Most of the reviews on this site describe films that already exist, but from time to time we highlight stories on upcoming or proposed projects. One particularly exciting development in recent years is the potential for “crowd-sourced film production” enabled by sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Unfortunately, it can also be time-consuming to sift through all the projects listed to find those of real interest to viewers of urban film. Here’s one that’s worth a quick look, and possibly even a small donation.
With a Kickstarter pitch-page that reads like a cross between a prophetic bible tract and the out-takes from a William S. Burroughs rant, this film was bound to catch my attention. Requesting only an extremely modest (and symbolically spooky!) budget of $666, the filmmakers — known only as Tides of Flame, “a collective of radical film makers from the Pacific Northwest” — are proposing to create an “anti-commercial” “negative production,” using film to alter the way we think about cities, capital, production, networks, modernism, and reality itself.
The description of the project just seethes with ambition. In their own manifestoic words:
“In Fritz Lang’s classic, METROPOLIS (1927), the rulers of the
city and the workers of its sewers come to an understanding at the
end of the film. The workers will act as the body, the rulers will
act as the head, and the intellectual will act as the heart. Our
film will destroy this broken harmony forever.”
Continue reading “Kickstart This Film: Metropolis (2012), by Tides of Flame”