Using Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville as a launchpad for his ideas, Jake Horsley aims to discuss the conflict between “artistic” and “commercial” movie-making that he believes exists in the film industry today. He proposes that the term “independent,” when applied to filmmaking, be considered an artistic term relating to sensibility and vision and not simply a question of backing or funds.
Can an “independent” film also be a commercial success in Hollywood? Charting the history of independent cinema from early pioneers Jean-Luc Godard and Sam Peckinpah to modern masters such as David Lynch, this book provides a critical analysis of the state of today’s film industry.
Horsley was born and raised in the UK in the late 1960s. He began writing film criticism while still a teenager, travelled the world during his 20s and has since published three books and made a series of short digital movies (THE GOD GAME) as well as one feature (BEAUTY FOOL). He is currently based in Mexico.
Product Details
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd (November 1, 2005)
Jason (Jake) Horsley is a writer, scholar and misadventurer of recognized accomplishment and promise. His are hard-won achievements as he is continually pushing himself, both intellectually and psychologically into new and self-surpassing paradigms. He is an iconoclast as well as an influential writer and film analyst. In the gracious words of the late Pauline Kael, "Jake Horsley seems to arrive from out of nowhere, yet here he is--an almost fully-developed and only slightly stoned sensibility. This hothead fantasist offers the excitement of a wild, paranoid style. He lives in the movies, explodes them from the inside, and shares his fevered trance with us. But he doesn't lose his analytic good sense. He's not just a hothead, he's a hardhead, too."
If Horsley had a mission statement to describe the trajectory of his life, it would have to include the words "relentless" and "intense." At the moment he is preparing for the publication of his fifth book, The Secret Life of Movies: Schizophrenic and Shamanic Journeys in American Movies (McFarlane, 2009), pursuing a collaborative project with Winnipeg filmmaker Jim Sanders (Nosis), and serialising for podcast his epic novel about Sam Peckinpah, Shooting the Ghost, from his new home in British Columbia.
Would you willingly give up everything--your home, fortune, friends and family--just to test your mettle? Horsley did just that. When he was 24, cosseted, ambitious, heartbroken, and in poor health, he disposed of the fortune he had inherited at 17 and took to the streets of Tangiers, Morocco. His identity, authenticity, and capacity for resourcefulness and self reliance were all placed under fire. In the months of hardship that followed, Horsley learned to survive in a hostile environment, befriended celebrated author Paul Bowles, discovered practical magick, wrote his first novel, and ultimately rediscovered his will to live. In the intervening years, Horsley has lived abroad, mainly in Spain, Amsterdam, Portugal, Guatemala, and Mexico, exploring the Latin cultures and his own psychological underpinnings with an almost maniacal vigour. Not satisfied with a shallow participation in life, Horsley applies a unique fusion-philosophy to himself that combines Jungian psychology with the sorcery teachings of Castaneda and the practical animism he learned as a shaman's apprentice in Guatemala.
Horsley has written several books, screenplays, and articles including a few that have been published: his two-part treatise on film violence, The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-1999 (Scarecrow Press, 1999), Matrix Warrior: Being the One, (Orion, 2003), and Dogville Vs. Hollywood (Marion Boyars, 2005). He has been a contributing author for Cineaste Magazine, The Guardian (UK), and Film Festival Magazine. In his spare time Horsley has experimented with other media, creating and hosting an esoteric radio show in Pamplona, and working as a contributing editor and film critic at the Oaxaca Times. Sojourning back to London days before 9-11, he produced a six-part digital documentary, The God Game, a digital feature, Beauty Fool, and a semi-autobiographical documentary, Being the One: Document of a Delusion.
Horsley continues to challenge expectations, especially his own. He dissolves the distinction between subject and object, immersing himself in thinking and creating with the same gusto a master chef applies to preparing and consuming a meal--as if every moment counts. He uses his natural eloquence and subtlety to uncover and present hidden stories, cinematic intelligence, and underlying social agreements that are invisible to a less discerning eye. He is a narrative genius who embraces fiction, history, mythology, pop culture, psychology and science in ways that make his theses not just urgent, but apocalyptic.
This review is from: Dogville vs. Hollywood: The Independents and the Hollywood Machine (Paperback)
This book is really good. It traces the beginnings of independent cinema in Hollywood from the '50's on up to the present day. The author is strongly opinionated about which movies are bad and which are good. I didn't always agree with his opinions, but by reading the entire book, I felt I learned a lot about how film studios work, and just what directors have to go through to get their work onto the screen, without the interference of studios and corporate interests. Interspersed throughout the book are entertaining ancedotes about various directors, from Alfred Hitchcock, to Francis Ford Coppola, to Quentin Tarantino. I have taken some film classes, and felt I learned more from this book than from the classes. For example, in one class I took, we watched "Mean Streets" by Martin Scorcese. The professor told us that it was an innovative film, because of the camera techniques used. However, this book explained in greater detail just what the importance of the movie "Mean Streets" was; the thought behind the film, the dynamics of the '70's that affected the film, and the studio/director climate in which the film was made.
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