Kontra-Agos

A Resistance Films Festival

Robinson's Galleria, IndieSine
Quezon City, The Philppines
December 5-11, 2007

A Few Good Words On Resistance Cinema

[...] there is an alternative to industry-made cinema that is more in touch with the practical and spiritual lives of individuals, whether these lies are documented by committed filmmakers or expressed in abstract or psychodramatic imagery.

[...] film going was more than a process of experiencing, over and over, the particular codes of commercial genre film, or worshiping the physical beauty or the dramatic ability of the stars; it was a means of getting in touch with the immense and fascinating variety in the way people live and with the myriad ways in which individuals express their inner struggles.

Amos Vogel

When viewers are faced with forms of film that cause them to wonder, "is this a movie?" they have the opportunity to recontextualize their previous film going experiences and expand their understanding of what film and film history is, has been, and can be. The inevitable conventionality of the popular cinema – "inevitable" because without established conventions, movies cannot be popular enough to return a profit on the financial investments necessary to produce them --- continually re-creates an audience with a set of predictable expectations and, therefore, with a considerable potential for surprise. If the achievement of the American film industry has been its ability to maintain its economic viability for nearly a century bycontinually reenergizing a narrow range of film going pleasure, the achievement of the critical cinema, which has been evolving at the margins of the popular cinema, has been the continual proliferation of critical film forms ---that is, forms of cinema capable of surprising viewers and catalyzing critique---by filmmakers with limited economic means. Indeed, this proliferation has been so extensive that even naming it has been an endless cause for debate: what I am calling "critical cinema" includes"avant-garde cinema," "revolutionary film," "poetic film," "film as art," "the New American Cinema," "film as subversive art," expanded cinema," "alternative cinema," "visionary film," structural film," "punk film," "trash film," "experimental film," "abstract film," "the new narrative," "materialist cinema," independent film," "third cinema," "transnational cinema," and "queer cinema."

Scott Macdonald, Introduction to A Critical Cinema