Low-Budget Dystopia
Where filmmaking used to be about vision and imagination, the low-budget paradigm has made it about cutting corners and cutting wages, says Brian Guckian.

In The Matrix, the real world has been destroyed and human beings are used as an energy source by artificial lifeforms, the horror of their true existence being hidden by means of an elaborate, computer-generated simulacrum. Similarly, has the ‘real world’ of Irish filmmaking been destroyed and replaced, almost unnoticed, by a low-budget mock-up of the real thing? This article will deal with the corrupting influence of low-budget filmmaking: its removal of filmmaking as a sustainable career for adults; its exploitative nature; its undermining of the art and craft of cinema as a whole; its lack of understanding of technology; and the shameful absence of leadership in tackling what is obstructing an otherwise viable, worthwhile industry in this country.

The ‘low-budget’ paradigm has an iron grip here today, aided and abetted by a compliant media and arts establishment. It has now reached the stage where no other form of filmmaking is tolerated. Low-budget filmmaking is continually advocated and supported in the discourse about indigenous film, not only in the pages of this magazine, but in the wider media. It is now institutionalised, and it represents a real threat to genuine Irish filmmaking.

It is de rigueur to lavish praise on ‘heroic’ directors and producers for ‘achieving miracles with limited resources’, for ‘surviving on a tight budget’, for ‘overcoming financial obstacles’, and so on. But the true nature and impact of low-budget filmmaking – not only on filmmakers, actors and craftspersons, but on cinema itself – has never been discussed. Such an analysis is now long overdue.

The first conceit of low-budget filmmaking is that it foregrounds the cost of production in its very phraseology. But why? Why should filmmaking be reduced to a soulless accounting exercise? Why talk about a film only in terms of its cost – or more accurately how little it has cost? How is this relevant to the task in hand? Do we look at an old master in a gallery and marvel at how little or how much it cost to paint the picture? Do we wonder at how much it costs to put on a concert? Do we speculate as to the outlay involved in creating a piece of sculpture? Of course not. We don’t engage in this philistine behaviour in these circumstances, so why do we so readily accept it in filmmaking?

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 115.