Well, this is a complex question and I must say that I disagree wholeheartedly.
So I live in Poland and I’ve studied film production. We were thoroughly walked through how films are financed by our national film institute and from what I understand our system was modeled after everybody else in the EU, so it’s a good example. And other types of art are financed similarly albeit with differences.
The way it works is that the film institute is financed each year with a legally mandatory payment made by media companies. I’m talking cable tv channels and the like. However as of late also VOD platforms such as Netflix must chip in (this is not taxpayer money!!!). This ball of money is then split and directed towards strengthening film culture - independent cinemas, festivals, film productions.
Filmmaker-producers then petition for chunks of this money with applications in which they must demonstrate that they have found funding from other sources (usually half), as well as acquiring preliminary interest from distributors. The institute runs this process by employing veteran filmmakers, artists, as well as academia and curators - people who have a proven track record. These committees decide, in a transparent process of deliberation, which productions from the ones submitted, they believe, are the most promising artistically and are most feasible.
This creates an ecosystem in which artists and producers are incentivized to focus on impressing those who know something about art and on ideas which have real potential in winning festival awards, not just box-office results. It’s bureaucratic, yes, but it works.
The flip side is that when individuals are the only ones to decide what culture they value, only the most idiotic super-productions from abroad will win. And money spent on those will be literally siphoned off to California - this is the real reason why Hollywood became so strong after WWII - total domination of foreign film markets. Actually, for a period of time this allowed the U.S. to culturally colonize large parts of the world, and continues today with SV.
As you would imagine in a longer term this slowly strangles the local film environment. If everyone just wants to see Star Wars, producers back out of financing riskier local projects and cinema owners turn risk down for fear of upsetting Mickey.
Now, I agree with this idea of giving people a culture allowance - culture should absolutely not be only decided by crusty veterans and “experts”. And 19 year olds often might not normally have the money to vote at the box office. Being a cinema-goer is an identity, a habit, something that has to be fostered and encouraged to exist early on. And it positively affects people’s mental well-being. These kinds of incentives are great to hear about. But also France already has an incredibly strong ecosystem for financing art and a resilient culture of embracing domestic creators.
When I compare all this to the barren “free-market” corporate wasteland in the US I’m just saddened. An average family has to pay through the nose for an extremely limited selection, to then be bombarded with product advertising. It’s just monopoly power at it’s worst and it’s culturally debilitating.
And when you visit a European Fest, especially one of the big five it just blows your mind that in fact, literally thousands of amazing films are made, but they’re simply locked out of mainstream distribution.
The thing about art is that often you might not even know you will like it before being exposed to it. Customer doesn’t always know what’s best, and blindly following audience desires creates a shallow culture.
> These committees decide, in a transparent process of deliberation, which productions from the ones submitted, they believe, are the most promising artistically and are most feasible.
Having built websites and various products under the direction of business committees, I don't trust a committee to simply choose a tasteful color and style for a "submit" button on a contact form, let alone choosing between between different film ideas. It's probably even worse if the committee is made up of "industry experts" and "academia".
> And when you visit a European Fest, especially one of the big five it just blows your mind that in fact, literally thousands of amazing films are made, but they’re simply locked out of mainstream distribution.
To me this is a really great and key point. The culture exists.
There's probably hundreds or thousands of unknown good films released every year in just about every country. You don't need official committees of academia or industry experts to decide which film production should be prioritized. Dedicated artists find a way to produce what they want to.
The bigger issue is distribution. There's Netflix, Hulu, and a few other places where people generally watch movies. These corporations are essentially deciding what a vast majority of the culture most people will get exposed to.
Is there a better way for people to simply find out what culture they're missing out on?
Every single one of these fantastic European films at festivals does go through this process with the experts and relies on institutional funding at some point. This fantasy about dedicated artists finding a way at great sacrifice is simply naive and in my humble opinion typically American in it’s “pull-up by your own bootstraps” way.
I’m sure your experiences with a committee in your job were awful, but in general it all depends who is on it, how honest they are and whether they can be trusted when it comes to merit. Companies that build products aren’t a good parallel to institutions which are built to protect culture.
