That is not what we're talking about here.
And neither am I. Those who do things badly on purpose are a whole different matter. And unless we are including Camp under that umbrella (mostly because the average viewer is unable to tell the difference between this and something that is simply inept), art that does this is almost always terrible.
We're talking about filmmakers who use a lens because they don't know what different lenses do, didn't care to find out, and didn't check the dailies until it was too late.
Exactly. And what is inherently bad about that? It would not negate anything they might be doing well, and it could add to the films effect. And, no, it doesn't necessarily matter if it was intended to or not.
Amateurism is not a curse. It is often a blessing, in the right hands. To not know the limits of what something can or cannot do, allows the amateur to try things a trained professional would not. It forges paths that might never have been taken if left in the hands of people who know what they were doing. Many established artists in fact will utilize techniques in order to break themselves of their habits and limitations.
Two examples of this:
A master painter who deliberately chooses to begin working with his left hand. They are obviously going to lose a lot of refinement in their art, and they are going to do a lot of brushstrokes which they might wish they could take back, but it freees them from habit. It opens up new avenues of expression simply through the fact they are unable to fall back on their talent
The cut up technique, where writers write as the might normally do, then cut their work into pieces and scramble it out of order. This introduces randomness to the process and gets the writer out of the habits of their style and well as the constricts of grammar and proper sentence structure. It creates something that would never have consciously been created. Song lyrics and novels have been made using this process, frequently to great effect.
In other threads I have championed the art work of children as being superior in many ways to that of adults. Why? Because they are at an age when they are not bogged down by tradition. They aren't handcuffed by believing everything needs to be purely representational. They don't have the guilt and shame of doing something poorly. They create for the love of creation, and this act when separated from all that other Orthodox garbage, allows us to see who these children are better than if they could draw people or trees or the sun in great detail. That visibility has value artistically in and of itself. And it's something many adults lose....unless they begin to work with materials and in ways they are unfamiliar.
We're talking about (this one is real) movies shot on both regular film and digital simultaneously not as a piece of metatextual performance art, but because the director didn't know the difference and thought it sounded cool and historic to do it, but didn't even up using it.
You mean Neil Breen? Glad you mentioned him. His technical and narrative and logical flaws as a filmmaker are what make his films art. I don't think there has been a film yet made that captures the worldview of this very particular type of American- paranoid, meglomanical, vain, wealthy and helplessly screaming against the government -- better than his movies.
If he made the type of movie he intended to, it probably would have just been a dull piece of garbage. But his limitations as a filmmaker are what expose him for who he is, and is what makes his movies things that probably should be studied 100 years from now, after the Apocalypse, so we can learn how exactly we destroyed ourselves.
We're talking about films that linger on cars driving
Are we talking about Tarkovksy or Manos here?
They are overwhelmingly failing by trying to be like every cliché idea of a movie you've ever thought of.
Intent really isn't so relevant. What matters most is what they make, what it makes us feel, and what we can say about it.
A lot of the time it's some silly moderately wealthy person who thinks it would be cool to be a director, like the person who opens a restaurant not because they love food
I'm more concerned about someone who doesn't know how to prepare food than someone who doesn't know how to point a camera, for obvious reasons.
If outsider art is valuable because it's not constrained by convention, then that's how we should define it, not by just asking "was this made by an outsider?" Outsiders can be just as banal and formulaic as your random mainstream fare. I might even say they're more likely to be.
Didn't say all outsiders are created equally
But one almost never gets the sense from these films that anyone was taking a "chance."
Unsurprisingly I'm not terribly moved by what most people get out of anything. Especially in the case of these movies which, as you've stated yourself, are either never seen at all, or are trotted out exclusively to be laughed at.
Next to serious masters, the next best thing in film are these nobodies floundering around and making miracles happen, sometimes completely by mistake.
They are simply trying and failing to make the most basic films, doing the most basic things.
This already sounds better than doing a basic thing professionally.
Saying we have to defer to them feels like saying we have to seriously engage with a home video of a guy getting hit in the crotch because it might be interrogating gender stereotypes.
It really isn't.
If that's the determination, it sure doesn't seem to be working, because what's actually happened is people loving and seeking these films out more than they otherwise would have.
I've got no problem with that. I'm just saying they have more to offer.
If they can bring so much joy with unintentional laughter, how does anything else they might do not count if it is also not completely intentional?
This is the thing I think people really need to grapple with, when their ideology of art would have the very things they're defending essentially erased from the world, and when the culture they dislike (which is about half in their imagination) is the only thing watching and celebrating them.
I