"Much of direction is production: the material conditions under which a movie is made plays a major role in the creative process. Movie lovers tend to think of producers as dictators of formulas, oppressors of originality, the enemies of art, but that just reflects the unfortunate history of studio filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. In fact, producing a movie can be a kind of art in itself, a practical imagining of possibilities for filmmakers that they wouldn't themselves have come up with."
"The directors were given a handful of dictates. The films had to be about adolescents and had to be set some time from the nineteen-sixties to the eighties, with some political context. Each movie was to run an hour and to be shot on a low budget, on a tight schedule (about three weeks), and in the small-scale format of 16-mm. film."
Much of directing depends on production; material conditions of a film shape the creative outcome. Producing can enable directors by imposing constraints and offering imaginative solutions that expand artistic possibilities. Chantal Akerman's 1994 Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels was commissioned by Arte for an anthology with strict requirements: hour-long, 16‑mm, low budget, three-week schedule, adolescent subject between the 1960s and the 1980s, political context, pop music, and a party scene. The project’s constraints fostered Akerman’s formal freedom and creativity. The film’s reissue is blocked by its use of pop-music needle drops and associated licensing complications. MOMA presents a retrospective running September 11 to October 16.
Read at The New Yorker
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