So, the film institute I described above runs a process in which the committees are split up into sub-committees. And the producer petitioning for financing gets to choose which particular set of people they want to be evaluated by. So if you’re making a documentary you might want to direct your proposal towards a committee of documentary filmmakers you know and respect. It’s designed to prevent this kind of “decision by committee” effect we know so well.
And then there come additional layers of complexity. Most of the time producers first apply for “development” funding, usually small sums directed towards fleshing an idea out, paying a screenwriter, paying for scouting trips, pre-roll footage. At the point at which you’re applying for the big bucks, you’ve already developed the concept well enough that it has some appeal. This is usually necessary to convince an investor to risk actual money to begin with.
And then even then there is even more complexity layered in because often incentives are designed to encourage international co-production efforts. We would never have Yorgos Lanthimos or the Romanian New Wave if the rules for these institutions did not allow producers from Greece and Romania to take advantage of the European Film Fund.
It’s all part of the process because you can’t just hand money out to people who don’t know what they’re doing. Art and culture have to be verified like anything else that we want to exhibit quality.
There are many parallels to start-ups and start-up culture to be found here. You might say: ”nobody should tell me how my start-up idea should be because I have this vision.” But if you want money from an accelerator, you’re going to have to encounter some sort of evaluation process. And usually a big part of that will be some experienced committee or board asking you to thoroughly explain it and verifying that you can in fact pull it off. Here in Europe we often trust the institutions and experts to do this part.
I dunno, distribution regulation is definitely key, you can still find just about everything that is made somewhere online. But nothing about the modern internet makes it easy to find out, and I suspect that this is by design.
So I live in Poland and I’ve studied film production. We were thoroughly walked through how films are financed by our national film institute and from what I understand our system was modeled after everybody else in the EU, so it’s a good example. And other types of art are financed similarly albeit with differences.
The way it works is that the film institute is financed each year with a legally mandatory payment made by media companies. I’m talking cable tv channels and the like. However as of late also VOD platforms such as Netflix must chip in (this is not taxpayer money!!!). This ball of money is then split and directed towards strengthening film culture - independent cinemas, festivals, film productions.
Filmmaker-producers then petition for chunks of this money with applications in which they must demonstrate that they have found funding from other sources (usually half), as well as acquiring preliminary interest from distributors. The institute runs this process by employing veteran filmmakers, artists, as well as academia and curators - people who have a proven track record. These committees decide, in a transparent process of deliberation, which productions from the ones submitted, they believe, are the most promising artistically and are most feasible.
This creates an ecosystem in which artists and producers are incentivized to focus on impressing those who know something about art and on ideas which have real potential in winning festival awards, not just box-office results. It’s bureaucratic, yes, but it works.
The flip side is that when individuals are the only ones to decide what culture they value, only the most idiotic super-productions from abroad will win. And money spent on those will be literally siphoned off to California - this is the real reason why Hollywood became so strong after WWII - total domination of foreign film markets. Actually, for a period of time this allowed the U.S. to culturally colonize large parts of the world, and continues today with SV.
As you would imagine in a longer term this slowly strangles the local film environment. If everyone just wants to see Star Wars, producers back out of financing riskier local projects and cinema owners turn risk down for fear of upsetting Mickey.
Now, I agree with this idea of giving people a culture allowance - culture should absolutely not be only decided by crusty veterans and “experts”. And 19 year olds often might not normally have the money to vote at the box office. Being a cinema-goer is an identity, a habit, something that has to be fostered and encouraged to exist early on. And it positively affects people’s mental well-being. These kinds of incentives are great to hear about. But also France already has an incredibly strong ecosystem for financing art and a resilient culture of embracing domestic creators.
When I compare all this to the barren “free-market” corporate wasteland in the US I’m just saddened. An average family has to pay through the nose for an extremely limited selection, to then be bombarded with product advertising. It’s just monopoly power at it’s worst and it’s culturally debilitating.
And when you visit a European Fest, especially one of the big five it just blows your mind that in fact, literally thousands of amazing films are made, but they’re simply locked out of mainstream distribution.
The thing about art is that often you might not even know you will like it before being exposed to it. Customer doesn’t always know what’s best, and blindly following audience desires creates a shallow culture.