question:  and yet, and yet..."In this age of mass amateurization and instant worldwide publication," argues Mark Schoneveld, "it doesn't matter how many people watch your videos, but rather, the quality of the folks who watch."  After all, he notes, there are YouTube clips that draw in tens of millions of viewers -- but it's purely for the sake of ephemeral novelty, and few if any transform their YouTube fame into money, a career, or anything that will amount to more than a whatever-happened-to moment on VH1 sometime in 2018.

Of course, as elegantly as it's argued at Poverty Jet Set, this idea is nothing new.  The notion that one should adjust one's thinking to relinquish the desire that mass audiences will suddenly develop the taste and sophistication needed to make millionaires out of genuinely meaningful artists in favor of the desire that you'll simply impress enough discerning people that one of them will throw some patronage your way has been around at least since the time of Shakespeare, and there's hardly an artistic genre that hasn't had this debate even in the pre-internet era.  The only surprising thing is that it's still a lesson that needs to be learned instead of an axiom that needs only to be followed.

Related Posts:

Who Cries for the Film Nerds?

Indie Film:  Back from the Dead Already!